CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #7 (July 5, 2018): BC3-1806 is officially over! The Class Wrap stream recording is available to watch and the closing post is on page 63. Please take a minute to fill out the Questionnaire 🙇🏻♂️
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #6 (June 20, 2018): Week 4's stream recording has been edited together - curse you computer freeze! - and is available to watch. This is the final week of the class! Spend some time sculpting a wild and crazy vehicle design and let's finish strong 💪
Also a reminder that we will be having a 5th stream to wrap up the class on July 3rd, so don't miss that.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #5 (June 20, 2018): Check out Week 3's stream recording if you missed the broadcast! I also updated Week 3's homework for those of you that want to finish your vehicle exterior.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #4 (June 13, 2018): Week 2's stream recording is now available to watch if you missed the broadcast. Also the additional timelapse video mentioned in the stream is available here.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #3 (June 11, 2018): Week 1 is done! Thanks for getting your homework submitted on time. Here's a link to the report card if you'd like to keep track of your grades throughout the class. Onward to Week 2!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #2 (June 6, 2018): Week 1's stream recording is now available if you missed it. Also I've secured a concept car blueprint thanks to the talented 2D/3D artist, Milen Ivanov (see page 9 of this thread to download it). This is the vehicle I'll be modeling and you're welcome to model it as well if you don't want to find your own!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #1 (June 4, 2018): Class is in session! Today officially begins the BC3-1806 class. Please check the syllabus below for Week 1's focus and assignments. Begin watching the pre-recorded courses if you haven't already and begin searching for a cool vehicle you want to model. The first Live Event is tomorrow at 2pm EST - SEE YOU THERE! 😎
Vehicle model by Chris Kuhn on blendwap.com
Welcome to the CGCookie Class: Vehicle Modeling with Blender! Here by popular demand, this class is designed to be a holistic learning experience about the art of modeling vehicles. If you’re diligent in watching all content and hitting homework deadlines, by the end of the class you'll be prepared to build digital vehicles to your heart's content! This is an intermediate-to-advanced class which means you’ll do best by having some experience with Blender and 3D modeling before committing to this class.
This is the third "Class" format where Citizen members are invited to focus together on a particular topic/skill for a month. Participation looks like this:
WHEN? The class will take place from June 4th through July 2nd (ish)
Abstract: Vehicle modeling is pure hard surface modeling. Therefore it's important to be proficient with general polygon modeling techniques. This first week we're ramping into this particular modeling skillset to prepare us for the vehicle modeling extravaganza to come!
Goal of the Week: Level-up and/or dust off your hard-surface modeling skills.
Pre-recorded course to watch:
Week 1 Live Event (Remember to RSVP!)
Homework:
Abstract: When I say "Imagine a vehicle" I'll bet a million dollars you're thinking about the exterior. And that's why the exterior is important. It defines everything about a vehicle's visual perception: Style, utility, purpose. This week we're going to build a vehicle exterior based on concepts like building to scale and building from blueprints.
Goal of the Week: Build the exterior of your chosen vehicle based on blueprints. This will be good practice in strict adherence to orthographic front/side/back/top view modeling.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 2 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Model by Neubi on blendswap.com
Abstract: The insides of vehicles involve more organic, soft shapes as well as opportunity for lots of fine hard surface details. Often vehicles renders focus on the exterior where the interior can be hidden or approximated. But not in this class!
Goal of the Week: Model the interior of your chosen vehicle to gain experience with fine hard-surface details in a confined space.
Pre-recorded courses to watch: Admittedly we don't have much in this context specifically...
Week 3 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: There's another facet of vehicle modeling that doesn't involve strict adherence to blueprints. Instead, Concept Sculpting is about designing a vehicle from scratch using the artistic approach of digital sculpting. This can be an extremely fun, experimental method for creating unique vehicles.
Goal of the Week: Sculpt a vehicle exterior from scratch; Practice hard-surface sculpting techniques.
Pre-recorded courses to watch: Again we don't have much in this context specifically, but we have a couple courses that cover hard-surface sculpting in general:
Week 4 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
This thread is reserved for CG Cookie Citizens that are participating in the "Vehicle Modeling with Blender" class. Its purpose is to serve as central communication for all participating Citizens (excluding Hobby plan Citizens) to ask Kent and fellow participants questions and to post homework. As the instructor of the class, Kent will be monitoring this thread on a daily basis (especially Mon-Thurs) throughout the month of June to review homework and answer questions.
Free members are welcome to observe the thread but please respect that communication is reserved for Citizens.
louhikarme That's indeed a good idea, I'm currently using a default human rig for scale.
baukepost It would be easiest to adjust for scale after you've begun modeling. So if you block out the model according to the art (regardless of scale), you could then add a basic rigify armature and scale it to the average woman's height. Then pose the armature according to the art and adjust the scale of your blocked out model appropriately. That would be my method since figuring it out on paper seems like more of a headache.
dieedi This is looking so much better already! Good progress and course-correction 👍
williamatics I take it you mean the intro to hardsurface airplane. I'll give you a B for no interior, A with interior 🤓
pprocyonlotor You purchased the art? Ok then just be sure not to redistribute at the full resolution. If you prefer not to show it at all to be safe *safe* I'll edit it out of your post on request.
