Car Trim
License Plate - Page 1
This should be about the easiest part of the model... well, partly. That is, the license plate itself is pretty darn easy, but I got ambitious afterwards and modeled a chrome license plate frame that might be a bit trickier.
At any rate, the plate itself is basically a cube, and the frame is nothing more than a variation on a cube. If you've gotten this far, it's a piece of cake. (An apology to the European readers is in order, I'm not too familiar with the style of license plates outside North America, but I'm sure the technique is adaptable!) ;-)
The first step is to create a cube primitive within a HyperNURBS parent. Make it one segment in each direction. Make it very very thin, and about twice as wide as it is high.
Use the Make Editable command, and select all polygons. Then use the knife tool to make cuts completely across the plate as shown so that the corners are a little closer to actual license plate corners.
Next, create a texture map that has a suitable 'license number' (or a vanity plate), and use that texture map in the Alpha and bump channels of a material to be projected onto the base plate material using flat mapping.
You should probably restrict the number material to one side of the plate using polygon selection sets... we've covered this technique though, and if you need more info, it's almost straight out of the manual!!!
A quick render shows the result is very basic, but probably suitable for most purposes. If you want to go out of your way and make the plates more appropriate to your locale, complete with registration stickers and province/state slogan, go right ahead... it's all in the texturing... :-)
So the basic plate is complete, and now we can use a copy of the plate as a basis for creating the frame.
Make a duplicate copy of the license plate object and label it as the frame. Remove the textures from it, and use the scale tool to increase the size of it slightly so that it completely encompasses the license plate object.
Make sure all polygons are selected on the frame object, and further subdivide the frame object along the border of polygons around the outer edge of the front and back faces as shown. (Use the knife tool again).
Select the polygons that make up the interior of the license frame face as shown.
Make sure to select these polygons on both sides of the frame object, front and back...
Then in polygon mode, use the bridge tool to 'tunnel' from one polygon selection to the other, so that the effect is to hollow out the frame. Basically the bridge tool connects the front face polygons to the back face polygons by building a tunnel between them.
The end result is a basic frame.
Let's continue by sprucing the frame up a little...
