BMW Z4 Coupe
 

Here's my latest project, the BMW Z4 Coupe. It's in the very early stages right now, but I thought I'd get the thread started. These are just the very basic initial surfaces, with no fillets or cut-lines yet, but you can get the idea. It's all NURBs as always, and the materials were just for a quick test render. Comments welcome.

nice start man love the paint on the car. cant wait for more updates.

Lovely as always. I wish I could model using Nurbs

glad to see your back in swing of things ..was getting worried ..god love it so far ...cant wait

I've been busy at work, so I haven't had much time to work on this. Here's a small update. Almost finished the front headlights, I just gotta finish up the lower signal lights. Textures are just for the test render.

wow very nice ..I am impressed with this model ...cant wait for updates ....cheers

v nice as always dilberts

what happened to the last car u were on i cant remember u finishing it?

also where the heligh light is there are those dimples did u use a bumb or model it??

thx
pbman

pbman, the last car I was working on was the BMW M3 CSL, but it was a poly model. I've pretty much given up on polys now, so I started another with NURBs. The lower headlight dimples are a simple bump map that I threw on for visualization. It's nowhere near the final look, but bump maps are alsways good for texturing your lights.

why did you give up on polys. I know the guy that inspired me to do my modena used nurbs also so why is everyone who uses maya models cars with nurbs

ericmattison, polys are fine for modeling for visual artwork, but they just don't cut it for engineering and accurate product visualization. Most industrial design is done with NURBs so that the model can be exported to rapid prototyping software, where tolerances for surfaces can be as low as 0.001 cm. That means that your surfaces have to not just look smooth, but have to be tangent/curvature continuous to a very low tolerance, that you'll never achieve with polys. I'm heading in the industrial design direction, so NURBs is just the way to go. Also, once you get to know how to use all the tools, you'll find that NURBs are so much quicker and intuitive than polys. You'll find the guys who actual work in the industry are all NURBs modelers.

By the way, as a side note, I recommend everyone pick up the new edition of "Digital Lighting and Rendering" by Jeremy Birn. It's an excellent source for lighting techniques and reference. I've just been noticing a hell of a lot of HDRI rendering on this forum that looks just hideous. There's a reason why 99% of product advertising is shot in studios, under studio lighting. Throwing an ugly HDRI onto an IBL node very rarely does anything for your model other than make it look fake. Just my opinion though.

If anyone's interested, the last render used a large area light, with 2 directional lights casting soft raytraced shadows, and took about 15 minutes to render. Without the shadows, it takes about 5 minutes.

added bous of usin nurbs is model looks smoothed from the start

dilberts ur renders r nice!! - r then in a box or is it just a plane with the setup of lights u suggested?

The model sits inside a modified flattened sphere that has a ramp on its color node, to give the fade into darkness. You could use a single curved plane behind the model also, but I set it up with a sphere so that I can render a 360 animation without having to mess with the background.

Just about finished the headlights. I just have to tidy up a few edges here and there.

Back to the poly/NURBs discussion, this piece of the car is a prime example of how NURBs can have huge benefits. I don't even know how long it would have taken me to model this headlight in polys, but I know for sure it wouldn't have been as accurate, and all the subtle little fillets would have been almost impossible to get right in polys.

That looks absolutely amazing, how long did you spend tweaking that to get it right?

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.

thx for the explanation!

i used ep cos cv does the straight lines and curved at same time an i got confused!
wen u rebuild the curve does it replace the cvs?

spz dilberts for clogging up ur thread wiv my q's ill move them over to my thread now

post answer to this here

Good to see you giving it a try, By the way, I'm modeling the new Z4 coupe that just came so it's a little different to the tutorial that you're following.

Anyway, to answer your questions. You use both types of curves for different situations. Bottom line, whichever curve you use, try to build it with as few CV's as possible, and as cleanly as possible (i.e. the curve should be flowing with no severe, sudden shifts in curvature). When you use the birail or squar tool, Maya is going to try to follow your curves as closely as possible, which is a good and bad thing. It's good for accuracy, but bad because if you built your curves badly, it'll still build your surface for you, but badly also (like in your picture). Maya doesn't know what your intentions are, so it just follows the guides you give it. You can rectify your problem by either building the curves again, but more cleanly, or by rebuilding the surface using the "rebuild surface" tool. Problem with rebuilding the surface rather than the curve is that you'll lose the construction history from the birail, or square.

There's so much with nurbs that can trip you up, you just have to go through and experiment. One suggestion I'd give is to put the car model aside for now, and work on something a little simpler to get used to the tools. Go through EVERY nurbs and curve editing tool that Maya has, and really get to know what everything does. That way you'll know the best tool for the job to solve a specific modeling problem. There's aspects of the tutorial that you're following that I think could have been done better/cleaner, so it's really all up to how you model, and the skills that you have in your toolbox.

mmoore, it usually takes a couple of months for me to finish an entire car. Mostly due to the fact that I work my regular job about 10 hours a day. If I were going to pick a car to start with for nurbs modeling, I'd suggest the new VW beetles as they are constructed with nice large flowing surfaces that lend themselves to nurbs modeling.

thank you dilbert ..i have look for nurbs modeling ..i will do what you suggested for pman ..

wow dilberts, you have inspired me so much that I am probably gonna do a 350Z in NURBS (because my friend's dad drives one (sweet car) so I can get the refs real easy).

Great work man, and I CAN't WAIT for a NURBS modeling tutorial from you.

:beer:
-Matt

oh yea dilberts can you post some wireframes.

i wouldnt mind seiing some wires an also the curve layout alone if u dont mind

thx

edit: pics
there r some large pics there u may be interested in

Been busy at work, so I haven't been updating this thread. Well, here's the progress so far. The basic surfaces are almost done. I haven't done any filleting yet to blend the surfaces, but the basic shape is there. I posted a paint test and a tire test also. The tire is actually a Michelin Pilot Sport, not a Toyo, but I only had a Toyo sidewall bump map that I downloaded. I'll make my own Michelin sidewall texture later.

Here's the paint test.

And here's the tire test.

very impressive yet again ..and I thought i worked all the time ..I cant wait to see the paint dilbert. ...