Car Body - Adding Detail
Wheel Wells
The only reason we've been leaving such a simple step this long is for the simple reason that it is just as easy to do later as it was in the beginning, and maybe safer too. By that, I mean that had we needed to add any knifecuts through various parts of the body in order to add more detail to parts such as the hood or trunk, we could have without much problems. The reason why is that as much of our cage remained as square and grid-like as possible until we were past the tricky parts. Now that we can see our tricky parts worked out well enough, it is no problem to go in and shape our wheel well openings accordingly.
Starting with the front wheel, with our reference picture enabled, we are reminded that the looseness of the HyperNURBS was playing to our favor in providing some of the curvature necessary, with very little polygon definition.
In fact, just a small amount of point manipulation, and the wheel well shape is approximated very very closely.
Just move the points into position along the Z axis. Based on where we had them positioned when we did our general shaping in the front view, there shouldn't be any need to move them laterally on the X axis.
In this case the top three points needed a little bit of lowering on the Y axis, but it shouldn't bother anything as long as care is taken to observe the overall effect on the curvature of the panel.
Moving on to the back wheel well, we can begin selecting points and placing them to define the appropriate shape. Again, almost no movement on any other axis but the Z axis. That should keep panel curvature consistent from top to bottom and prevent the stress of having to manually smooth the curvature from a perspective view...
Due to the looseness of the polygon cage at the back of the wheel well, the interpolation of the car object is much rounder than our reference picture dictates.
Clearly, it is not a huge problem, but while we're all here learning things, let's just throw in an adjustment as an exercise!
Select the polygons that make up the bottom of the back end of the car. That includes polygons along the entire back facing bottom portion of the car. We will be performing a knife cut, and we want it to pass through all polygons cleanly.
With the knife tool, make a cut that runs more or less parallel to the angle of the back end bottom in the side view. It should not be very far away from the edge, as it is being used to sharpen up the corner at the edge of the wheel well, and would do no good if it wasn't placed in close proximity to the existing edge.
With the knife cut made, select the points at the corner of the back of the wheel well and adjust them into position as necessary.
That IS starting to look suspiciously like a car. It sure would be nice to maybe add some depth to those panels...
Well, what are we waiting for?!