3D Car Modeling - How to Get Started

hey everyone today we're going to cover workflows for getting started with vehicle modeling in maya this is a new series where i will be covering vehicle modeling from beginning to end this video will cover how to approach one of the biggest challenges in 3d modeling which is how to go from 2d reference to a 3d model that is accurate from all angles this series will include a combination of high level concepts workflows and step-by-step techniques and is targeted for beginner to advanced skills in 3d modeling maya 2022 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 all right so here we are in mayan as you can see here i have a blockout version of the vehicle i will be modeling for this series now i will be using a 1972 datsun 240z for this tutorial in series but keep in mind you can apply these techniques to any vehicle that you're modeling all right now the first thing that you're going to want to do is reference is find as much reference as you possibly can for the vehicle that you're going to be modeling so the first thing is definitely head to the internet and find whatever reference you can of the specific vehicle i just typed in 1972.240z and i'm going to find all sorts of reference for the vehicle now keep in mind this specific vehicle also gets modded uh quite a bit so you'll see some variations of it but the overall body is consistent through all modifications so find one that interests you that you want to model find the reference and go from there here you can see i'm going to be using this reference here of the dsm 240z and once you've nailed this down you're then going to want to find some blueprints now don't forget that you want to make sure to compile all of your reference into a tool called pureref so here's pref and this is just this floating window here just right click to move the window middle mouse drag or middle mouse scroll to zoom in and then you can click left click and zoom and the nice thing about this is i can zoom in and just really get into these high resolution high resolution images and see all the detail that i need to see and i have all the varying angles and you'll see that i've also included some different versions of the modded 240c and i can continue to build this up if i find more reference that that interests me so this is where i'm going to compile all of my reference and as you're gathering reference make sure you know if you can get as much reference from different angles that's going to help you you know put this vehicle and in maya and your 3d software and make sure that it looks good from from all angles and especially from a lighting standpoint too this is going to be helpful all right the next thing is if possible try to find some blueprints all right i just simply went to the blueprints.com and you'll see if you type in your vehicle you'll be able to find the you know different versions of vehicles different model years and all of that so you can see if i go here to you know the blueprints and then type in that sun 240z that i'll be able to maybe find something or i want to make sure to to put in a space for that right so there we go so you can see that and they have the different versions and different years and different resolutions and all that and you can pay to get really really high resolutions uh and whatnot but the one that i specifically used was just kind of this one down here which was this that sun 240c which was a decent resolution which is going to work great now one thing to keep in mind is if i actually open this blueprint reference here you'll see that there are some challenges and it's not perfect but it's going to give me a good start is that these are different scales like the front you can tell by the size of the wheels isn't lined up with the size of the wheels of the side view the top view is is very large so it's just it looks like this was taken and cropped from some sort of manual and it wasn't made to be you know one to one in all the views so you're gonna have to keep that in mind this after all is just reference so we're gonna have to use these as a guide to help us within 3d all right the next thing that you're going to want to do is find your dimensions of your vehicle right so i'm just going to look online find dimensions of the vehicle and then you can eventually find something that's going to give you the length width and height you could also use wheelbase that's from front wheel to rear wheel but this is going to give us what we need to set this up inside of maya okay so you can see here now if i jump back to maya i have the reference images already set up okay now you can also see that i have this camera set up with the perspective view so i'll show you how to set that up as well i do have very straightforward videos that show you how to set up image plane reference so you can take a look at that if you want to just come back and and find that but to set up a specific reference in an orthographic view you would simply go to the camera that you want to or that you need the orthographic camera so in this case it's going to be front i can actually simply delete this right now and once i have this cleared you can simply hit this icon which is image plane and it's going to then ask you hey what image do you want to pull in so you say that's on 240c here's my blueprints great i go ahead and put that in and then now it's going to come in here you can see it's going to be small now the key thing is i already have this cube here that is my scale reference this is the scale reference of the dimensions that i found online so i just typed in those