Homework Submission Week 1
Well after my power cutting out just before rendering twice I've finally got these images done, but first here's the Primitive Exercise. Very basic in comparison to some of the other fantastic ones but this mostly me playing with the snap tool which I had so dearly neglected up until now.
For the simple airplane I took some renders from the one I used in this render to put it more on display:
Sorry about the funky orb in the interior, point light gone wrong haha.
For my blueprints I've chosen a Rolls Royce limousine:
After taking the advice of you guys I found quite a few similar-ish interiors to work with which is great, not sure if I should post them here because I've posted like 4 images already and this will get quite spammy. Well I hope this shall do, and I wish everyone here the best of luck! Gonna try and finish the MMB and then get to work!
I had never model a car before and I have to say it is whipping my ass. There is a trick to it. First I was approaching it by box modeling but it gets ugly really fast, it's hard to accommodate the curvatures. Now I'm taking the edge modeling approach and it's working better. Talk about a humbling lesson.
jimmack sorry to hear that you consider stepping out at this phase.
Anyway I also felt the plane exercise hard and also time consuming, around having 15-90 minutes daily when our 1 year old girl goes sleep and did the Toy Plane almost in whole May :-)
In your place would select a relatively easy vehicle which gives you pleasure and which you surely can complete and staying in the class like that. (except one case, if you would like to spare your time for the soccer World Cup from 14th of June :D )
"She's back to take all the XP!"
Exactly - Katerina is back really good to see one of the "veterans of CG Cookie Classes" :-)
Just a short reminder/motivation for them, the all time top 3 standings in gained XPs actually:
1) Matthew Ullrey (ullreym) - 360 XP
2) Katerina Novakova ( Sshiennar ) - 308 XP
3) John Sanderson ( Pprocyonlotor ) - 283 XP
Anyway John also posted already so congratulations 9 homeworks this year :-) Hopefully Matthew will also join in June too.
Also some explanation for the new members in the class - the best part of the finishing is when at the end of the month Kent adds the XPs for all the participants based on their homework grades, simply well deserved good feeling and fun too
csehz hah, nice one, more little statistical snippets....
Looking forward to trying to get decent grades this month and stealing some of pot ;)
Finished the plane. Rivets were a bit of a pain!
And here's the primitive exercise. I'm not quite done with the mesh modeling fundamentals course, since I decided to do the head and a side project to practice some of the tricky topology it involved, but I'll try and squeeze in the revolver before week two.
As for next week, I've always been a fan of the old Volkswagen vans.
I think the exterior won't be too difficult, but there's a lot of stuff to model on the inside. I'll probably use this as a reference.
Really enjoying what everyone else has posted so far, too!
Homework Submission Week 1
Hi there, im back after a year of no practice in Blender. Motivated to build and finish some awesome Cars.
Here is my preparation Homework.
Airplane: https://sketchfab.com/models/026c9e7ca42847be89c816e71b456c80
Primitives Excercise: https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/14694
I also did the Orb retopology to get the habit back of hard surface modelling:
https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/14732
For the car i have chosen a Toyota Corolla. I will use the blueprint for the basic shapes and dimensions, but i will modify the final look to match a photo reference of a self made variation of the car.
dostovel That's been my experience so far as well. I'm currently on my third start-from-scratch iteration. Hope this one doesn't fall apart as easily...
csehz No pressure, huh? :-) (I'm Kate XP Monster and I've come to eat your delicious XPs, bwahaha!)
Now would be a good time to stop being terrible at car modelling...
shiennar Yep, same here, I'm in my fourth one. Trying to get an optimum base mesh, trying to see which workflow gets it up the ground faster and better. I really like modeling, when I start extruding and moving vertices and things begin to take shape, is hard to get up the chair cuz you're so hooked in having fun.... then you start to realize it's not so healthy to be sitting all day and then eye fatigue starts and you also realize you haven't eaten in a while.
HOMEWORK SUBMISSIONS WEEK 1
Here we go, Here's my little airplane for today
https://sketchfab.com/models/424dd4b522be4c4580d7fd666e8a60d8
And My primitive kitchen
https://sketchfab.com/models/de7b32d359084d53ae2825e268e82a2c
And of course most importantly the object i plan to model the Cosmo Type Zero
http://www.shipschematics.net/yamato/images/edf/fighter_cosmozero.jpg
HOMEWORK FOR WEEK 1:
My airplane (with an interior): https://sketchfab.com/models/8fa99c66092f4402927d7ed8720f32d6
My primitives (It's boring, I know, but at least it's better than my last one!): https://sketchfab.com/models/013ad74537754b8890ed0ca871d5b5cf
My blueprints (I will take artistic liberties, as I intent my tank to be futuristic):
My reference for the interior:
I will use other interior reference if I can find it. Do you know where I can find reference for the hover thrusters?
Whilst not strictly homework I managed to finish the CG Cookie Logo too, which was a good way to practice some edge modeling (which dostovel has pointed out to be incredibly useful when it comes to vehicles). If some of you haven't tried edge modeling yet definitely give this a try, it could really help!
