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.
thecabbagedetective There's no such thing as stupid question :)
As usual, the answer would be it depends :) It depends on the size of the lumps and the size of the quad you will retopo over. Usually, since retopo involves larger quad scale, the lumpiness vanishes and you get a smoother result.
If you use a subsurf and a shrinkwrap (over the sculpt) on your retopologized model then the lumps will reappear. @theluthier explains it well here. Mind thatt it's not a car but a buff male body and the purpose is to recover the details but you get the idea :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU7EQjauKNo
Starting to work on this sculpt assignment. I tried making some kind of car at first, but kept making something that looked either too generic or too derivative to me.
So now I'm playing with some kind of spaceship design, although even that is starting to look a little stealth-bomber-ish in nature and I might start over if I can't make it interesting soon.
Here's what I have so far. I'm not inspired by anything in particular, but at one point it looked a lot like a dolphin. I didn't like the dolphin submarine, though, so I sculpted it away (I hope). Critiques are welcome.
tbrbn Oh thank goodness, that's a worry lifted. 'Cause I've definitely smoothed out my sculpt but it's still a biiiiit lumpy in some areas so nice to know they'll be basically irrelevant. Ta very much!
Day 1 done!
Didn't do *too* much to begin with, combination of getting used to modeling and getting used to my tablet. Only modeled like twice before so I'll let you guys be the judge on whether this is decent or not, there's still a couple areas I need to improve/smooth a bit more but this leg is mostly done:
Onto the body next, who needs to model each one separately when I can Alt + D 5 times? Also fun fact, and this may be hard to believe, but it's not a good idea for an arachnophobe to be inspired by and therefore have to research arachnids. Scorpions are badass though, so I'll deal with it.
I have not seen the live stream yet so maybe incorrectly associated that maybe such Flinstones type of car could be sculpted from wood/stone something, actually having this sketchup version which itself took some 3 hours already :D
But so going to watch the recorded stream and let's see whether can stay with it or being not enough original :-)
@theluthier Thanks for the clay renders! Not that one is better than the other - they each provide their own useful depictions. Really great model btw. And sure, you've more than proven yourself an active participant this month. You can submit late.
Thanks for your kindness, Kent. I appreciate that. Hate this kind of situations when i have plans and than "boom" and plans are gone. Anyway, will try to do my best to submit both homeworks till the end of this week.
For sculpting i chose some kind of hover bike based on your eagle reference.
Here is WIP for second day of interior modeling. I have found this cars interior so complicated. I thought the exterior would be the hardest part. I was wrong :)
tthepainter Wow looking great already ! The multimedia panel looks very promising, so crisp! Watch out for that sharp area on the upper left side of the steering wheel hole: it looks to sharp in comparison with the passenger side area. Usually there's some kind of symmetry (despite the obvious difference with controllers etc).
Good luck and keep it up!
Hi I sat in on the sculpting live stream and really enjoyed it! I was inspired by the process so I tried sculpting in Blender for the first time. It was really fun and a quick way to concept the "eagle" inspired flying car I had in my head. Thanks for the inspiration and motivation! It was nice to try something new - I never would have guessed sculpting would be such fun. I'll have to try it some more in my regular workflow! Thanks again.
williamatics Oh wow, that tank is massive! Threw me off at first since I was expecting a small tank, barely big enough for people to fit inside. But I like the direction.
Though being such a big space does mean a lot more details need to exist to be believable. But I can tell you've put some hard work into the interior. It's an A from me, William 👍
silentheart00 It's a tough corner to get perfect with such a lo-res basemesh. If I'm in your situation and it constantly bothers me, I'll apply the subsurf at level 1 (or 2 in extreme cases) and sculpt that corner till it looks right. Not an ideal solution since you can no longer easily edit a lo-res base, but it's a solution nonetheless.
jakeblended Looking good, Jake. It's reading well already 🤘
How do you like the concept sculpting approach?
williamatics I can see some dolphin influence. A penguin too comes to mind. Both of which are relevant to a submarine design 👍
thecabbagedetective Ooo this is looking interesting! I'm excited to see where this goes.
Lol I hope I never have to model a spider-inspired anything.
csehz haha I love this choice of vehicle, Zsolt! What a perfect specimen for sculpting. Awesome job.
tthepainter I'm finding a significant characteristic of life seems to be turning plans on their heads lol.
I thought the exterior would be the hardest part. I was wrong :)
So true. Same for me.
jigsaw What a cool design! Wow you've really thought through the function. Mixing sculpting and poly-modeling to rough out your ideas - the perfect use case for this approach. Great job, Angel.
Hi I sat in on the sculpting live stream and really enjoyed it! I was inspired by the process so I tried sculpting in Blender for the first time
I was afraid the stream was more a crash-n-burn, so I'm very glad to hear this!
williamatics Oh I missed this, sorry. Wow, this thing IS massive. I kind of like the idea and it's too bad you ran out of time before you could fully flesh it out.
I think you did pretty good this month, considering that you had to struggle not only with the problems of modeling, but with the whole creative side of ideas and design while the rest of us had a ready-made set of drawings and reference images to use.
@theluthier Thanks! Something tells me I need to cool it with the dyntopo and and detail size, that leg alone is 300,000 verts...
@theluthier I like the approach a lot! I think I'm running into a problem where the rational/scientific side of my mind is clashing with the creative side. Like during your livestream while sculpting your car, you said at one point that you realized the design wasn't very aerodynamic, but that that was okay because the point was exercising the creative process - absolute practicality isn't a priority. It seems like such a simple and easy decision, to say that; but when I'm facing the same conflict I'm all like
I'll make it work though.