Date: 9/12/2007 7:39 am
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Hi there,
I've watched all your podcasts and find them both enjoyable and extremely helpful.
My suggestion is a tutorial that covers modeling a car from scratch, perhaps something like an old convertible Thunderbird.
I think it's something many of us have started and then stopped, scratching our heads and feeling perplexed.
For example, the basic methodology for the process eludes me. Is it possible to do it with Photomatch? Would I need a front 45 degree photo and a back 45 degree photo ... where would the origin go? Start with one big rectangular cube and cut away? Or build each element separately? Does it make more sense to just build half a car and then flip/duplicate the other side?
Or supposing I had a '57 Thunderbird and could take pictures of it at any angle I chose; how would I go about doing it in the most efficient and effective manner? What pictures would I need to take and from what angles?
Would I use a process similar to the CAD building episode you did, where you put one set of cad lines perpindicular to another? I've had some success doing this with exterior blueprint elevations I scanned (North/South/East/West/Footprint) and imported as images on the various flat faces of an exploded cube. Though afterwards I wondered if I should have traced the lines in something like Illustrator and exported them as DWG files for a little more precision (I don't use CAD programs myself and found this a pretty good workaround).
A previous writer mentioned vehicles as well ...
Thanks for all your help,
Tom
Date: 9/12/2007 3:20 pm
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Tom,
thanks for the compliments and for the suggestion. i think modeling a car is something i'd probably have to start and stop a few times too. biggest problem with us doing a podcast about that is time. there's just no quick easy answer for something like that. start to finish, modeling a car could take weeks. trying to cram that into a 10 minute show would be impossible. tell you what though. we'll take another look at it and see if maybe we can do some kind of muti-part series on it. to help us out, can you provide some feedback as to which parts of the car, in particular, you think you'd like to see us do a show about.
if you have any files that you can send as a reference for us to use on the show, such as SKP models you're working on, or pics, elevations, etc, please feel free to email them to us at info@go-2-school.com
to answer your questions:
yes, photomatch could be helpful, and yes you'd be best off taking front and back pics at 45 deg. it would probably be easier to model individual pieces and assemble. using mirrored components is absolutely the biggest time saver for a project like this. using plans and elevations as references would be more accurate than using images since you can snap to the cad lines. and yes, you can export CAD from illustrator into SKP (See episode #19)
thanks,
-mike