Kroma's vehicle flow studies
Here's my first study, a Volkswagen Golf Mk5. I read somewhere before that marking out the shapes with splines first can help to visualise them in 3d as blueprints are sometimes difficult to read. I'm not sure whether to model out the whole body as one piece first and then cut out the panels or just work on each piece separately. I opted to work on a piece at a time but match the edges between pieces to maintain edge flow.
This came out at 2530 tris for the body. I tried to keep a strip of edges around the main shapes like the lights and wheel arches (forgot a bit more around the arches). I think I could have continued more loops along the door to flow around the rear light area and I'm not sure I needed to cut in the rounded shape in the windscreen as that's inside the car.
Feel free to leave any feedback or tips, I'd very much appreciate it. 
Replies
@igi Kind of, I do a strip of polygons over the clear flowing shapes and roughly match to the splines. Only roughly because it's going to change a lot and I just want to see the forms first and see where I can fill in the polys between. If you have any more questions about a specific area I'd be able to give you a better answer. I'm still learning this myself though
I set the units in Max (Customize>Units Setup) to centimetres and define the boundaries of the car with a box with those values. Then scale and align the blueprints to fit the dimension box. This may take some time as not everything lines up nicely. Adjusting the segments on the box can give some points of reference along the car that you can use to line up one view with another e.g. find an edge that lines up with the front light from the front view and use that to align the side view. As the blueprints may not be accurate in the first place it may not be worth spending too long here.
Then I've been doing a pass where I mark out the blueprints using splines. This helps to visualise the car in 3d and separates some of the blueprint lines from one another. I've found it to be good for getting curved surfaces to flow nicely when it needs multiple ortho views to define it. You can colour code sections and name them for easier management. This part of the process takes longer than I would like but it makes things easier when modelling so you decide if it's for you, I'm no expert.
This is what my scene for the Audi looks like before I start modelling. I hope that some of this helps you.
keep it up
I just want to know that so you made sperate chunks of car with nurves/curves
and after you did polygon modeling to combine and maintain flow ??
The studies really helped to define the early shapes using the principle of following the major flowing lines first and filling in the gaps. Without them I think I would have been moving around points a lot more and not letting the sub-d do more work. If you want a "crash course" you could try and do one quick study and one sub-d for the same car and compare how the geo turned out. Thanks for the questions
@Prabh Thanks. To clarify, I set up the blueprints, add the splines only as guides and then begin poly modelling, no nurbs. The poly model is made as one piece for the bodywork first, but keeping edges flowing along where the panels will split for later. Once the panels are split, I try not to change the geometry along the split as that may mess up the shading across the pieces. Hope that makes it a bit clearer.
@Felixenfeu @JonahH_M @Poinball Thanks a lot. I appreciate your comments.
I do intend to pick this back up and finish off the Audi so I'm not done yet. Thanks to everyone who's looking and thanks especially for the front page, I really didn't expect it!