dimensions here on this cube and then what i do is i just go ahead and then scale up my reference to the size of this scale reference cube and then i move and position this and do everything that i need to do to you know get this working properly then you can kind of see that it's also in the middle you can also just simply move that back and the other setting that i typically use is depth where you can maybe type in 1500 depth and you can see that also will push that back in your orthographic views there but you can simply move that out and i'm going to actually just undo that and then bring mine back to its original state and i'm just going to do that for all of these orthographic views you can see that i have this orthographic top view already set up by my default and that's already here all right so everything's set up everything's moved in position and i have everything to scale based off of the scale reference okay now the next thing that i recommend that you always do is find your reference find some good reference and then do your best to try to actually camera match that inside of maya or your software so if i go here to the panels and then i go from perspective i or you see that i have this camera called uh camera match so i will go ahead and maximize this viewport hit perspective and hit camera match all right now you can also see that i make use quite a bit of layers i'm actually going to put my channel box right here and i have ref layer and i'm going to just hide this with the the ref layer or you can simply grab your image planes so if i take these i can simply group these and i'm going to just do image planes okay and i will hide those now you can see that i have this perspective matched camera as close as i can get to it now if i go ahead and hide this geometry so you can see this camera all i did was simply load in the image plane just like i did previously so if i go ahead and load that in you can see that it's just gonna if i select this actually and you can see that it's just the a perspective matched or just a perspective image of the image plane okay now here's the thing is how do we actually match the perspective you can see that i'm pretty close here which is nice and obviously this is modded version i just did kind of the front grille without having these front air dams set up but for now this is gave me enough to camera match this so how do i go about that right is you want to make sure to use a tool like f spy okay so here's f spy because i need to pull in or at least gather some sort of camera information otherwise i'm just going to be guessing inside of maya now i have a tutorial where i cover the whole f spy to blender to my workflow but for this one because i have this image plane all or not this image plane excuse me but this ground plane all i'm really trying to get out of here is this focal length so what i ended up doing was so if you see if i don't dim this image here you can see that i'm using this ground plane so i'm using at least as much of this horizontal ground plane here and i have it going to about right here to the end of the driveway and then i have these lines guiding it here i cover how to use use f spy in more detail so make sure to check out that tutorial if you've never used it before but if i go ahead actually you know and i just you know move these points here you can see that the the camera and these points are going to start shifting okay so i already have that pretty much set up where i wanted to and where i landed was somewhere between you know 45 and 55 focal length for this for this camera or for this image and you definitely want to find images that you can use and have as guides obviously if i go ahead and take a look at my pure ref reference some of these aren't really going to be helpful yeah i have kind of this horizontal line this horizon line that's not really going to help me camera match anything so this one here worked really great like maybe even this one from a rear view you can put this in having these these lines these vertical lines going through your reference are perfect for camera matching so you can bring those inside of maya now all i actually did is i didn't even have to bring it in through blender was that once i brought in this image plane i just showed i just create a plane that's essentially the size of the ground so if i go here you can see i have this and i shift h show that you can see that this is what i'm using for the ground plane so i'm using this and i'm using these lines here to help as a guide and the width of the driveway and i'm then going to go to camera attribute editors and this is where i typed in the focal length by default my is going to be 35 and when i was trying to use 35 it really wasn't working out and it was not giving me the the results that i needed but again i'm doing this by i so i ended up using something like 45 to 50 and then using that is going to help you really position these your images with your vehicle all right one thing to keep in mind is that even if you look at the front wheel in relation to this rear wheel you can see that there's not a lot of distortion which means that they are using a narrow camera lens all right so they're using a longer camera lens for this so i would imagine easily something 45 50 or higher okay if they were using something that you know the front wheel was much wider than the rear wheel or so on and so forth then they're definitely using a wider lens so that led me to believe that yes i'm going to want to stick around 45 and 50 at least to start now i already have this already set up i have a bookmark and i can just