Modeling Cars with HyperNURBS in XL 6 - Adding Detail

Car Body - Adding Detail

Grill Opening

The grill opening presents an interesting challenge in how to construct something on one side of a symmetry object and have it not only mirrored on the other side, but appear as if it was modeled across the entire surface, originating from the middle. The solution is pretty simple in this case however, and is only a small extra step at the end of our procedure.

For aesthetic reasons I've decide to increase the height of my grill opening over the reference picture I've been using.

This is a good example of the flexibility of HyperNURBS, in that modification on the fly is relatively simple.

Select the points on the line that was to be the top of the grill opening...

... and simply move them closer to the position that you would like to see them at.

There is very little distortion to the surrounding elements. Luckily, they seem to be independent of the influence of geometry changes in adjacent parts of the model.

Using the extrude tool first of all, apply an extrude in a very small amount outwards away from the car surface, just to begin forming a 'lip' that will surround the grill opening.

Applying a very small extrude inner makes this outward lip appear much more clearly defined and creates a lip surface facing forward. The smaller this extrude inner is, the sharper the front of the lip will be.

You will notice that the extrusions seem to be bothering the symmetry object a bit, as polygons are created with the extrusion that sit on the symmetry plane. For now, the grill opening won't span the car smoothly, so don't worry.

Now we can begin shaping the grill opening inward, which is where it will end up when done.

Extrude very minutely inwards once for a sharp inner edge, twice for an even sharper edge. It will depend on your preference what you would like it to look like.

Perform a larger extrusion to move the bulk of the grill opening towards the inside of the car.

Ordinarily this opening would only go in a little ways then stop altogether, but if the grill is seen in a close up, it may well present the problem that one could see the inside of the car from the camera perspective, and notice that the inside of the car was basically an empty shell. To combat this, I like to make a deep pocket behind the grill and using selection sets, I texture these inner polygons flat black. That way any possible glimpse between the slats of the grill results in a good look at darkness.

At the back of the pocket we've made, another small extrusion can be made to sharpen the corners. This is not of vital importance if we won't see these corners, but if the pocket is not very deep, it does ensure that the walls of the grill pocket are indeed straight and not likely to look too amorphous or curved at the front where they are visible.

All through this process, we've seen how the symmetry object separates what we've been doing right down the middle. Polygons were made along the symmetry plane so that it appears that each element is isolated to its own side.

That may be useful in some cases, but here we'd like to have a surface element that spans our entire object without that separation in the middle caused by the symmetry object.

So we select the extra polygons that make up the middle geometry, and delete them.

Because we used an extrude inner, some of these points will be a small distance off of the X=0 centerline, causing a slight gap in the grill opening. Select the points on the edge of this gap, and use the Set Value command to set these points all to an X value of zero.

The gap should close up seamlessly.