Vehicle Modeling Series, Part II

2 Comments Posted by on April 30, 2011

BlenderCookie’s Vehicle Modeling Series

Part II, Blocking in the Shapes

Don’t worry – it didn’t take me this long to work through Part II. Other stuff came in the way. But, but, I won’t lie: this was a LOT of work! And long too. It takes me a few hours to go through 45 minutes of these video tutorials, pausing, rewinding, doing, redoing, tweaking. If you’re sitting through these having popcorn and thinking Jonathan is the man, well he is, but you’re missing out big time. I’m really confident I’ll come out of this a good modeler, even if it’s just out of experience.

This part was still not considered detailing (ha!) – we were just blocking in the shapes to work as the base for the actual details. Believe it or not:

I know I don't.

So like I said this was a lot of work and therefore a lot of experience. I also started to realise the best way to do things. Before I always wondered, looking at things and thinking how to model them, whether I should start with some solid and extrude stuff out of it, or if I should add geometry, how to look at the topology… Now I feel I’m more armed to know what’s best where. Then a few applications of things like empties, arrays and spins and your modeling toolkit really starts getting together. Great stuff.

Ah, one last thing: don’t be afraid to do your own thing. The only thing I’m really being religious about is matching Johnathan’s topology, meaning I make sure I have the same polygons he does, although they may be shaped or placed somewhat differently. This is to ensure that if later along the road I realize his way was better for doing whatever it is I’m doing by then, I’ll just need to do some tweaking and approximate my design to his. Other than that I feel free to shape things differently. It’s my own rendition of the Gyrocopter anyway ;)

Next up we’ll actually start detailing the vehicle. But before I head into that I want to get back to the Blender Foundations book and actually do some animation. To pause from all this vertex pushing craziness :) Stay tuned, I’m back!

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This post is part of a series on BlenderCookie’s Vehicle Modeling Series.
You can find the base post of the series here.

Next post on the series: Part III (Detailing the Front)
Previous post on the series: Part I (The Silhouette)

Vehicle Modeling Series

2 responses to “Vehicle Modeling Series, Part II”

  1. BnBGobo99 May 10, 2011 at 3:25 am

    Hey Fax,

    I just ordered my copy tonight, so hopefully we can parallel our learning experiences with this tutorial set. :) I probably won’t start working on it until I get in country, but since there might not be anything else to do during my off time, this should be a good learning set.

    Have you experienced any issues with skipped explanations, workflows that don’t work as described or anything like that?

    Take care,
    BnBGobo99

    Reply
    • Fax May 10, 2011 at 9:11 am

      Hey nice seeing you here! If I understood correctly from your message and your blog (those medals are awesome!) you’ll have some time off military deployment soon, right? Enjoy it, it is well deserved!

      Keep me posted on your progress! I’ll pick this up again soon. As for issues, none so far. In fact I really admire Jonathan Williamson’s ability to say out loud every single action he does on the keyboard/mouse and still keep a nice pace, the guy is a machine! :) Then like I said don’t try too hard to make everything match Jonathan’s version exactly, I think you’ll waste a lot of time without learning much. As long as you have the same faces in roughly the same positions you should be able to follow every instruction.

      Stay safe!

      Reply

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