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 hopefully i'll get time for this, busy modeling tails and wings for drones.. :D
My car exercise is nearly done, I'll post it later today. You can expect it within 6 hours :)
Chewing through the Mesh Modeling Bootcamp now, this topology stuff is gonna be vital.
I have already done the homework when i followed the courses a while back. Can i upload those models or do i have to do them noe more time?
You can now see my car exercise in the gallery (there are multiple renders): https://cgcookie.com/u/baukepost/projects/car-f20de755-3568-4dab-a8d9-98279227977f.
baukepost WOW. Awesome job! And this is what you built to prepare for this class??
@theluthier hey, I'm not sure to understand how works homework, do we have to make it before or after the week event ?
For this start i've already model the airplane 
and done the primitives exercice :
https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/12087
I'm currently looking for some steampunk vehicle (if it's allowed, I'm not a big fan of cars ... ).
So back to my question, this I have what's needed in homework but for next week, homework has to be done before or after event ? (it's seems it's before ...)
choosens model can be any type or ground only (planes, boats ...)
dieedi Excellent job on the plane, Jeremy! Homework can be submitted anytime during the week, just as long as it's before the end of Sunday. So it's totally fine to submit before the live event but it's not required. I say end of Sunday assuming weekends are the most available time to work on homework each week.
A steampunk vehicle is certainly allowed. I'm not sure anything would be not allowed so long as it is a "vehicle" including cars, boats, planes, etc. I'll talk about this during the event today as well.
Homework Submission Week 1
Here's my Airplane:
And here is my Modelling with Primitives exercise:
I did it three months ago, time flies too fast!
I started doing this guy last week as practice:
And this is what I have so far:
I still have to work on the wheels, add more details and prepare it for subsurf, but so far it looks so cute <3
However after looking at what other people are doing just for practice, I'm no longer sure if I should continue it for the class. The design is too boxy, it feels kind of cheating.
My other option is one of this guys:
Should I continue my little truck or go for a different vehicle?
Also, I found a bug in the site! After adding two Sketchfab embeds, I can no longer scroll back to the beginning of my reply. I hope I wrote everything correctly haha.
Edit: Sketchfab embeds are not showing up, I looked in the previous class' thread and they are not showing up there either.
Homework Submission Week 1
Plane: https://sketchfab.com/models/b5bd5de09e814aa09c518f80695a4f51
Primitives exercise (Tower of Sauron): https://sketchfab.com/models/2c5af865081e46479a98f6145ba8e756
I'm still not sure what vehicle to model, but I have already seen some pretty sweet concepts on Artstation.
Quick (and possibly silly) question but with the interior of the vehicle should we be using more general references or references for that exact vehicle model? Just that I've found some blueprints I really like but can find almost no high quality interior pictures of that same vehicle so I'm not sure if it's worth pursuing or if I should just find a different one instead.
thecabbagedetective I think the purpose is to get a good workflow at the end of the course, so if your interior is not the exact one of the vehicle you wish to model I'd say it's completely fine, as long as they kind of match: you wouldn't do an old interior of WWII utility vehicle in a supercar from last year :) What matters is that next time you'll be able to do it faster and better.
That being said, you do have a good point in that it is very hard to find references for interior. Maybe look at the car manufacturer website and see if they have images of the model you're doing?
thecabbagedetective I think you can definitely use different vehicles as a reference for your interior, as long as it makes sense. For example, I would not look at Land Rover interiors if I were modeling a Tesla.
Its a "hairy" task i set myself to. Not sure about the final result, but i am going to learn from this anyway.
jack07 in my opinion that transformers guy looks awesome and would continue with that :)
Itself that is a good idea that a vehicle and character in one, that is far from being easy
aarev exactly that is the point of the class, it inspirates to create anything on your level and will be better than before.
My selected concept car looks quite similiar, so would like to follow how you continue :)
For anyone looking for freely-licensed blueprints, Wikipedia has some material that might work. You'll still want to pay attention to the image license, but a lot of the Creative Commons material should work.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Line_drawings_of_vehicles
I found the airplanes section really helpful.
aarev If it's something you want to include in your profile gallery, you can upload there and link to the project here. If you don't want your homework to be part of your profile gallery, you can just upload the image here in your reply.
thecabbagedetective Not a silly question at all - I can't find many interior blueprints either. Pretty much all I can find is photos. It's something we're going to have to discuss in week 3. But I recommend you find interior photos of a vehicle you like (from any car) and use that to model an interior that will conform to your exterior.