Car Trim
Trim - Chrome Strips - Page 2
The rear chrome strip on the side can be done in nearly the same way, but presents an added complication that we'll have to work through. That being that a small strip extends up from the main trim that actually wraps around the top edge of the car, making simple projection methods more complex.
When drawing the side view reference picture, I included an approximation of the trim. Using the empty spline object to create a linear spline, I outlined the shape of the trim with a basic enough point structure that it can be made completely with quad polygons.
Notice also that the spline edge always stays within the outer profile of the car. No overlapping!!! (Or else Projection won't work...)
Move the spline object outside of the hull of the car object. (In this case, merely slide it directly out along the X axis a sufficient amount so that no part of the spline object remains within the car hull).
Under the Structure Menu, (Edit Spline Submenu), use the 'Project' command to project the spline object to the ZY plane.
The side of the car hull will in effect 'get in the way', and the spline will conform to the shape of the side panel.
Using the structure manager, copy and paste these points into an empty polygon object, so you have a new polygon object made up of nothing but the copied points.
Use the bridge tool to make quad polygons out of these projected spline points. When this object is placed within a HyperNURBS/Symmetry hierarchy, you can see the HyperNURBS parent causes very loose corners between the main trim and the protruding trim areas.
This extraneous webbing can be cured with the knife tool of course.
By selecting all the polygons and carefully making 'cuts' near the intersections of the main trim and protruding trim areas, the corners can be sharpened to taste!
In this shot, some knife cuts on the rear trim shape show which corners had to be adjusted with this knife technique.
The 'wrap-around' of the trim on the top edge of the side panel becomes much less of a science I regret to admit.
Here I have switched back to the car object and selected some of the points that make up the little indentation where the trim will run.
Using the Structure Manager, I copy and paste these points into the structure of the chrome trim object.
You can see that the points are not ideally located to make the wrapped piece of trim, but they are a good start.
Using the bridge tool, the polygons for the wrapping trim section can be made from the newly pasted points.
As you can see, the trim does not conform perfectly to the car panel. However, a little bit of manual adjustment makes it very close.
Here the wrapping piece of trim has been adjusted slightly to fit the car panel shape. The main point of this exercise is to show how preexisting parts of the model can be recycled or reused to form new or dependent parts as you continue.
(Incidentally, points can be projected to surfaces, you may want to try projecting these points to the panel surface and see if that is a feasible technique!)
All polygons of the chrome trim object are then selected and extruded a few time in minute amounts to create a nice sharply defined thickness on the strip.
Now select only the polygons that will make up the front of the main portion of the chrome trim. These are about to be manipulated to form the outer chrome edge and the inner inlay of the trim object.
Use Extrude Inner on these polygons just a fractional amount to define the width of the outer chrome border.
Then, Extrude the polygons inwards toward the surface of the car using the Extrude tool. This too should be done with multiple extrudes in tiny amounts so that edges remain sharp.
Now, extrude those polygons back out away from the car panel, so to give the inlay a bulge that makes it almost flush with the edge of the outer trim.
Make a selection set of the inset polygons and call it, oh, I don't know... 'InnerTrim'... ;-)
Then invert that polygon selection and make a NEW selection set called 'OuterTrim'.
When making multiple selection sets on the same object, make sure the first selection set icon in the Object Manager is deselected before setting the second set, otherwise it will just 'overwrite' the first set's data.
As on the previous page, due to the fact that the trim object crosses a door seam, I had to knife the trim object along the seam and split the trim into two separate objects. Here you can see I also selected the end points of each polygon trim object and separated them visibly to match the width of the door seam.
In the rendered view above, you can see the end result when I apply a chrome material to the objects (restricted to the 'OuterTrim' selection sets...) and a basic white material to the inlays (restricted to the 'InnerTrim' selection sets...). You can see the chrome strips help break the monotony of the car surface. (They should look even better when the car is more complete!)