Car Tutorial Part 1
Ed Ferguson, CascadiaDesignStudio.com

You can also download a PDF version of this tutorial here: http://1drv.ms/1PNsXpQ



About this Tutorial:

Modeling a car in MoI is something I’ve always wanted to try. Some nice tutorials were done in the past (search MoI for “car tutorial”), and a few debates have taken place on the forum as to whether MoI is the appropriate tool to use. I hope this tutorial thread doesn’t invite a rehash of those debates.

My personal perspective is that:
1) I prefer to stay within one program.
2) I’m not a professional designer or modeler. I can’t afford the money or the time to use high-end tools.
3) I’m not building a real car. Let’s be clear: These are not manufacturing drawings. Exact dimensions and insane levels of detail are not the goal here. The end goal is to simply express a concept via a render.

Additions to the MoI tool set in versions 2 & 3 make the modeling task easier.

Max Smirnov’s SubD scripts introduced in March 2015 add a new optional feature to MoI : Polygon Modeling.

Advantages of using Polygon Modeling and Nurbs Modeling together:

* You stay 100% inside MoI. No exporting / importing to other programs.

* It’s a hybrid approach: SubD scripts in MoI for the organic body. MoI Nurbs tools for everything else. In other words, we’ll use the appropriate tools for each job.

* All your parts remain in one place so you can see how they fit together.

* All parts are solids. Therefore no painstaking building and matching a patchwork of body panel surfaces built from lofts and sweeps. Changing a simple SubD car body structure is easy for evaluating ideas. But if you choose to model a car body patch-by-patch using surfaces, changes will be difficult.

* Because the car body is a solid, creation of parts like headlight buckets, tail lights, wheel openings, scoops, etc. are done via simple Boolean operations.

* The Boolean, Trim and Blend operations to the car body (scoops, windows, rear fascia, etc) begin by defining curves. Curves can be drawn or constructed very accurately in MoI, so the final model has crisp features.

* If you want to make a different style car there is no need to start over from the beginning. Modifying the basic SubD car body structure is easy. Just move some key vertices to change the wheel base, move the windshield forward, change the roof line, etc. And you can re-use parts you already made with Nurbs such as wheels, rear view mirrors, fuel door assembly, lighting assemblies, etc.

Going Beyond this Tutorial:

The MoI SubD scripts are very effective and may be the only SubD tools you need. The scripts have limitations as of this writing, so if you’re going to need complex SubD objects with control over which edges are hard / soft, I recommend NVil. NVil is a low cost modeling program that has all the specialized tools to make SubD models. Objects made in NVil can be imported into MoI and used in Boolean operations with Nurbs objects.