3D Car Modeling - How to Car Body Details

hey everyone today we're covering a crucial modeling workflow for adding in small details to your sub d car models this is part of a series where i'm covering car modeling from start to finish today's video focuses specifically on how to model in fine details like door handles and fuel caps without ruining the form and edge flow of your subd models this series is targeted for beginner to advanced skill level in 3d modeling and my 2022.4 will be used for this tutorial but the workflows can be applied to any 3d software as well as any version of maya so with that let's get started alright so here we are in maya and you can see the iterations and progress that we've been making over the past few videos in this series we are going to be finalizing the details by adding in door handles and fuel caps to our model and this workflow can be applied really to any type of 3d model now if you haven't i'd recommend taking a look at this video that i've posted in the past before which is hard surface modeling how to fix bad surfaces this will give you a really good in-depth look on how to apply this to other models and just keeps it at this high level workflow now i'm going to quickly recap and show you this workflow applied to a simple sphere now here we have a sphere with a cylindrical extrusion now if you look at this at a you know pretty far distance it holds up pretty well and to be honest we'll be fine for most needs but for something like a car vehicle where we're going to be really really getting in close here we're going to want to make sure that we have really consistent body lines that we don't have disruptions in the surface detail and the reflections hold up really really well right because if i'm doing 4k renders you need to make sure things look as crisp as humanly possible right and that's where this method is going to help you for these high detailed workflows keep in mind this is for high poly sub d models but you can take this detail and of course bake it down to a lower poly model so back to the sphere here you can see that we have this extrusion and if we zoom in and really get in close here you can start to see that the shape falls apart a bit as you're orbiting around and taking a look at it with a really fine tooth comb all right now the method here is instead of doing an extrusion at this base mesh where again you can kind of see that we have 16 edges here you're first going to want to not do the extrusion and subdivide the mesh so this is as if you have this form done and you're ready to add in fine detail this is just a smooth version of the sphere without the extrusion so if you go back i go back and remove the divisions you can see that i have these 16 sides so then now i can add in one division and then from this point here i can do the same workflow and do the extrusion and you can see how this looks now and it holds up much better we have more geometry sub d's subdivision surfaces really really like this it doesn't like when you take detail like this and try to push it far beyond what it can do right there's just not enough edges here for it to hold and retain the overall surface and then if i check this in smooth preview you can see how crisp and clean this looks the highlight here it's looking really good and it doesn't break apart or fall apart and i can rotate around at pretty much any angle and it really looks good now for the final test here i can duplicate these spheres put them next to each other and then apply a subdivision to them in this case this low poly or lower poly mesh is going to get two subdivisions so if i hold shift right click apply smooth apply two divisions and this is what it's going to look like this model here that's already been subdivided can only be subdivided once or i should say only needs to be subdivided once and again it holds up really really well and then now you can start to see how this is pretty apparent with the artifacting and issues here on this lower poly mesh that's been subdivided versus this mid subdivision and then i add in the detail after i subdivide once and then subdivide again the overall division and distribution of edges is the same the detail is the same there is minimal differences in polycount it is actually a little bit less here for this model 3 800 tries and this one's at 4 600 so we're even saving some poly count here but that really doesn't matter for what we're trying to do we're just trying to get this to look as good as possible this workflow is when i learned about this was incredibly groundbreaking to me because it told me like oh my god i can come here model my form subdivide it and then subdivide it again afterwards right it's kind of like that zbrush workflow as you're you know iteratively and progressively subdividing and adding in detail you're just applying it to the hard surface workflow and this makes sure that you keep this high poly high detailed crisp looking geometry and this is huge you guys so this is what i'm doing here and i'll show you how to apply this to the vehicle all right so i'm going to go ahead and hide all of these parts that i don't need and here we are with this now this is the final version so i'm actually going to hide this get rid of the door handle everything and bring back my original version now keep in mind when you are ready to do this you want to make sure to control d as in dog and duplicate this and throw this in your web folder so you have a backup of it this is a destructive workflow meaning once you apply the subdivisions and make edits that you can't go back to that lower poly but you can go back and forth as needed all right so just keep that in mind so once i'm happy here i can go in and of course add in some extra detail to these door lines so i added in an extra subdivision here that's going to hold this and give this kind of this crisper look and if you wanted to depending on how thick you want this gap you can subdivide or smooth preview with three on the keyboard press w for move and hold ctrl middle mouse and drag and you can start to move this out a little bit just to get a little bit more precision and control so this is one of those final things that i do to the model to give that detail and kind of refine those door gaps but i'm going to leave these as is and i'm happy with how this looks so then i'm going to go ahead now and hold shift right click and smooth so i have divisions one and i'm going to keep this at one subdivision now with this i can jump to my side view go into x-ray mode and now i can start to add in this detail here you can see that i have this fuel cap and if i check our reference here we got this mood board it's going to be on the driver side or excuse me on the passenger side i'm adding it on the driver's side and then i'm just going to mirror it over so it's no big deal all right and then you can see the door handle geometry here so with that i can start cutting in this detail now without this i don't have