Car Modeling - Part 7
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Part 7: Wheels and Tires

First off, I suggest opening up a new file for modeling your wheel. For me, my computer slowed down greatly when I was nearing the end on modeling the car and I don't want to wait through the lag. (My laptop crashed from overheating once…) I gotta watch the poly count I guess. Anyways…The great thing about the wheels and the tires is that they have radial symmetry. This means we only have to create one section of one wheel and 'Spin Dup' it. If you don't understand, let me show you. Below I have an image of my wheel.

This wheel is split into five separate parts. So all we have to do is model 1/5th of the wheel. After that we get to 'Spin Dup' it. Modeling the wheel can be a little harder than doing the rest of the car. Almost always you will only end up with a side view reference image, like the one above. This causes problems when you need to create the depth. The best thing you can do in this case is find some good photos and images to look at and estimate where certain points should be, mainly the edges. After that the rest can get filled in. This process is the same as the rest of the car, only you have to make good judgment on where the key points are supposed to be.

So, once you are done with modeling the one section of the wheel, (I'm not worried about the tire just yet.) you will want to change some settings within the 'Mesh Tools' panel. To get there press F9 while in 'Edit Mode'. Within the 'Mesh Tools' panel you will need to make sure that 'Degr: ##' is set to 360 and 'Steps' is set to the number of repetitions are in your wheel, in this case I would set it to five.

After pressing 'Spin Dup', you should see a full wheel. To finish it all up all you have to do is press 'W' and select 'Remove Doubles'. Assuming your edges match up nicely the whole this should be connected as one. If you didn't get it to match of perfectly (like me) all you gave to do is manually get them to match up. Usually they vertices were close enough together that I could select the two vertices that needed to be connected, press 'S', press '0', and remove doubles.

Now your wheel should be complete. Now we can move on to the tires. There are two ways you can do it. You can use a texture later and just throw in a cylinder or you can model it. I am going to model my tires. The first thing we have to do is find the treads style you want to put onto your car. My suggestion is to go online, search for tire treads or something and find the one you like. The image that you want should look something like below then use it to make a background image in Blender.

With that, you are going to make on segment of the tire that will be repeated over and over again until it comes all the way back around to the beginning. This means you have to make sure your one segment is going to fit with itself so you do not get any gaps. When I did the tire it took some tweaking to make sure there were no gaps present, so don't worry if it isn't perfect the first time.

When you have completed your segment we need to make it into a circle. For this we will use a couple of modifiers. First go into side view in object mode by hitting 3 and add a Bezier Circle. (AddCurveBezier Circle) Now scale the circle up by hitting 'S' and make it bigger until it looks about the right size for a tire. Once that is done select the piece of tire tread we just made and add the 'Array' Modifier and the 'Curve' modifier. This is in the 'modifiers section' of the Editing panel of the buttons window. (Hit F9 and find the modifiers box)

In the curve modifier we want to add the name of the curve that we just added so the tire tread know to curve along it. For me it was called 'CurveCircle'. This goes into the 'Ob:' text line. You also might have to change the orientation of the treads. This is below the two text entry lines. Mine was defaulted at 'X' but I ended up changing it to 'Y'.

Now just go into the Array modifier and raise the 'count' until the treads are all the way around the loop. Don't expect the ends to match up perfectly. The chances of that are very slim. You will also have to change the offset of the individual treads so they match up. Depending on the orientation of your treads, you will want to adjust the X, Y, or Z value under the 'Constant Offset' or the 'Relative Offset'. Just enable one of them and zoom in on the gap between the arrayed treads and change the value until they match up. Overlapping vertices will be removed later. To fix the gap in your tire just scale the Bezier curve down until the ends meet.

By now you should have a good looking tire. I know this wasn't the most detailed tire tutorial but I think it gives you the general idea. Don't forget to apply the 'Curve' and 'Array' modifiers and remove the overlapping vertices by going into 'Edit Mode', pressing 'W', and selecting 'Remove Doubles'. It should then give you a count of how many doubles it removed. You final result should look something like this:

At this point we have our wheel and our tires finished. Since tires usually go around wheels we will just stay in this file and import the wheel into this one and put them together. To get the wheel into this file go to 'File --> Append or Link' Then find the file that you saved your wheel in, click on 'Object' and choose the wheel. Once it is selected, click 'Load Library' and it should appear in the viewing window. All that you have to do now is fit them together. When you feel like they are in the right position, press 'Ctrl+J' to join them together. Now save the file you are in and open the file with the rest of your car.

Now all you have to do is append the wheel and tire into this file and put it into place. When it is in place, duplicate it and do the rest of the wheels. Here is my final car.

The modeling part of your car is now complete. All that needs to be done is the materials and texturing. So go and start giving your car some life by giving it some color and put it in a cool environment.

If you have any questions or problems with this tutorial I would like to ask you to go to the forum. I will be there to answer any questions to the best of my ability.

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Have a comments, questions, or suggestion for a new tutorial? Let me know in the forums or send me a message.