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Mar 6, 2010
Modeling A Car
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Part 2: Creating the Hood
Whenever I want to model something like this I go and make sure I make it in separate pieces. This way when I screw up I can only mess up a small part of my model and if I decide I want to animate it I will have a much easier time doing so. So I will start by modeling the hood of my Camaro and since cars are usually symmetrical I will just to the right half of the hood and then duplicate it.
Firstly I am going to add a plane in the top view of our scene. To make sure our plane is added correctly in the top view we want to use the space bar to add our plane. Personally I have gotten into the habit of hitting add in the menu rather that hitting space. So, if you are like me you may forget to do this sometimes. So, with your cursor in the viewing window in the top view hit space --> Add --> Mesh --> Plane
After adding the plane, just grab your plane along the Y-axis and pull it over the hood. Now grab the left edge and move it along the X-axis by 1. This causes the one edge to be directly in the center of our car. Now just scale your plane along the Y-axis until it covers the vertical distance of the hood. Now select all of the edges except for the left one. Delete them. You can see what I have done below.
Now we have the centerline of our car. Before we continue shaping out the hood we should subdivide our line. Select your line and subdivide it about three times. Now we have a line with a few vertices on it. In order to make the plane the shape of the hood we will work in sections. On the Camaro I will extrude the vertices along the X-axis to the right of my line until they hit the first line to the right. You can see what I mean here:
If you are doing a different vehicle these steps may be a little different. Basically what I am doing here is just making the hood in small parts at a time so that it does not get overwhelming. If you try and do everything at once you will just make it harder on your self. Anyways, let's continue. Now that I have the extruded vertices in the correct position all I have to do is fill them in so we have a plane. Select the top four vertices. Then hit F. This should create a face:
Now do this for the rest of the vertices. When that is done we will do the same steps as before to the next line to the right. Extrude the vertices along the X-axis then fill in the faces.
If you try to do it again you may find that this method won't work as well as it did the last few times. The next line curves too much for the small amount of vertices we have. So, what we will do is improvise. First I will just extrude the vertices to the right as we did before. Instead of filling in our vertices we will extrude from our newest vertices and follow the lines. Below I did this to the bottom right of our hood.
Now that we have the hood completed in the top view, we can now get it correct in the side view. So, in the top view select one of the centermost vertices. Then in the side view grab it along the Z-axis and bring it to the top point on the hood. Then do this for the rest of the vertices. You can do the same thing with all of the vertices just by matching them up with their correct lines. Here is my finished half of the hood.
To make the other half just select the entire hood in Edit Mode and hit Shift+D. This will duplicate this half of the hood. Now Press M with the new hood selected and hit X. This mirrors the hood on the X-Axis. Now you just have to grab the new half along the X-axis and align the centers right on top of each other as closely as possible. To join them select the vertices that are to be in the very center of the hood and remove the doubles. You can do this by hitting W and selecting 'Remove Doubles'. If they do not join you can go to the Editing Buttons in the buttons panel and in the Mesh Tools box you will find 'Rem Double'. Right next to it there is “Limit: 0.001”. Just make the limit higher and you should be able to hit 'Rem Double' to remove the doubles.
Now we have the hood. As I am sure you are finding out, this will take a long time. With the creation of the hood you have just found out how to do pretty much every part of the car. All you have to do is go piece by piece slowly expanding on the model.