The whole headlight took about 3 hours. Getting the fillets to work was the hardest part. That's the problem with NURBs, you've really got to build your surfaces clean up front so that the fillet operation will work.

yea thats what I heard so alot of ppl who used maya nurbs modeling switched over to XSI because they said its even easier and just better theb maya nurbs. I really have to learn it but cant find any real good tuts on how to do except for one but its for advanced users

this is a really nice model.
Did u make it with curves and then used the boundry tool to make the front?
Also, if u did make it with curves how long did it take u to get all the curves right?
Thirdly, i tried this and some of the end of my curves, like the end edit point, it seems to curve out in one direction instead of flowing with the rest. I tried to deleted the end edit point and that seemed to fix it but any advice would be great.
Nice work.

wow dilberts just awesome ...thank you for the explanation ..I always wondered why you did nurbs too and that makes sense

i really should learn this way
i know the sub d and crease way which i must admit im not too keen on

now off to find sample model car an a begginer tut

nice work dilberts

edit: what method do u use for laying out ur curves?

All but finished the front end, apart from the panel cut-lines separating the panels. This is a low res render, but every edge has a small fillet on it for clean close up renders.

To answer some questions: I use the birail, boundary, square, loft, trim and revolve most of all, but basically every other tool. Every surface is built off of curves, which are built as uniformly as possible, with as few cv's as possible. Also, I use the curve etiting tool, and the project tangent tool a great deal to prep the curves for surfacing. The more work you do up front on making your curves tangent/curvature continuous, the easier it is to produce a clean surface. The curves are laid out against image plane blueprints that I get from the web, but I never rely just on blueprints. I have about 30 high res photos of this car also, that I use for constant reference. Blueprints are never accurate enough to be relied upon on their own.

those headlights are amazing. Hey how come I never seen any renders of your 350z in nurbs. I would love to see how that looks as well. are you doing studio setup lighing for these renders

I gave up on the 350Z because I didn't build the surfaces too well, and it was too far along to go back and fix stuff (big problem with nurbs is that if you delete history on a surface, it can be hard to fix stuff without messing up other parts). I described the lighting set-up earlier. It's just a large area light, with 2 directional lights casting soft raytraced shadows. I'm ditching the whole HDRI lighting thing until I'm good a studio lighting, then I might go back and do some HDRI renders.

I totally agree with you. I was just readin that post where you recommended a book and im ordering it right now. Ive seens some real good hdri's but the studio lighting just makes a huge difference. I was looking the theshaddixs post on cg-cars and this guy from japan showed his studio lighting and it made his car look so nice sa you can see form the image i posted. SOrry for posting that image but Its good to show everyone how much better a image can look and its worth investing on learning lightin. No ugly reflecitons and it just adds to the overall image. Im a poor lighter and renderer so this will be helpful

Exactly, nice clean reflections and highlights. That book will steer you in the right direction. Do me a favor though, can you edit that picture you posted to be 640x480 so it complies with the forum rules. Thanks bud :beer:

nice work man hmm maybe i might try nurbs modelling for my next car project. but for eric theres this website which has tons of xsi tutorials.
http://www.edharriss.com/

Another great car model dilberts - those headlights look amazing - thanks for all of the good info on nurbs modelling and also the book recommendation.
:beer:

wow dilberts that is great ..man I feel intimidated to even attempt to do a car model cause I see how good yours is and I would strive to be that good lol i know sounds stupid but ya know ...

cant wait to see finish product ...

just curious how long does it usually take for you to finish a car ?

also dilberts could you suggest a good car to start for first model ? if someone was going to model one ...

not sure if you seen my dragon in the WIP but that is second model ....so that is skill level I am at now if you take a look

mmoore5553 - thry 3dtotal.com for their nurbs car modelling and its a bmw z4 coupe so u can compare to dilberts

i am diong it an i laid out the curves with ep curve tool was this bad? should i have used cv?

also do do a lot of rebuilding curves so they match better as in thte tut it says make it 5 for 1 part but it makes it looses the curves shape?

cv curve tool is much better imho because you know where youre placing all the cv's but with ep it places cvs in random positions but you can still tweek and add/remove them.