Car #1

After completing the fire hydrant I decided to attempt the car again.  I made several more attempts to figure out the best way to do this before coming up with the final design.  The biggest problem was deciding how to do the body.  My first attempt has one box for the passenger section and one for the engine section and involved connecting the two.  I ended up scrapping this plan because connecting the two became too tedious and problematic because I had used so many subdivisions.  The final design had just one box and slightly less geometry, though there was still a lot to allow greater detail.  At that point I just moved and scaled the vertices to get the desired shape.  Next, I did the fenders which are just spheres with a lot of faces removed, and running boards which are just elongated boxes.

The wheels were another tedious part.  The wheels from my reference images had spoked rims which had a few dozen spokes each.  I knew this would be ridiculously time consuming, so I simplified it by reducing the number of spokes and making them a bit wider.  Kevin added the windows, and I added the grill, which is just box with the center cut out and more long boxes for the slats.  Originally the grill was going to be textured on, however there will be a close up on the grill in one part of the animation, so we decided to make it more detailed.  We decided to added side view mirrors to it as well because, while cars in the '30s didn't have them, it just looked weird without them.

Warming Up

My first attempt at modeling for this class was a car that we needed, however when I tried to start that, I had a lot of difficulty.  This was the first time I was modeling with polygons not nurbs, and I wasn't familiar with the differences between the two.  Also, I hadn't done any modeling since my Animation I class two semesters ago.  So, I decided to do something simple that we would probably need: a fire hydrant.  Since the story is going to take place on city streets, there are likely to be a few of these lying around.

My work:

And later, after Greg's texturing:

Introduction

I will be working as part of Team Rags for this class with the goal of creating a short animation.  My main job throughout the course of this project will be modeling, however I will take part in other areas of the project as well.  Right now I'm working on some of the set and background objects; the progress on these will be posted soon.  All of my work will be posted both here, and on the Team Rags blog here:  http://rags-imm370.blogspot.com/