click that back and then go ahead and lock it now if you've never used bookmarks before you just edit bookmarks open up this window position this hit new bookmark and if you accidentally move it you just double click on that bookmark and it's going to take you back so i have focal length 45 final after i did a few tests there so that's how i would set that up using this focal length and using this ground plane to make sure that everything's kind of aligned properly and then i have these wheels these little proxy wheels just to kind of help okay now keep in mind you're probably not going to have a vehicle right off the gate so i did this with just this ground plane to start and then i went ahead and started modeling the vehicle okay so this is going to definitely help you as you're beginning the modeling process okay so having this camera matched angle is going to be really really helpful all right so now what we can do is i'll open up my channel box here and i will go ahead and hide my rough layer so i can kind of take a look here and the next thing that i want to do is i want to go ahead and now start that transition so i'm going to hide this so we're going to start essentially from from scratch is i want to go ahead now and begin the process of going from 2d to 3d and how do we do that if i go ahead now and select my image planes and show that here is where i'm starting i'm actually just going to hide this entire group here okay how do we go from blueprints to 3d model so i'll actually go back to top here for orthographic now one of the things that i do and use a lot especially when modeling vehicles from from images is to start with creating guides using curves i typically like to use the cv curve tool so if you go to create curves tools and you can see there's cv curve tool ep bezier and some arc tools you can use whatever tool that you want it really doesn't matter these are simply going to be a guide to help us transition from 2d to 3d reference so i will simply select the cv curve tool and you can see i actually have it on my shelf to add tools to your shelf if you're not sure you can simply go here to the curve tools hold ctrl shift and left click and then there you go it's added it right there i can just delete this since i already have it and left click there or middle mouse to move that all right so now that i have this tool activated i'm going to start in the top view and what i'm going to do is just start left clicking i'm going to just simply start from my line of symmetry you can see if i had turn on my grid everything's based off of the x line of symmetry with z being forward and x being horizontal this is just kind of a standard that i'm always working with and that we use in the industry and helps with rigging and physics and whatnot so starting from here i'll just go ahead again and just start left clicking so i'll do one two three you know points and you can start to see the curve start forming and whenever i have turns and curves like this that's where i'll make sure to at least have three points there and then i can just start clicking until i get the results that i need and i'm just going to continue on and then i'll probably add a few more points and here for this sharp corner i'm going to hit another three points so i'm going to one click two click three clicks so you can see now i got this sharper radius and then i'll add one right here and then we'll end here on this line of symmetry and you can hit q to exit the tool and there we go all right so now if we take a look at this in the side view we've created this from the top here so now we need to make sure that it looks fine from the side views and our and our other orthographic views so i will go ahead now drag this you can see that if you create curves from the orthographic views it's just going to simply put this right here on the grid plane here on this zero zero so now what i want to do is just move this up and then now i need to make sure that these curves now follow from the side view you want to make sure that it at least matches into orthographic views so i will go ahead and do control vertex so just simply hold right click control vertex and then you can left marquee select and then i can start dragging and start moving these down to more align with the shape and curvature of the body so this is going to essentially just reach the front of the hood here and it's going to match all the way across and we can see we're just matching this body line as much as we can so we get something like this great so now you just want to do this exactly what i just showed you over and over again right just until you get some good amount of curves that gives you some good reference for 3d space right so if i do this maybe a couple more times i'm not going to do it for the entire vehicle uh i already have that already done so what i can do now is let's maybe start from now the hood or the end of the hood to the roof to the rear so if i go here and i left click and i'm just going to left click three times anywhere i have some good curvature and up here and we're just making our way around and this is going to be the main top piece of the vehicle and we'll end up right here okay so i hit q to exit the tool and then now let's take a look at what this looks like now this is not the dead center of the vehicle this is going to be right here right around this window okay so if i move this now i'm going to use my top view to help here this is going to give me more a bit closer to what i want and now if i can hold right click and grab control vertex there we go okay and now we're just going to move these at an