How to get good at making cars in Blender

all right so in this video I wanted to share what I've learned when it comes to modeling texturing and rendering cars in blender and I'll put up the screen my first car looks awful and here are some of my later car renders so yeah I'm far from the best like there's a lot of good people out there doing cars and car modeling all that but I'm better than I was when I started and that's all I can ask you know when you look up how to make a car in blender on YouTube you usually get videos where the method that's being used is we have drawings or blueprints of pre-existing cars and then you use those to model the car and here's an example where I've done that it's a Honda NSX and like I'm not gonna go into detail about this method uh the they're like there's great videos explaining this already but in general it's a good method to use if you want to model a specific car maybe you don't want to buy a model off the internet or maybe a model of that car doesn't even exist and then you know this is a good way to to do it keep in mind if you want high quality blueprints that's probably gonna cost some money uh probably less than an actual 3D model but yeah there are three blueprints usually but they're usually lower quality so like you can see here if I zoom in there's it's pretty pixelated but you can still get the overall shape and you always have to like complement with actual photos of the car so you can see like okay wait what's going on here like how how does this shape look and uh stuff like that and yeah this method is good for practice as well uh and it's a good way for studying existing designs learn from the Masters Etc I've done this three times myself and I find it can be very time consuming cars are complicated and there's like a lot of detail personally I usually abandon the projects because it starts boring me or like I can't be bothered to finish so like here you like the the back isn't even finished also in general when doing this you want uh the mirror modifier you get a plane start doing this placing out vertices you got a mirror modifier so it it's mirrored on the x-axis then you get a you can get a solidify modifier in the beginning and just keep don't like keep having that on this one's at three millimeters a very low value basically um or you can put it at the end like when you're done modeling everything and then you also want a subdivision modifier and that's going to give nice smooth surfaces you know another tip is to install Loop tools it's an add-on free add-on just get it and it's a good add-on for modeling it has some tools like flatten relax circle is pretty good and basically flatten like if you pick some surfaces here or some faces and then you press flatten it's gonna make those flat which can be useful Circle it's the same thing but if you pick some vertices or whatever and press Circle it turns it into a circle which can also be good and useful relax it kind of just relaxes vertices like it only does something if they're kind of bent like this and you press relax a few times and it it kind of relaxes it basically as if it was a soft material kind of but yeah that's a good add-on and they're probably more add-ons that can be useful let me know in the comments if you know any good ones another method that I've used when modeling cars is to just use references and this is for when I'm designing my own cars basically I find pictures of cars that I want to have a similar style as so for this car that I've made I have a folder here full of pictures of cars that I want like I want it to look similar to these kind of lmp1 old school 90s and 80s cars and then I actually made a movie or like a slideshow that runs on my second monitor while I'm modeling just to like imprint the inspiration in my head like I always have that in my peripheral or just to look at just to keep it like keep in mind what a car looks like basically and keep in mind what it is I'm sort of aiming for so so that's useful and with that you can take inspiration you can sort of see what dimensions are used in general ratios Etc but then you put your own little spin on it this is obviously very similar to those cars but it's still like unique in its own like it's a it's its own car you know when I use that method I what I usually do when uh just starting off is I make a mesh I put in circles that will be the wheel arches so I put in one like this actually the first thing I do is put in a square or a cube I mean put the viewport visibility or display viewport display as wire and then give that uh some reasonable Dimensions like usually a car is like two meters wide five meters long and then maybe I don't know 1.5 that's a super low like sports car kind of Dimension you can look up like in general what uh the dimensions are and then you want to keep within that kind of uh just to get an idea of how where to put these wheel arches and then you that's kind of how you start modeling it put these kind of things here and then you have your wheel arches and then you just go from that kind of delete these connect that and then you can just go crazy make a shape this looks great of course I mean you're doing it quickly to show the absolutely basic topology is awful here obviously you want to keep like all the faces you want them to be squares or have four vertices each you want quads and this that's not really working out here but you got to keep that in mind as well that's the boring part like the difficult part but let's say we fill this in like that that's obviously not how you want to do it but uh then you could just you know that's basically what I did for the car I showed earlier now you have now you have a car it's more difficult than that but that's like kind of how I started you make the side profile and then then you go from there basically all right when it comes to Wheels the first method that I used that I've learned from this video which is great by the way go check it out the method is this you get a circle flip it on the y-axis 90 degrees why does it not want to do that rotate on the z-axis no the y-axis okay now this is 32 vertices that's fine but basically if you want eight spokes for example you want 16 vertices because we're gonna use this and we're gonna have every other vertices or every other face is gonna like be extruded but let's fill this in this is also like either you can do I mean there's ways of doing it I mean you could do this grid fill that works uh you could you can also do like some more here it's not super important uh but you do want quads I guess if you want to be really a really good boy or girl you know keep it quad keep it quoted you know and then just some some similar on the other side ideally you want a subdivision surface modifier and that's also why you want quads because if you don't that's gonna mess up a bit uh maybe make the edges a bit no not yet actually but you can do this select all of those let me put on screencast keys so you see what I'm doing pick those alt click with that and um select Checker deselect and then you have every other spoke selected so to speak then you can press alt e extrude phases along normals and then just do that and now you have a wheel basically congratulations you know congratulations um and this method you know it gives you a wheel it can be kind of complicated though because you have to like if you want to edit something you have to like you have to do it at the same time for each one you know like it has to be symmetrical so it works there are ways but it can be a bit tricky to just edit everything at the same time but it's a an easy way to get a basic wheel shape I guess the other method the better method that I'm using currently or