Development Screens (Each post contains a picture OR contributing post)

nah that would be silly xd, the wagon will also recieve the same narrowing treatment

 

Lovely work for the Claria. I should go back to blender and work on my oversized V12 powered luxury hardtop saloon.

 

2 Post

 

Sounds good, I'm curious about the final result.

 

yeah, you can kinda see how it will look already a few posts back, tbh you probably wouldn't notice it is even narrower unless you looked at both at the same time

basically narrowed from about 1820mm wide to the 1700mm limit, of course the round bits and fixtures like mirrors are moved and not scaled to avoit squooosh

 

on topic tweaking the design of this boi still, pretty happy with the front for now so time to fix up the rear

 

let there be light

 

With all the changes made, is this going to be a separate mod or are you going to send LJ the file and have it published as an update for the claria?

 

it will be an 'expansion pack' of sorts, so you will need to have the base Claria installed for this to work

Where possible I will try to not replace things, though given the nature of some things it can't really be helped
--- Post updated ---
anyways fogs are now positioned nicely, also thought it was criminal not to have a chrome twin outlet exhaust for maximum shakotan style so made that too

 

I'd be inclined to make some taxi stuff for that once I get my hands on it, since the Cedric/Gloria was one of two most common cars used (besides the Toyopet Crown).
What would that be? A mod, for a mod of a mod? Either way, I've got ideas.

Safe to say, this addon of yours might be enough to motivate me to buy a mod for once...

 

For sure, feel free to make a mod of this mod I guess
I will also probably make my own police and taxi models, but not for the Hardtop, but rather framed windowed Sedan (once I make one lol) seeing as hardtops or coupes were never really used by police forces or taxi companies.

Oh and the Claria is a free mod btw, so be sure to check it out if you haven't already

 

WIP Second Gen Corvette body;

Originally modeled one back in 2021, but I felt it was pretty awful, not to mention it was entirely inaccurate... Also mainly started this as a modeling exercise as well, but eventually want to get it in-game at some point I think. Not really happy with this one either tbh, but that's more-so related to how I feel about my modeling skills vs actual accuracy.

In all honesty I feel like I've sort of plateaued skill-wise, my biggest weaknesses for awhile now being around modeling some of the finer details, for example in this case the vent window and window trim;




Biggest problem areas atm asides from details are the topology around the panel gaps and the rear lights (not pictured) where I resorted to triangles instead of quads to transition some areas to save on edge loops. The impact of that's negligible IMO, but still not something I'm entirely happy about.

Also need to decide how I'm doing my panel bevels;



Since I was actually being smart for once (Yay!) and did a double-bevel on my panel cuts, I have holding edges which means I can do clean physical beveling vs the fake bevel method Gabester used on some early official content. My current workflow doesn't involve substance painter, leaving me with Blender's god awful baking tools which complicates this decision drastically... (If any of you want to see how I do PBR texturing now I'll do a test project and show that off here and explain it all. Also look up Layer Painter 2.0.)


If I fake any of the panel bevels, as far as I know I can't do any additional high-to-low poly baking in Blender... The last time I tried to merge 2 normal maps in Blender (also tried this through the Layer Painter plugin I just mentioned above aswell,) the result was a literal dumpster fire and derailed an entire project (Since I was counting on being able to do this.) This also rules out any texture painting involving normal maps for the same reason.

That's not to say that baking down works all the time either, especially on objects that can't be easily inflated during baking... At least from my understanding of it and my experiments with it.

Not that this model's exactly going to be a good candidate for baking stuff down anyway, but if I plan ahead like I should be doing and maintain the holding edges seen here, I should be able to at-least apply the panel bevels at the end and easily bake those down to a duplicate model.

I would also like to model and bake down some of the details I usually leave high-poly (Inner door skins, underside structural ribs, firewall stuff, etc.) but honestly don't quite know how to manage my projects to ensure my high and low poly meshes match on something this complex, not to mention keeping up with the UVs... Which again is why I'm still even considering faking some of the crucial parts of the normal map.


Anyway, have some additional matcap pics (Old Blender and new Blender

Spoiler: pic dump

 

Second generation Gavril Vendetta if this gets a lore friendly version?

 

anything on the c3 vendetta?

 

sick!

 

Really nice stuff there

In terms of accuracy it looks good enough to me (far better than say any forza model) though I am not very familiar with these cars
and speaking of workflow I have had the same issues as you mentioned, and may have some useful tips

First of all with details, main thing is to not worry too much. Traditionally I would always bog down on the details and take way too much time and never finish anything.
Details are just that, details, so for now you can ignore (or fudge) them and focus on the overall model. I would rather buy a car that drives decent and looks good 10 meters away with some small rust spots, than a car with polished chrome trim and clean airvents but has a missing engine and warped chassis

Second of all is modifiers (and a non-destructive workflow) may make your life easier, at least for me it does
recently I use subdivision on all my stuff, which contrary to popular belief is not a bad thing at all, you just have to have good understanding of topology

take the hawk for example, here is how the base mesh looks:

as you can see, it is very lowpoly, but also almost everything is done in quads. You can use triangles (as subd will just turn them into quads anyway), but the folylfow will be bad so for small areas that you wont notice it is fine, but on a large flat surface it will stand out a lot ect..

next you will notice the blue lines, this is my bevel modifier, another very important aspect

here is the preset

using weight limit method will allow you to have different creases to have a sharper or smoother crease
also make sure to set segments to 2 and shape to 1, will end up like this


now what you have just done is created control loops that once subd is applied will retain the body lines of your hard surface model, so none of that subd melty crap you often fear


and then finally is thew e i g h e t n o r m a l modifier
basically a must have if you are doing hard surface

the result is a mesh which generally will have pretty decent shading and reflections with geometry alone


and for me it also makes it much faster to model things this way

 

Obviously a sedan would be ideal, I know. But, if I make all the kit and liveries for the hardtop, (hopefully) I can just adapt it to fit a sedan - if and when you make one.

And I do believe I got the Claria and the Signia twisted, I forgot the Claria was free. Thanks.

 

Yes and no.

I'll elaborate more on that later in the Vendetta thread.

If you're after laser-scan accuracy then I can guarantee that it's not 100% accurate, but my goal with my real cars is to achieve decent visual similarity... As long as it's recognizable as what it should be and doesn't look entirely wrong per say, I'm fine with it. If I get it even more accurate, even better... 90-95% of the way there IMO is good, wasting time on perfecting the placement of things isn't entirely worth it as long as they're close.
Since most blueprints are based off of existing 3D models, brochure images, etc., you're not going to get perfect. Even photographs taken with telephoto lenses (A method I used on that C1 Corvette shell I made awhile back and also on another project) have some perspective distortion which can throw off things like the front/rear overhang. The only way I could envision something ending up close to perfect is if you retopo a laser scan, or use orthographic projections of a laser scan as your blueprints.

At the end of the day this is art, unless you have the real thing and the equipment to scan it it'll never match perfectly.

That workflow though... That's cool. Definitely worth a try, especially since cars by nature are hard surface.
Will have to try that out tonight on a separate project to see how that works for myself.

 

Rennspecht rebranding, also redone badges to conform more with the ETK Refresh