Car Trim
Windshield - Page 2
In the previous steps, we created the rough shape of the windshield, but in order to achieve the look we want, we'll have to learn how to use that rough shape to make a detailed window structure.
This mostly involves some fine detail work to differentiate the windshield glass from the frame itself and making both parts appear solid.
First, select the polygons on the front and rear surface of the windshield which will become the glass.
Make a selection set of these polygons so you can restore the selection easily later when the geometry of the windshield becomes more complicated.
Use the extrude tool on the frame polygons so that they 'thicken' by offsetting outwards and making the frame wider than the thickness of the glass.
This angle shows the result of the thickening of the frame a little clearer. Here the symmetry object is turned off to show you the way in which the frame of the windshield was fashioned with the extrude tool.
This picture also serves as a reminder to select the polygons shown along the plane of symmetry and delete them so the object is cleanly mirrored by the symmetry object.
This is the result you should see after deleting the polygons. This object will be mirrored smoothly.
Furthermore, there is another part of the windshield frame that must be adjusted - the bottom!
Select these polygons that are along the plane of symmetry and delete them.
Restore the windshield polygon selection.
Use the Split command to separate the window polygons from the frame polygons, thus creating two objects. Make sure both the window and window frame objects are properly placed under symmetry and HyperNURBS parents.
Here I have also applied a glass material to the windshield (and chrome to the frame).
Now that we have the windshield, we can use part of that geometry to build the side windows.
Invert the selection so that the exterior frame polygons are all selected...
Keep all the window polygons selected. Before this step, the window glass is 'two sided' with an interior and an exterior surface. What I did is used the thickening method (copy/paste in structure manager, reverse normals, extrude) so that both the front and back surfaces of the windshield were 'solid' two sided objects.
You could skip this step, but I like the look of the glass better when a material is applied to this geometry.
Switching back to the window frame object, I decided I wanted a little more flare on the top of the frame so that the frame sloped downwards toward the window.
So here I hopped into point editing mode and selected the points across the top back of the frame and moved them vertically on the Y axis just a bit.
As has been the case all along, extrusion on symmetrical objects requires cleanup of extra polygons on the plane of symmetry.
The thin polygons on the end of the glass surfaces (middle of car) can be selected and deleted.
Here's a quick render of the windshield in place. That's not a great glass shader, but you get the idea.