Yugo - Research

So to start off, I have chosen the vehicle from Suurland.com and  found the Blueprints. So we have to create a file hierarchy, get reference material and prep the blueprints for use.

File hierarchy is really easy and just common sense, it stops you losing objects, textures, etc when moving folders between computers. That's what you would probably be doing between home and college/uni, it can be easily forgotten.

For example you may have a file system like this:

Projects > Yugo > Models

                > Textures

                > Images

                > Research

                > Renders

                > Scenes

Once you have your folders we are going to fill the research folder, most 3D courses ask you to keep your research, but generally its just good practice. Sometimes images on the internet can be taken down, its best to just keep them on your computer.

Google images is usually the best way to find any images you want, just search for the car name, I also searched for Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. 

Here are a few images I collected covering most sides of the car and part of the interior and engine.

                                        

Last thing for the research folder, we have to prep the blueprints to take them into Lightwave Modeller. It's very simple to do, all we need to do is to take them into a photo editing program, straighten them and crop them. I'm using Photoshop, but most photo editing programs will do.

With these blueprints I found that they needed to be rotated about 1° clockwise. Then you have to crop the separate views so the edges of the vehicle touch the sides of cropped image. Try to make this as exact as possible.

The top down view will need to be rotated to face down for all the images to match up once imported into Lightwave Modeller.

Save all these images in the research folder titled left, back, front and top respectively.

In my next post I'll show you how to import them into Lightwave, line them up properly and start on the wheel arch.

Yugo 45?

Right, to start off I thought I would find something easy and quite fun to do that will have some good results. A car is a good place to start, plus I'm quite good at them. 

Probably the most important thing to find when doing a car is to find blueprints, the best resource I have found for this is suurland.com. This is a portfolio website for a Freelance 3D Artist called Thomas Suurland. As you will see from his website he is a fantastic 3d artist. Unfortunately I'm not that good.

If you click the Assets section of suurland.com you will find a huge selection of vehicle blueprints.

I had a quick look and picked the Yugo 45. I chose this vehicle because its small, square, Russian and a piece of crap, but mostly because it was in the film Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. 

Not the best film in the world, but it does means that there shall be plenty of images to reference on the car, and hopefully should be recognisable to anyone who has seen the film. We can also add some rust, damage and dirt to make it more realistic looking when texturing it.

Introduction

I'll start by introducing myself. 


I'm Andy.
I have a BSc in 3D Computer Animation, my ambition is to become a environmental or vehicle artist in the computer games industry, although I currently work part time behind a bar.


What I'm going to try and do is update this at least weekly as I make new models for my portfolio. I shall attempt to write them in the form of a tutorial so anyone can learn from me. Hopefully I shall get some constructive criticism back that I can work from.


I normally work with Lightwave 3D, it is the program I was trained in and is very versatile and easy to use, skills are often transferable. 


My Youtube page is http://www.youtube.com/AndyBegg1 all videos will be posted here.


Finally this is my Uni showreel, give it a gander.