My take on Fiat Argo - WIP

[capa14]

So, I own a Fiat Argo and I was like… “Why not try to model my car shouldn’t be too hard, right?”
Man… was I wrong lol

Really… If you want a challenge try to model a real car for the first time ever…
It involves a lot of techniques to make every part of the car: grills, rims, tires, headlights and tailights

I learned a lot on the process, like:

1. Have a better understanding of topology
2. Have a better feeling of the 3D space and using the Quadview properly…
3. Learning of Array, Simple Deform, Mirror, Subsurface, Solidify, Shrinkwrap, Curve modifiers
4. Learn how to solve some “How do I make all Quad from this?” puzzles
5. Learn how to solve some puzzles “How do I make it this sharp but still have this other side smooth?”
6. Material nodes, PBR

And the most important lesson:
Some stuff, will take a lot of time to model ! (specially when you need to stop what you are doing to research)

Once I understood that I wouldn’t be able to finish in a couple days it was just “relax” and work one piece at a time…

2 months in(ofc not everyday and not entire days spent since this is just a hobby) and this is what I have:

I wasn’t able to “nail it” since I used bad blueprints but came out near reality and then I gave my twists to Bumpers, Headlights, Tailights, Skirts, Double Exausts, Shark Antenna, Led design

Breaks Off and On

HeadLights Off and On

Still need to work adding some pieces like: brake plates, brake light of the back glass, windshield stuff, suspension maybe and maybe also make a full led version of the headlights…
Also some materials and the scene setting need some work too.

[Mark_Jackson]

This is freaking awesome! Great job! You can tell there are a lot of hours gone into this. The result looks fantastic

[thenrylewis]

I second @Mark_Jackson. This model turned out so good!

How many hours do you think you put into this?

[capa14]

Thanks @thenrylewis, @Mark_Jackson !

Well, I did not really count the hours but it was like 2 month which i spent some hours of the nights and weekends more time.
But then, I had to learn and research how to do all the stuff. Hopefully with the knowledge acquired it’s possible for me to model a car faster.

[thenrylewis]

ot really count the hours but it was like 2 m

Well it turned out really good…glad you made it to the finished product.

[Sam_Hamsord]

I know how that all feels. Here’s my attempt on a car I love, made it few months ago. Spent more than a week working most time of every day on it.
Thing is, working on a car is rather relaxing. Takes time, but soon you realise what you are doing, figure some techniques with subsurf and it becomes quite simple.
I found modelling organic things quite a bit harder, especially humans. We are so used to looking on other people that when we see a model where something is a bit of it immediately looks wrong and ugly, so it takes a lot of understanding of anatomy and practice to get things right. And than texturing… and all those roughness maps and so on. And than rigging, weight painting… animating. Gosh there is a lot to learn.

[capa14]

First, Nice Subaru man!

Takes time, but soon you realise what you are doing, figure some techniques with subsurf

These are the key words here “Takes time” hahaha!

I can imagine how hard all that stuff is. Actually I have learned a bit of everything you mentioned there, but really just the tip of the iceberg of each lol. Didn’t try much of Organic models yet, i’m keeping it “simple” for now.

Speaking of roughness and materials… I’m working some nodes based on Principled BSDF to create a procedural Car Paint material. At first I though car paint was Metalic = 1… but trying some Metalic = 0 and adding a Clear Coat gave me a more “Car painty” look but then the Speckles were not shiny enough… So what I did was using a Voronoi Texture, and ColorRamps to make just the speckles Metalic. Like this:

What do you think?

[Mark_Jackson]

Yea I love the voronoi texture. I’d be inclined to drop the strength of the clearcoat normal vector nide and/or increase the scale of the noise texture too though only because it detracts from the speckled metallic and the normal displacement makes the paint looklike it’s painted on rough or rusted metal, or that there’s some heavy rain damage on the paint (depending on the angle you view it at).

If I ever need a metallic paint for a future car I make though, I’m stealing that Voronoi hack (I hope you don’t mind)

[capa14]

Yeah, I dropped the intensity of the Noise texture for the normal of the Clear Coat using a ColorRamp. It’s more subtle now (I think)…

One thing to note is that using Denoise almost removes completely the speckles, so it’s better visible when not using it. Then the speckles might mix up with fireflies lol, but it’s better than having none…

Also, no problem using my crazy node setup

Edit:
This material rocks with Eevee which is pretty much noise(firefly) free so we can see better

[Mark_Jackson]

That’s looking really awesome now. Not sure which I prefere the cycles or the eevee render. eevee is more saturated but cycles looks so photorealistic. It’s really nice.

Can’t say I’ve played with eevee much but it sure looks impressive from the image