angle and just making sure that we're matching and guiding this along to match the body of the vehicle all right so this is going to help us significantly as we make our way around now one nice tool if you're like oh crap i didn't you know have enough points here like let's say actually you can simply delete a point if you want or if you hold right click go to curve point then select a point with left click again then hold shift right click then you can insert not and once you insert not you can re-add or add in any points that you want so you can see here i have some a decent amount of space i'll do that again i'll hold right click go to curve point left click okay then hold shift right click and insert knot and there you go and then now i have a control vertex that i can move here that i didn't have previously so that's just a nice quick way to easily add that and you can see now i'm starting to get this set up and it's looking pretty good uh remember i said the scale on the front is a little bit off so i may may not even use this view so things are looking good and i may do just simply one more if i'm going here maybe just this one that just just gonna simply run down the center of the vehicle so i'll grab my cv curve tool here and this time i'm going to do it from the side view again and i'm going to start up here and this is going to be again the highest point is going to be the dead center okay so you want to make sure to try to do your best to understand exactly where these points are and you can actually middle mouse drag to move these points and then left click and there we go hit q to exit the tool all right so you can see now i have this and this is again this is going to help us give us a 3d representation of our 2d blueprints this is probably the biggest challenge that people that i've seen a lot of my students start out when they're modeling and they just start with blueprints and they just want to immediately start with poly modeling and then all of a sudden things look off and i say you know i would recommend create your guides create your 3d curve guides okay so i'm going to go ahead and hide these real quick and i'll show you the group that i already have so if i show this here we go take a look at that this is a 2d curve representation of the vehicle of the datsun and you can see i'm i'm i have all the main body lines i have the main hip line i have the front fenders the front grille i have the hood scoop and the the roof everything i and and including the rear area i have a good understanding of how this vehicle should look like in 3d space okay now if i wanted to make adjustments i can simply make adjustments to these curves now and then i can it'll save me time down the road but i wouldn't spend too much time on adjusting these curves these again are just guides that's taking us from 2d to 3d all right now that we've created guides let's begin and look at the process of how to get to this which is going to be planar modeling right now this is just going to be very quick because the next video i'm going to go into much much more detail and we're going to start to take a look at the actual workflow for modeling but i want to at least show you why i do this step before i jump into the detail modeling so i can simply hit shift right click i can create a plane and i can come up here i can scale this up and what i'll do is just set this up to two by two for heightened with subdivisions and rotate this 90 degrees and i should say 90 degrees here and we can start to put this in position and we can start working with what we have here so i'm going to actually start at this corner here i'm actually going to start with this being 1. sorry i'm actually going to keep this on the 0x and we're going to use symmetry so if you go to your modeling toolkit you can see i have symmetry and i have world x already enabled so that way if this is on the x now i can move this and we can have our line of symmetry all right so i'll bring this down like so and just simply using these guides is going to be a significant help okay now you're going to be using these guides in combination with your blueprints so you know kind of taking a look at what you have here we want to make sure we kind of get that front of the hood there and then maybe bring this down and move this like so now we're going to use the edge copy and planar method so you can kind of see i'm just really all i'm showing you is how helpful these 3d guides are so i'm switching to vertex mode and if you don't like if these image planes are annoying you in 3d space or in your perspective you can simply select your cameras here or excuse me your image planes here hit control a we can go to image planes we can just do looking through camera okay and that should work fine i think right now it's uh if this is a little bit of a bug but it should be showing it in the side view but at least for now that's that's fine and what i can do is continue to edge copy this so i select hold shift right click go to edge hit w to move and hold shift and just continue to edge copy and then there you go and then you can see now again it's like oh crap if i were to continue this down here i wouldn't realize that i've lost essentially all of that that width and that body and that curvature so having these curve guides i can catch that pretty much immediately and stay pretty consistent with with the reference here so again we're just going to kind of move this in 3d space and this is going to help very very much and help significantly right so if i grab this image side it's just being a little stubborn right now so i'll work with this