enough geometry and this is where this issue lies that if i just go through and quickly cut in this without any edge flow and i just cut in it may look okay but we don't have enough geometry so i cut in i cut in and if you wanted to then bevel this and extrude this so you can see that it doesn't look good and it doesn't even give us enough geometry to match the form of this field cap so you get something like this and it may look okay but things are a little bit too round it's not square enough and it's just not enough geometry and then you have to run into issues where okay well then i can start pinching these and you start to break these line these edges these main edges that were used to refine this form and it just doesn't look good you start to ruin the underlying form of your mesh and even worse like you'd probably have to go in and add an edges which you don't want to do at this point since you finalized the form so you can get away with this if you add in manually some edges but instead we're just going to subdivide it and add it to the end all right so i just jumped back here and i will add in that subdivision now you can of course just extract the surfaces that you need which is going to be this rear quarter panel here which is actually combined with the rest of the vehicle so i will extract this and delete history and that way i don't need to subdivide these meshes unless i absolutely need to so with that i will subdivide these and then now i have enough geometry to go in and start cutting in some detail and i'll go ahead and do that okay so now that we have that i was able to cut in the detail and i have enough geometry that it holds this form a lot better than what we had previously so what i can do is grab these edges that i cut in and i'm actually going to lower the specularity on this material because it does look like it's a little bit hard to see so i'm going to darken it a bit and drop the specularity okay great so with this i select these edges and i bevel these edges and i can use something like this just like we did the paneling you know you can set this fraction off use something like you know 0.25 we don't want it to bump into any other edges so that's fine and set this to two segments and grab this edge here bevel again and this time i'll use maybe point one five or not fraction remember turn off fraction and use offset point one this is going to be a little bit tighter always make sure to double check and take a look at your reference so since this is on the passenger side we can take a look here and see what this looks like so you can see how that looks here and i can add this lip later but for now i'm just going to do the extrusion and i have this edge here and i can extrude move in about 0.5 excuse me minus 0.5 and i'm going to add in one division like so or two divisions so it gives me an extra edge here then with this face still selected i'm going to hold shift right click and extract faces and there you go so now this paneling is holding up really really well and you can see we don't get any artifacts the reflections are going to be consistent and it looks clean very very clean this is exactly what we want i can apply the same workflow to this door handle and the one thing that i wanted to bring up is based on part nine i had to prepare the geometry a little bit more where i took this if i set this division back to zero and what i did was added in an extra edge just so i had enough to cut in when it subdivided because without having this extra edge it didn't give me enough that i had to kind of move too many edges so this is going to give us exactly what we need i'm making sure that i have essentially these sets of faces here one two three this is going to give me this nice edge here for my inset here and same thing on the other side so instead of having just one edge here which was primarily these two faces i have three and remember when you subdivide it splits it into four faces so i'll go ahead and hide that and i can take this now reapply that division of one and i can now cut in this detail so i'm going to go ahead and do that okay so here's what i got so i went through and cut in that detail and we can see how this starts to look now instead of taking this surface data and doing an offset and then extrude where i'd have to do a lot of manual manipulation to get this to look right instead i can grab a sphere and use that instead this because if you look at reference here it's a nice curve and we zoom in here it's nice and curvy inside so it's kind of like this half cylindrical look so instead now what i did was grab this sphere a normal sphere not a subdivided cube and let me put this in position and i will just use maybe 16 or so and then i can clean that up as needed rotate 90 degrees and i think 16 is actually a lot i think i ended up using like 8 or something i can scale this up you can start to see you can kind of get this half shape here and what you can simply do is take this middle edge bevel it and i'll probably end up reducing the fraction here a bit and just move this so you get something like this and from this point i can take this put this here and i'm not going to boolean that would be too messy but i can use this form and use the inside of this piece of geometry for example i have this already done here where i have this part here with my whip let me just grab this and let me duplicate non-parent these i have this geometry and what i ended up doing was taking the sphere this capsule shape now and scaling it rotating it and putting it in position and ended up with this shape here just like this right so this gives me what i want or what i need and i can grab this sphere and make sure that these edges are aligned with the cut in geometry that i added so i can move these make sure that's clean and i can grab these edges here these edges inverts move these in kind of space these out a little bit and cut in this so i'm preparing this geometry so i can add it to the car and what i want to do now is select these faces and delete it so i'll kind of show you what i'm talking about right here so hopefully you're kind of sticking through this you'll see exactly what i'm going to do and it's going to save you a lot of work down the road and i had the wrong edges or faces deleted i wanted to make sure to evenly do that right down the center so here we go so i want to make sure you caught that delete these faces now the thing is you want to make sure not to move these edges and snap them here because that's going to mess up the surface of our geometry instead we're going to use that technique that i used before that i use all the time which is shrink wrapping or conforming this surface on another surface but how do i do that well i can take this edge here and i can do a quick fill hole shift right click fill hole so now we have this face here and what i can do is select the door handle like so and set this to live surface so this is going to make it live so we can