This was my final asset, and it ended up being a long journey with much frustration in it. I really wanted to learn how to make a car in Maya. Thinking ahead to whether I decide to go into 3D asset design as a career one of the largest studios around where I live is Sumo Digital. I spoke to Greg Wisniewski, who is one of the art directors at Sumo digital. One of the game franchises they have done a lot of work with is the Forza motorsport franchise and so I thought it would be great if I could get a 3d car asset in my art station portfolio for when I need to look for an industry placement next year.

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The classic car front end of an American diner is of a Chrysler. While this is a very cool car model I still didn’t want to just recreate something that already exists. I do however really like the headlights and how they are incorporated into the wings, as such I’ll take this into my design.

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I love the way the bonnet is raised up above the grill in this design, and the long strip down the centre of the bonnet too.

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This reference really got me thinking about how to present the asset once completed, I already had a booth seat and bar stool asset. So thought it would be nicer to use my asset as a sort of wall hanging rather than the base of another seat.

Mike Hermes was extremely useful in making this model. He has a whole series on how to model a car which I will look at over the summer. For this asset however there were two videos specifically which I used a lot.

Attempt 1

There were many redesigns and changes made during the modelling of this asset. Including a total idea change. Firstly I experimented with how best to make a complex car grill, I used the extrude and rotate method I used in the vintage fuel pump to make the outside ring. Then I used the edge loop tool and extruded faces into each other, deleting faces and welding the vertex where applicable.

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I made the headlights out of two pieces. A plane, to which I added thickness and moved the centre vertex outward to give a nice convex look (Fig.8), and a sphere. With the sphere I deleted half the faces, then gave the shape a thickness and bevelled the edges smooth and booleaned the two pieces together (Fig.9).

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Making the headlight surround was fairly straight forward, using a pipe I stretched the shape I wanted and gave the thickness I wanted (Fig.10). then I manipulated the outside vertex to give the top peak look and bevelled the edges smooth (Fig.11). When I positioned the headlight within the surround you can start to see how I wanted the headlight unit as a whole to look (Fig.11).

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Making these different parts was really more of an experiment so that I would know how to make them in my finished model. Next I turned my attention to making the actual bodywork on which I could fit these parts.

Attempt 2

I used a poly cube to form the body of the model. I added two evenly spaced edge loops and manipulated the vertex to give me the raised bonnet look of the second reference (Fig.1). Also here you can see the curves line I created ton which I will later turn into one of the body pieces of the grill. Next I added seven evenly spaced edge loops, which in turn allowed me to move the vertex in such a way to create a wheel arch (Fig.2).

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I used the Mike Hermes video found above to learn how to make a convincing tyre. I began with a pipe, to which I made think and set the division to forty (Fig.3). Next I selected the vertex that made the inner ring, scaling these upward also made them extend outward slightly which gives the impression of the tyres sidewall (Fig.4). The Key part to this method is setting the extrude to not keep the faces of the tyre together, this allows you to then offset them once you extend which makes them look like tyre tread (Fig.5).

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Finally, I extended the bottom lip outward by extruding the vertex (Fig.6) and deleted the internal face (Fig.7). this was because I originally welded the tyre and rim together, however I did later change this so that the two objects remained modular.

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With the tyre finished I turned my attention to the rim. When looking into 1950’s cars I found that a lot of them had solid, one-piece rims. Making these rims was very simple, I just made a poly cylinder and added in divisions I needed, then manipulated the vertex to give me the result.  

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Next I turned my attention to the grill. So far everything had been going well with my model however here thigs started to go wrong. I extended along a curve to give me the top part of my grill  (Fig.11). Then shaped a cube to the shape I wanted and planned to extend the subdivisions outward to weld the two pieces together (Fig.12). The issue here, which only further exacerbated was that I didn’t really know how I was meant to put these different pieces together. You’ll be able to see this even more clearly as things progress.

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The second Mike Hermes video as shown above taught me how to use the birail loft tool. This is the tool I used to make my car wings. I used the curve tool to give me the outline of the object (Fig.13). Then used the birail loft tool to give me a quadrilateral poly object I could place and manipulate (Fig.14). One thing with this method however was that I had to remake the connecting curve lines in order to make the other side, meaning that they are not exact mirrors of each other (Fig.14). I don’t know if that is the method used in the industry and would like to learn of other ways, but wouldn’t be surprised if studios just make them look as close to each other as possible.

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Here you can see how I placed the wings (Fig.16). Also you can see how I used many curves to create the flowing bonnet, this was just a simple loft like I used in the bar stool before (Fig.17) and gave me a poly bonnet that followed the curves of the model nicely (Fig.18).

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My next step was to make the Light surrounds extend. I also extended the outside most faces to give a slightly more ornate look (Fig.19). Once all my assets are placed you can start to see the issue developing where I have all the pieces to make a car, but none of them fit together quite right (Fig.20). Then I made a cube and added edge loops, then manipulated the vertex to give me the shape you can see here (Fig.21). I then target welded the two pieces together (Fig.22) to give me a shape like you can see here (Fig.23).

