Car Body - Adding Detail
Page 1 - Headlight Swells
Even though the planning stage was still the most important, now we get into the meat and potatoes of the model. Without adding detail, it was just a well planned model of a box. Now we have to bring the actual car model to fruition. Herein lies a lot of manipulation of the model at the point and polygon levels. I hope you're seated comfortably, this may take a while!
There's a reason why we kept that frontal headlight are as square as possible.... ummm, you did didn't you?
First we want to define the headlight housing. (Forgive my lack of knowledge of car anatomy!!!)
Select the four polygons up front where the headlights will go and extrude inner three times. The first extrude inner sets up the surrounding swell, the second sets up a 'transitional area', and the third defines the shape of the headlight.
Because of the interpolation of HyperNURBS, the more square this area is, the less we have to adjust to make round lights.
Select the inner ring that we will turn into our actual headlight housing. A series of simple extrudes will bring this area bulging out like we want. One small extrude to create a tight fillet, one lengthier extrude for the main shape.
Notice the very thin extrude creating the tight fillet between the protruding surface and the main body.
It's not as round as we'd like, but that's due to the unavoidable polygon density in this area right now. We'll MAKE it round via point manipulation.
Select the points at the top, bottom and sides of this extruded segment. Make sure you select all the points on the extruded piece, right back to the car surface.
If you just select the outermost, you'll end up only affecting part of the shape.
Activate the scaling tool, and constrain it to only affect the X and Y axes.
Using the scale tool, drag until the points drift out enough that the protrusion resembles a roughly circular shape. It likely still won't be satisfactorily round (unless you are doing better than me!)
At a passing glance, that's round enough for most purposes, so we can move on.
We've only just begun...
