Car Trim
Headlights - Page 1
To be fair, the headlight recipe I came up with is a little more involved than what you might categorize as 'trim'. But that doesn't mean it has to be hard does it?
Yes. Unfortunately it does. This headlight recipe is pretty tough to pull off. It took me a lot of tweaking and test-rendering, and I can't guarantee that if you use the same material recipes and light parameters that you will get identical results... Hopefully you will, but if not, try to treat this more as a guideline, or an inspiration to find a better way. If you have a better headlight method, PLEASE don't hesitate to tell me about it!
The first thing to do is return to the front body section of the car and select and delete the polygons within the headlight shape we made.
You can see I left the ring intact and only created the opening by deleting polygons within the confines of the ring.
Next, create a cylinder object that has about eight rotational segments, one cap segment and three height segments.
Adjust the radius of the cylinder and position it so that it approximates what I have shown on the right here. This will be the basis of what I call the 'headlight chamber'.
This picture gives you a better idea of how long the cylinder should be in relation to the radius. Here I have made the cylinder editable and dropped it into a HyperNURBS hierarchy. The points are optimized so the cap segments and height segments are joined as one.
I also selected all polygons and made a knifecut near the front of the cylinder (from the side view) to sharpen the edge of that end a little more.
Here I've selected the sides of the cylinder with the exception of the narrow front ring of polygons caused by the knifecut I mentioned in the previous step.
Using the scale tool constrained to the X and Y axis, scale the polygons up so this selection of the cylinder gets wider in radius.
The reason for this will be to provide a little extra width along the headlight chamber than the front end. This will allow us a little more room for manipulating the light we put in there and the subsequent aim of the lights out the front... you'll see...
Here I have selected some points along the bottom of the cylinder and moved them downward to create a more sloped transition from the front ring of the headlight chamber to the car body surface.
That is to say, this is for aesthetics only. I felt it looked better. :-)
Select the polygons at the front of the headlight chamber object, and use the extrude inner command to draw the polygons inward.
The thickness of the resulting outer ring of polygons will basically determine the width and roundness of the chrome headlight trim... kinda one of those things you just eyeball.
Extrude those same polygons back a bit to begin to create the inner mouth of the headlight chamber. After the initial extrusion, you can continue with a couple more extrusions and possibly scale the polygons up on the X and Y axes in the middle of the chamber... This creates a bulbous inner chamber that is wider than the chamber opening.
When you are done with the extrusion, and the inner surface is complete, the polygons you were extruding should be back almost as far as the outer back wall of the chamber object. You'll have basically created a hollow chrome container for the headlight to sit within.
Oh yeah. Chrome. Did I mention chrome?
;-)
Of course every good classic car needs chrome, and this is another shining example... pardon the pun.
Now to create the glass 'lens', make another cylinder with 8 rotational segments, 1 height segment, and 2 cap segments right in the middle of the chamber opening, but recessed a little.
Polygonize that sucker and drop it in a HyperNURBS parent... optimize the points so the cap and height segments are joined.
Make sure the radius of the lens is suitable for the chamber opening too...
Select the interior polygons of both ends of this lens object and move them forward slightly on the Z axis to round the surface of the glass.