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.
Work in progress. Really good challenge, if you have any advices, I take it.
tthepainter No. I began last saturday. Aprox 3-4 hours every day. I made the airplane exercise last summer, so i got some extra time for the car.
mmrdojo Wow!. Nice & smooth modelling. Love this cartoony style. Waiting to see it finished.
Hey everyone!
So after a couple busy days I managed to get some work done. I looked around the internet and actually managed to quite a lot more references which I'm now actually using more than my wonky blueprints, and I just wanted to ask is this topolgy acceptable? Have more edge loops to place, naturally:
A thing I'm having a problem with (which kind of answers my above question for me) is in one corner the matcap seems hyper distorted and I was wondering if anyone had an idea how to resolve it?
I thank any and all in advance who can help me out, and good luck everyone in the course!
thecabbagedetective One thing you could do to improve your topology is to round out this edge loop.
Right now it is a lot too blocky. I don't know about that horrible corner, though.
Wha?! That Probmron went from "coolest vehicle I never knew I wanted to ...cool I probably can't afford it." At least those 2009 models.
@theluthier
@theluthier
Okay, I can't do a video but I did some screenshots maybe that helps.
Background: In this case I seperated out the trunk lid from the body of the car and I wanted a small gap between the 2.
You can see the subsurface from the body bleeding over the trunk surface at the corner.
So I turned the sub on the body off, then extruded the vertices to give it some 'thickness' . Then I selected edges and gave them a crease value of 1.0. It seemed to work
williamatics That will be a better idea . I know almost nothing about shading and whenever i watch a tutorial and try to understand something i get the more confused. :D
For the distortion you mention, the part that is encircled in yellow is quite usual when you have a sharp feature, it's the purpose of such sharp edges: catching light. The red part is indeed a little bit unusual.
I would aslo look at the distance along the Y-axis for the sets of vertices in the green groups: you have a very dense mesh in a short distance, it can sometime lead to distortion.
Finally, try also with different shiny matcaps, some have low resolution and can be misleading. It can also be due to the orientation of your object: try to rotate it (double R can useful!) to see how the light behave on this area.
Hope that helps!
mmartinlisen Looking good, Martin. I like that you're keeping your mesh density low. Seems like you're working in the sweet spot of minimal/optimal. 👍
thecabbagedetective I'd say your topology is acceptable but it could be improved. Namely I think the basemesh is more dense than it needs to be in areas. For example the wheel well shape could be achieved with less edge loops:
The red denotes removal and the blue denotes new edges/sliding existing edges. Also the northeast corner of the headlight is a bit wonky. Here's my suggestion for topology of that corner:
As for those las images of the wheel well corner, the topology doesn't look bad imo. It just looks like the corner verts are out of place/alignment with the surrounding verts.
Hey, passing the last 2 days building parts of an engine based on true measures and blueprint, that was a nice work.
Here is a test on the car (there is still lots of work to do) in a clay render I really like that first look and I hope to end it before sunday :D
@theluthier How would you do that for a curved surface like this? I found it really hard to avoid distortion and get such a nice shape.
dieedi Looks great, but the car should probably be a few times bigger. Great work so far!
@theluthier Hey kent, I hope u would take a look at This it's the back part of Milen's car it's still in progress but I'm not very satisfied with the mesh, what do u think could be fixed?
Note:I duplicated the mesh twice one with subdivision-modifier applied and the other without it, to give u a better inspection over my topology.
@theluthier tbrbn williamatics Thanks to you all for the assistance, I've managed to apply all of your advice in one way or another. Honestly this is the first time I've ever modeled something with a deadline so I need to get out of the endlessly tweaking mindset I'm used to.
That also ties into what you've been saying about the mesh being too dense, because I don't stop to think about what the subsurf will do and just try to make it smooth from the getgo. After adding some extra details, applying your advice and adding edge loops I'm at about 17,000 verts with subsurf 3 so I don't think I'm doing to bad for my first attempt, onto the bumper next. Thanks to you all again!
