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.
@theluthier yeah, the basic zepelin is simple but I have something maybe more complicated and interesting than this :D
For the light, it's a wip so there will be more ... if I manage to finish this :D
thecabbagedetective Really awesome stuff! Nice details here. I've recommended this link to others to help possibly speed up their renders, maybe it'll help you, too.
thecabbagedetective If it's for a job, I've took too much time, maybe 35hours. I include pictures searching, tests, and a lot of experimentations to understand and learn how to create the good shape without adding too much polygon. With practice it could be done in 15h, I don't know.
have to say a thank you for seeing some of your models guys with the mesh overlayed on the models.
picked up a few pointers and things to try going forward myself.
I'm going to miss the stream, so is it okay if I dump a load of questions here afterwards?
mmrdojo Looking good! What a cute vehicle! Good detail work. Looks like some pinching around the headlights, don't know if that was intentional or not.
thecabbagedetective Look at that! Utterly glorious. And a Little Tree to top things off, love it!
On rendering: All of my renders have to be CPU, because my particular AMD card isn't supported for GPU rendering. But the renders that I posted in this thread have been mostly 1920x1080 at only about 250(!) samples with the Denoising feature turned on and none of them took more than around an hour and short change, I don't think. That Denoising feature is a true blessing from the Blender gods. If I were posting full-size images that people could fill their whole screens with, I would definitely put more samples into my renders (although the full-size 250-sample denoised renders I made do not look bad AT ALL); but the forum shrinks all the images down quite a bit so it's kind of wasted time IMO.
mmrdojo You say it's only 75% finished? I can't imagine what you're missing! It looks excellent, and it's really awesome to see you and a number of other people here following through and finishing their vehicles even though you had to miss a week or take some time out.
silentheart00 jakeblended Cheers for the compliments and advice guys! Yeah it rendered surprisingly fast with my optimization, about 2 hours with 1,500 samples. Though considering I disabled caustics and enabled denoising I could've easily gotten away with 1,000. Disabling caustics is like a get out of jail free card, it barely changes anything but it shaves off so much time.
mmartinlisen Ah, I actually meant how long you've been learning Blender and 3D modeling in general but I should've been a bit more specific, my bad. Still though, you're doing this as a job so you must be quite experienced, and 15 hours for something like this would be insane, I think for both my interior and exterior I must've put in at least 80 hours combined, always was a bit of a slow poke. The fact you managed to make this in a reasonable (at least in comparison to mine) amount of time is truly amazing.
thecabbagedetective Hooo, I've start to learn blender in November 2017 but I've start 3D modeling with 3dsmax few years ago but never improve my skills to my actual level on Blender. I hope to progress.
You can check my work on www.martinlisen.com
@theluthier For shame, Kent!
Nah, it's fine. I'm sure you had other things occupying your time.
@theluthier Isnt there an option for just adding a post here, without "replying" somebody?
Anyway, started sculpting half an hour ago, this is the beginning of my concept.
aarev " Isnt there an option for just adding a post here, without "replying" somebody?"
Took me a bit to find it too. :) Top right corner of the screen, the "Reply to this topic" button.
aarev In the upper right corner you should see a red "Mark Spam" button and an orange "Reply to this topic" button. The orange one is what you want I believe. No worries, I find myself missing it as well.
Your sculpt is already reading like a car! 👌
Attempt #1, the nature inspiration must have been a potato :)