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I made a few mistakes in trying to get the pieces to fit together correctly. Mostly silly things such as connecting pieces that didn’t need to be connected. I did this with the two wings, extended outward from one and deleting the outside faces (Fig.24). Then welding it and the other wing together (Fig.25). Also here I extended outward from the headlight surrounds (Fig.26), which then developed into this strange attempt at a grill (Fig.27).

At this point my issue of not really knowing how to put it all together became much more clear. I extended the bonnet bottom however didn’t know how to connect it to the grill of the car (Fig.28). At this point I had a talk with Tom and it became clear that I had approached the idea of modelling a car all wrong. I had to restart and so left this model here.

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Overall, with this model I had lots of nice individual pieces, but none of them fit together well. A lot like taking different parts off different cars and trying to stitch them together.

Attempt 3

For my second attempt I made the bonnet and worked my way outward (Fig.1). I made the bonnet out of a sphere and shaped it to the size I wanted. I then bevelled the edge and deleted two of the sections I had made. Then I bridged the gaps made to give me the finished bonnet shape. For the wings I started with a cube and shaped them so that they finished just shy of the bonnet (Fig.2). Then I recreated this shape as just like before I could not find a way to mirror the object, here I also made the headlights, using the circularise mesh tool I used in the coffee machine and others before (Fig.3).

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To make the grill I created a square and shaped them to fill the gap made from the wings and the bonnet (Fig.4). I then moved in some of the vertex to give a nice curve and extended outward to make a bumper. Then I made a square follow this grill line and deleted selected faces, giving me five objects which are all in fact one (Fig.5). Finally I imported the wheels from the previous attempt.

The problem with this model is quite simple. I don’t like it. I could maybe claim that I was trying to make an early Land Rover however that still leaves the original issue. I feel like this model would stick out like a sore thumb when placed next to all my other assets and so I decided to go in a different direction.

Reimagining

I didn’t like my results when making a car, but I did really like making the wheel. So I decided if I made three different rims and tyres I could stack them in different methods to give me different assets. Perhaps I could have got away with making just one wheel however I wanted to experiment with different tyre patterns and more complex rims.

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The first wheel is the one I made during my first car attempt (Fig.1). Here I discovered the downside of the offset extending method I used. Adding in the supporting edges was very time consuming. I had four divisions, and each face required two supporting edges for each outside line and two placed where the extension began and where it ended. I don’t know if there’s a way around this, and so progressing took a lot of time.

UV

This is the first wheel UV, which was much simpler than the UV for the second. The Automatic tool did a lot of the work, and all I had to do was go in and add cut lines to some edges where they weren’t placed. There is a lot going on in the 2D view but that’s just because most of the rim is made from 90 degree corners, all of which need a cut. Resulting in a 2D map of many, small pieces.

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The UV for my second model needed a lot more manual input than the first. Mostly because I wanted parts of it to be a white wall design and use white highlights in the tread. However I should have cut out a face along the tyre walls, as this would have helped make a nice seem between the white section of the tyre and the black.

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Texturing

The first wheel baked as well as I could have hoped, with just some minor artefacting around the edges of the tyre tread (Fig.2). The second wheel however didn’t bake quite as well as I would have liked, the need to use supporting edges to make the tread appropriate lead to the wheel taking on the wheel having the same kind of sharpness to it as the filter handles did on my coffee machine.

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Also I had the same artefacting with the tread of this wheel as I did with the first, only because the tread was more complex with this model the issue was more obvious.

I started with a darker grey steel for the rim of the first wheel (Fig.5), which I thought would contrast nicely with the bright gold of the highlights (Fig.6). Then I simply added the rubber tyre smart material to the tyre itself (Fig.7). While the texturing stage was pretty basic I didn’t want to add too many scratched and dents, the rim texture involves a slight fade around the edges of the rim which I thought gave a nice worn effect.

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For the second wheel I used a much lighter steel for the rim, which I thought would be nice against the darker rim of the first. That being said I think it would have been nice to swap the rims over for the tyres, as the dark rim would have given a nice contrast if placed by the whitewall tyre, and the bright rim would have looked nice against the dark black tyre of the first wheel.

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I used the same texture for the tyre, but just changed the base colour to a slightly lighter shade, then used the same texture with the base layer set to white for the highlights of the wheel.

Final renders can be found here

Referencing

Hermes, Mike (2020a). How to model a tire in 7 Minutes in Maya [YouTube Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozs8qHKKemE [Accessed 12/12/2020]

Hermes.Mike (2020b). 3D Car Modeling in Maya 2020 made Easy ! Part #1. [YouTube Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzRnJxAEJIE&ab_channel=MikeHermes [Accessed 13/12/2020]

Rebloggy.com [Online Blog]. No Title.. rebloggy.com. Available online: http://rebloggy.com/post/vintage-1950s-retro-restaurant-diner-fifties-rockabily/116047638560 [Accessed 10/12/2020]

Unknown Artist (a) [Pinterest Post]. Pinterest.com. Available online: https://br.pinterest.com/pin/482377810078446400/ [Accessed 10/12/2020]

Unknown Artist (b) [Pinterest Post]. Pinterest.com. Available online: https://www.pinterest.se/pin/412149803397543418/ [Accessed 10/12/2020]