Car Trim
Trim - Grill - Page 2
Now for the remainder of the grill, we will fashion the chrome grill slats out of extruded spline objects. Which sounds great, except one might wonder how we are going to get splines shaped the way we want them (conforming to the curvature of the car), without a lot of work...
But, with spline projection, we should be able to do what we want relatively painlessly.
From the grill border trim object, select the points along the back outer edge of the object.
Using the point mode in the structure manager, copy and paste these points into a new polygon object.
Use the bridge tool to create the polygons for a simplistic "backing" surface from these points.
Of course, we make this surface the child of a HyperNURBS and Symmetry hierarchy also.
Except then we go one step further! Make this hierarchy editable and it causes the surface to become neatly subdivided (as well as double-sided.
This subdivision will allow us to project splines onto this surface and have the retain a generally rounded appearance, as opposed to only projecting across three large polygons.
In the front view, create a spline that stretches across the width of the surface at the widest part (middle).
This spline just has to be completely straight, and "linear" (no handles on any points). It should also be segmented to a similar amount as the surface has subdivisions.
You can array this spline in Y direction until it looks like you have a nice even distribution of them from the middle to the top of the surface.
Each one of these splines will become one of the grill slats.
Zoom in close and make sure that the end of the splines will fall within the ends of the surface. I merely moved the end spline points to fall within the apparent curvature of the backing surface when viewed from the front. (Make sure to do both ends.)
Now comes the spline projection. One by one select the splines and have them projected to the XY plane. Because the surface is present, it 'gets in the way' of the spline projection and therefore receives the spline across it.
Do the same for each spline and when you are done, you will have half of the total amount of splines needed to do the horizontal slats.
To get the splines in place for the bottom half of the grill, simply mirror the top half splines with the XZ plane at the midpoint of the surface object.
The splines that appear on the bottom half of the surface should be positioned correctly automatically.
Place these splines into an extrude NURBS parent, and give them just a minor Z movement. In my case, this had to be a negative Z movement to get the extrusion to come forward (front of the car) from the surface.
If you make this extrude NURBS object editable, you get what amounts to one object that is made of strips of polygons as shown. These strips of polygons now are the perfect size and shape for grill slats, with one problem... they are really FLAT!
So our only recourse is to resort to our tried and true thickening method... Select all polygons, copy and paste them in the structure manager, reverse normals, and then extrude ever so slightly..
I should mention that these grill slats are one object on this car I did NOT bother to use a HyperNURBS parent with. I think they look fine without the added bulk of subdivision.
Next, the vertical slats must be done. We'll use the exact same method as we did for the horizontal ones, but I'll walk through it again. Repetition being the key and all... :-)
Create half of the splines from the front view so they appear to cover the one half of the surface. They are all linear splines, with just two points each (end points).
The reason they are just linear with only endpoints is because there is no vertical curvature to this surface, therefore these splines don't need extra points to interpolate curvature when projected.
Next, make sure the spline on the end falls within the end rounding of the surface. (Note: all end points should fall within the edge of the surface so projection is clean).
Project the splines to the XY plane, and they come to rest perfectly on the grill backing surface.
You can then mirror all of these splines using the YZ plane right down the middle of the surface/ middle of the car, so that the grill surface is completely covered end to end with splines.
Place the splines under an Extrude NURBS parent, and give them about the same amount of Z movement as the other slats. (I gave my vertical slats a little less movement since I wanted the horizontal ones to stick out further and be more pronounced...)
Again, these slats look great, but entirely two-dimensional. Make them editable, and the vertical grill slats become a polygon object...
Then select all polygons...
...and using the structure manager copy and paste these polygons, reverse the normals and then extrude slightly.
You'll end up with some slats with a little thickness to them.
And once the whole grill is rendered you can see it does a passable impression of an actual auto grill.
Ordinarily, you could make that backing grill surface invisible, but I decided to keep it visible with a flat black shader on it, just to sort of add the 'darkness' you see in the picture...