essentially draw on it but we're not going to draw we're going to shrink wrap and conform if i turn on edge faces or wireframe unshaded you can see it turns green so then i can select the face here go to mesh and use conform now if you do conform by default it may end up looking okay but i ended up having to change a setting and if you use it by default well that's why because i have the other setting it's going to use a long normal and it's going to look bad if you do it with a long normal so undo that change it to closest point apply and there you go it gives you this nice looking shrinked wrapped conformed surface and it's going to match up perfectly so i can close this and if you want to you can of course adjust this while it's live or snap it to these vertices points to make sure everything is nice and even so that's gonna make sure everything's good and what i can do now is remove the live surface grab this half capsule delete this face select all these faces shift right click face normals reverse normals there so now we have this inside piece of geometry that's going to look really good and i'm not going to have to manually cut it in i am going to remove these triangles here that's why i like using factors of 4 so i can just delete that and we have something nice and clean and then i can go back to here and i can delete these faces and combine these okay so we have all of this ready to go and i'm just going to snap these into position and since these were conformed it's not going to alter the surface that we have so i'm going to snap this to the surface of the vehicle since i cut these a little bit more precisely so let me do that all right and i'm just off by one so i can edge slide these with ctrl shift middle mouse drag you can see that i need one more edge here so i'll use multi cut but i will use edge flow and control middle mouse click boom look at that looks really good fits in nice and even and snap this last vert and there we go and i'm snapping by the way with w and v for vertex snapping sorry if i forgot to mention that but here we are and everything's looking good you can clean up these with just kind of some edge sliding space these out as needed i think things are looking really good and i can you know make any adjustments later alright so now that i have that i can select these and combine and i do want to make sure i can delete history and i need to make sure that i have the right material applied to these you can see i have this font one material all right there we go and isolate control 1 3 preview and select all your vertices in vertex mode shift right click merge vertices merge vertices there you go and then now things are looking really nice and we just need to add in our holding edges so we can do that by selecting this edge doing a bevel but i want chamfer off and there we go now it depends on how crisp this line is you can see that it's catching quite a bit of highlights here you can see that in a lot of different renders it's actually pretty soft relative to a lot of things so it's not going to be a super sharp cut like this but we have these edges in here where i can you know adjust as needed and kind of edge slide these in or i might not even need this inner piece here and we get something that looks a little bit easier on the eyes there or i can do it the other way where i remove this edge so it just kind of depends but that's why that beveling is nice but i might keep that outside bevel and just adjust as needed but yeah there we go so we've now added in this door handle and i have this geometry here for the door handle that i created and here it is and it's just extruded or duplicated off of these but i just wanted to you know focus on just the door handle extrusion and the fuel cap and then of course i can mirror this over to the other side uh or really just flip negative x we should good to go there you go it shows up on the passenger side without any issues all right and we have this piece here delete that and i can select the original door handle pieces ctrl d negative one of course group that then scale negative one and there we are so things are really starting to come together so keep in mind it's i can't be understated this workflow is so nice because it you know doesn't mess up all that time that you spent on form topology and edge flow and then you can add that and let's say i come back here and i'm like oh crap i messed something up you know i can just take this piece of geometry and you know duplicate face and i can always reattach that later so for example if i'm like oh crap i messed up and i need to go back to the original low poly uh that that we had i can duplicate that that i had here ctrl d p you know change whatever i want like oh i don't like the door gaps i change these i move these on the normal blah blah do whatever that i want to do subdivide these i can just select these and reattach it so it's not like you're you know losing a lot of work uh but just keep in mind if i were to select the other geometry here and there we go so you can see now i have this geometry and i can attach it to this then i just cut out a hole and i can keep this so just make sure to keep that and duplicate it and you won't have to redo a lot of that work okay so just in case like you're like oh i needed to make some adjustments but i don't want to redo this entire process you can keep that and one last thing is that once you're done and ready to render you would just select the geometry that you subdivided once like so and delete history and you can smooth this one time and you get something that looks like that and the rest of the geometry can be subdivided twice here and there you go and now you can see everything still matches up because i subdivided once here added in some geometry and then subdivided once again all right and everything lines up all your edge flows everything are going to look super crisp and super clean and if i wanted to let's say i got in super super close here you know i would reserve that for a third iteration where i would grab these pieces and subdivide it again that's it everybody so i hope you found this helpful and i hope this workflow aids you in all of your modeling if you got any questions let me know if not i will see you in the final video and we will be wrapping up the series and then i can put up this model to download for anybody interested all right you guys talk to you then bye

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 1,102

Keywords: maya, car, vehicle, 3d, modeling, hard, hard surface, how to, blender, 3ds max, tutorial, vehcle, transportation, automotive, datsun, 240z, fairlady, fairelady, fair, features, feature, detail, details, detailing, hardsurfaced, panels, paneling, bevel, extrude, multi-cut, 3D, 3d art, autodesk, topology, edgeflow, hardsurface, surface, workflow, mod, modkits, restomod, sung, kang, fast, furious, door, handle, fuel, cap

Id: d-oJJrKWzuM

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021