Car Trim
Trim - Front Bumper - Page 2
In some of these older cars, you can see the bumpers are every bit as big and flashy as any of the other stylistic elements that went into the design... It's all part of the package. Now that we've got the basic bumper shape down, we can perform some simple modifications to get that flare we were talking about.
Extrude the polygons we selected at the end of the last page so that a visible bump is formed in the bumper. This is to become the basis for a protrusion on each side of the bumper that will be bridged with another bar of chrome.
Here, the same polygons that were extruded are scaled down on the X axis to narrow the base of the protrusion so that the transition from bumper surface to protrusion is a little more gradual and the resultant post we are going to model is more tapered as a result.
Two of the points on either side of the front surface of this protrusion should be selected and moved upwards on the Y axis to bring them even with the top points. This creates a little 'plateau' of one of the polygons, which will be useful in continuing...
...when we extrude the polygon and then taper it down with the scale tool to form a rounded extension to the top of the protrusion...
(I promise pretty soon I will quit with the words ending in 'sion'...)
Next, perform an extrusion ;-) on the topmost polygon to lengthen the... uhhh... post. (Were you expecting 'protrusion'?)
Select the polygons on either side of the top section of our post.
Perform an Extrude Inner operation to draw the polygons in a bit. Then use Extrude so that the beginning of the crossbar is formed.
Position the end polygons of the crossbar so that the curvature of this bar follows the curvature of the front of the car roughly...
That should mean the end polygon closest to the middle of the car goes forward, and the outer polygon goes back on the Z axis toward the car.
Return to the end polygon of the inner portion of the crossbar and select it. extrude it so we create another section of crossbar extending from the first section.
Move this polygon close to the plane of symmetry.
Delete the polygon and select all points on the end of the inner crossbar section. You can see I didn't quite get them to the plane of symmetry, and to make the two sides meet symmetrically I am going to have to...
But tihs is where the Set Value command comes in handy again. With the points selected, run Set Value command, and set the X value for the points to zero. Leave the other values unchanged, and the crossbar joins perfectly in the middle on the plane of symmetry.
Now we'll go back and add a little more detail to the sides of the bumper.
Here I have selected the top polygon on the side wall of the bumper and extruded it upwards on the Z axis three times. The first extrusion is small and keeps the transition fairly tight... The second extrusion adds some height, and the final one is to create a section that can be modified by taking the forward facing edge polygon...
...and extruding it forward on the Z axis to create an extending bar element. This bar doesn't really serve any value other than adding that retro 50's flare to the bumper.
I also bent the end of this bar inwards a little bit so that it looks like it retains some of the car front's curvature.
Here the outward facing surface of this side bar was selected and treated with an 'extrude inner' just to add a little more definition to it.
A quick render shows are bumper to be a really large knobby chunk of heavy chrome. Just like the type of bumper you'd expect to see on a vintage 50's auto.
The level of accuracy wouldn't fool the serious car enthusiast, but it suits my tastes just fine!