that I've used lately is with a array modifier so basically you get a plane flip it on the y-axis probably should apply all transforms for this to work that's actually super important like for the object or for the modifier to work properly everything has to be applied but basically you're gonna Design One spoke and if you want to be really cool you can do just one half of the spoke if the spoke is symmetrical but let's say it is so mirror modifier on the y-axis and then you have imagine this is one spoke let's pull that out a bit super basic shape and then what you want is an array modifier and you don't want the relative Offset you want an object offset and we want an object so what we're going to add is a an empty and we have that and then we go into the modifier do the eyedropper tool and select that empty and it's important for both of these to have their transformation supplied so like these need to be zero and these need to be one basically otherwise it's going to be messed up and then what you do is you just rotate it and let's say we want five spokes that's a pretty common configuration so five and put that in the count and then for the rotation so here we want to rotate on the x axis so we have 360 Degrees that's one one rotation but then we divide by five and there we have it and then you can just you know edit one half of this little Rim here and it's just gonna reflect on all of these I guess oh that looks pretty cool wait what did I do that was what I did oh that's kind of cool um and it's a great way to just make those I guess we want a subdivision modifier as well Crank that up shade smooth look at that that looks pretty cool and then you would need probably to like there's different ways to doing it but you can add like a circle around it later like the outer ring so to speak why does this not rotate there we go uh because that's what you know Wheels have that they have an outer ring that the actual Tire looks at or sits at I'm not going to explain how to make tires today because I don't want to but uh you can do that as well and here you have a wheel I mean it doesn't look it's not finished obviously but that's the basic method and I think you can figure that restaurant you're you're a smart person you can figure it out go do it all right so next I want to show how to make just this basic basic little car paint material so let's go into the material preview and then we pull up the Shader tab here the Shader window and the basic is okay let's say you want a metallic paint you pull up the multi-metallic maybe lower the roughness uh let's pick a color that's a bit darker that's kind of where metallic paints are the best where they are they're usually a bit darker uh specular don't touch the specular but somewhere around there you know and then you want a clear coat you can just do one but then in one video that I saw where he or somebody made like a car material he showed they can just you can bump it up you can like put it to a billion or something and then it becomes super shiny that's almost like a metal but uh yeah three is pretty good and uh it just becomes more shiny because when I I discovered like when it's at one it can kind of look not shiny enough sometimes so three can be good whatever let's put it to three and then to get like metallic flakes you want a voronoid texture uh Ctrl T to get the node Wrangler and if you don't know what the node Wrangler is look it up download it whatever let's see how the Warner texture looks looks small but you want the color actually separate color that's what it's called it used to be separate RGB um anyway plug in the color and then you want to combine the color again and that's it nothing happens in between just kidding you want that do not connect the blue and then put blue to one and then that's this is what it looks like it looks like a normal map and that's what we want I'm pretty sure you do this then yeah you still need the normal map node plug in the color plug it into the normal and then it's all about just adjusting the size first of all and that's a bit extreme so you just wanna adjust the strength here and uh you have a basic card material another thing I wanted to talk about is windows so of course have Windows one basic thing you can do that's uh easy to render uh is you get a principled Shader bump up the metallic lower the roughness and you have like a mirror you can use just a mirror it can look kind of weird I guess as a window but then you can also lower the alpha so it's like okay now it's a window and you can see through it and that's super good like Earth so that's easy to render uh compared to a glass Shader which you could also do so remove the metallic and then do a transmission now it acts as a window but this can this can be or it will be heavier to render glass is you know Infamous for that being difficult to render transmission roughness you don't want to touch that you can also just do like a black window tinted windows so roughness down and it's black and that's it that's a window that's if you basically if you don't want to model an interior for the car then just put black windows and nobody can see through them it's fine but yeah that's it for Windows okay so for lighting you're either gonna do it manually so to speak or use an hdri and when I say do it manually I mean you build a little scene maybe just a simple Studio setup like this I'm going to show you here um the simplest possible ways to just make a plane go into edit mode pick this Edge extrude on the z-axis and pick that edge again Ctrl B to make a bubble and then scroll up to give more like more edges and give it a bit of a Bend like this shade smooth and that's a studio setup like that's kind of how they sometimes have it in just uh in photography they just have this as a blank background then you put your car here and uh that's it pretty much then you place little lights around here to light your car basically so hdris can give nice realistic results but they can be kind of bad as a background so you probably want to build like a little environment like I've done here it's a little road some water and some mountains in the back a bit of a fence going on and that's just so it's like not not just a plain the car and then the hdri's the background that can like it can look kind of bad and I've done that too many times because I'm I was lazy but if you build like if you combine an hdri with like a built environment a little bit like this then it it can give some nice lighting basically for anybody wondering about these Landscapes or these mountains I just used the add mesh and Landscape add-on so you get the mesh mesh landscape and you can like use some settings to get I think I used the default setting for this and then I just kind of scaled it you know made it wider put it around the scene a third kind of lighting setup that I've done is I make a little room or a studio like this and then I put kind of repeated patterns of Lights in the ceiling and that's it pretty much uh this is just yeah it's a circle and then two Ray modifiers basically uh one on the x-axis and then one on the y-axis so it gives this like kind of grid pattern sometimes I add little like complementary lights just to light up like the side or the front just to like bring up the brightness a little bit but I feel like this this gives some really cool results uh it's pretty good to show the shape of the car and you get some cool patterns on the with the reflections and stuff and I mean yeah that's it that's all I got uh thanks for watching bye

Channel: Viktor Frankling (vf3d)

Views: 17,879

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Id: FM2tAw1lC6Y

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2023