and we can just kind of keep this here and keep this aligned with our reference and i can kind of scale this so it's nice and flat and i'm going to actually keep this right here uh right on the midpoint of the wheel well and i'm going to again continue to shift copy so i'm going to just shift copy a few times shift copy and all i'm doing is holding shift and move shift and move all right and we want to eventually get down to the rear of the vehicle and then we can jump to our perspective and make sure that we are matching our reference here so i can kind of bring this up here and making sure things are looking good but again this is just quickly showing you how to use your guides to help with modeling now we can see okay it looks okay from the side view but now we know we can see we need to bring this in and using our guides is going to help us with that so i'll bring this in and we're just going to go to edge and i can just kind of shift and move there you go which is just extruding and then i can hold shift and then scale and you can see that i can just do this all the way up until the center and then we get something like that okay so we're starting with the main body and you know i'm going to start next week or the next video i should say is going to show you the specific workflow for actually starting with modeling but what i'm doing is at least right now showing you how to get your guides in place so you can begin the planar modeling process okay so if we take a look now at the orthographic version and i'll show you the differences with this vehicle we have this one that i modeled specifically off of the orthographic images and a little bit of the curve work here and what i found was if i go here to the panels and this is the next tip right so this is my last or fifth tip is how to refine and use your camera matching to help maintain your form so if i go back and show my image plane here so i think i have this one and actually have that on this layer right here so i can show that so i have this set up and you can see i'm actually going to just hide my curve groups here and we can see that it's looking okay but it's a little bit off actually went from the from the reference and then i i realized that the blueprints weren't as i didn't get it as wide as i should so you're starting to notice some gaps here or it's misalignments here and a little bit towards the back so what i ended up doing was simply taking this vehicle once i have it blocked out and going to deform and just simply using the lattice okay now the nice thing about lattice so i'll do three by three by three and it should be fine for what i need and i can hold shift right excuse me just right click so hold right click lattice point you can grab this these points here and i can start to move and make these adjustments here and then as i'm making it a little bit wider i don't it's non-destructive and then there we go those are the adjustments that i'm making then i can notice if my hood's a little bit too high i can come in here and just kind of start flattening this out so now you can see the power of using this camera reference here this camera match reference with the blackout version and using your guides to help you get there okay so i can take this now delete the history but what i'm going to do is just hide this actually yeah i'll just go ahead and delete history then hide it and then show the perspective version which is this matched one you can if you remember i just moved the camera and then i'm just going to move this back into place okay so you can see now what i do need to do is i will go ahead and actually go to display i'll go to polygons and then enable backface culling so i remove all of that junk that i need to and you can see that the windows aligning pretty well the windshield is lining pretty well and the body hood is aligning pretty well so remember the five key things are reference which include blueprints and all sorts of different references and collect that here and really understand the vehicle you're creating find camera matched reference so that's going to help you model create your guides if i hit ctrl one to isolate to help you with your modeling process and with your guides in place you're going to then create your planer modeling of the vehicle and then once you do that you're going to create and refine that form from your block blockout phase all right so this is the ortho view and this is the lattice version here all right so this is just a high level introduction on how to get started with vehicle modeling so in the next video we're going to get into the real specifics of actually modeling now that the groundwork has been laid out so if you have any questions comments feedback drop it down below and we'll just keep going stay safe and i'll see everybody around

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 8,188

Keywords: maya, car, vehicle, 3d, modeling, hard, hard surface, how to, blender, 3ds max, tutorial, vehcle, transportation, automotive, datsun, 240z, fairlady, fairelady, fair

Id: bv2NqDe-EKM

Length: 31min 18sec (1878 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/100Percertain]

I'll definitely be checking this out when I get home

[u/i_hate_cate]

Saw the video. I definitely learned a few things. Thank you

[u/farhorizons11]

Thank you for the video.

[u/whoiskateidkher]

love your channel, its really helpful

[u/blueflash99]

Awesome, thanks

[u/breadndread]

:D Oh man - I love your videos!! Keep it up!

[u/ToranosukeCalbraith]

Is this related to the post the other day of someone asking how to model realistic cars? If so, quick thinking!