projects :: BMW 3 Series Coupe E46 (2002) [02-03-2004] - Just tossing up some renderings of the car.   [02-01-2004] - The bulk of the body is done at this point. Now I need to go in and do the rest of the details. The two wire meshes show the difference between the base cage that I am modeling and the meshsmoohted versions I tried sevral ways of cutting the door handel out. Booleans produced a clean mesh provided I used the high rez meshsmoothed piece, but because of the junk and polys it add, it wasn't worth it. Instead I had to rebuild the polys around the door and i used my boolean shape as a guide. After I got a projection of the boolean object onto the door, I just cut those polys away and the result was pretty good. The trim around the window was reworked to give it some depth and to better match the distance between the inset windows and the body. It would have been much more difficult had I not had a real vehicle as a reference because the blueprints did not show this area in very much detail. The grill and mirros were just tossed together via a little bit of box modeling. Nothing special here except that I had to get the curvature right on the grill on the front. I did some animation passes to make sure that they looked right as the camera moved across the front. Click thumbnail to view fullsize:     Here's a shot from a older version with the door handle cutout. [08-17-2003] - I did a few lighting tests to make sure that the surface gemoetry is smooth and consistant with the lines of the body. By using these sharp reflections, its really easy to identify flaws in the geometry. Adding the windows prooved to be quite a challenge because i had to keep the polys relatively straight or i got warping in the reflection. The trick was to try and use simple geometry and make sure that it lined up to the body panels while making sure not to add distortions. I used some ffds on to try and get the glass to line up to body without warping.    [05-20-2003] - The blue panels in these images have been completely reworked. Also the door panel has been redone since the door handel cutout didn't work as well as I had hoped. I also added some creases to the rest of the geometry to bring out the lines. The mesh was also sliced up into several parts to create the body fit gaps. Note that these images are quite large:   [01-08-2003] - Some early tests on the shape of the body. I split the door from the rest of the mesh to try removing the door handel. I'm just trying to make sure that the surfaces arn't warped in any odd way.    [11-12-2002] - The beginnings of the BMW. I started out by setting up my ref views using front, back, side, and top blueprints. The next setp was to create a really detailed outline of the whole car using splines. This then sets up the next part of the modeling process where I used the splines as a snapping guide to create some panels. I used meshtools to add segments to the panels to kind of fill in the body work on the car. The splines help in getting the bluk of the geometry down quickly. Click thumbnail to view fullsize: