[WIP] Land Rover Series 3

Gooner442

Hi all,

I took a few snaps of this beaten up Land Rover, thought it would make a good project and help improve my modelling skills. I'm not sure of the work flow I should follow for this, I've never done any normal maps before so perhaps this is a good project to give it a go. Any advice or tips on workflow or good tutorials that might help would be appreciated, and of course constructive criticism too!

Obviously I still have a number of things to model and to make it imperfect and less symmetrical, no small details or the interior, so plenty to get on with.

Thanks for reading!

Xoliul

http://www.overland.co.za/Land_Rover/Death_Row/

check that out man, superb ref!

Anyway, I think the spacing of the lights in the front is not 100% correct and you a few weird n-gons. Also these rendered wireframes are not as good as simple viewport grabs.

Gooner442

thanks for the reference and advice!.. I never found anything like that on my search, my landrover looks in good nick compared to those!

I wasn't sure how best to present the WIP, everyone here seems to present their work with a studio setup so I thought I'd try it too. I agree though I think screen grabs will be better for now whilst in the early stages, I've attached one for a clearer picture of what's going on at the front.

Regarding the n-gons, is there a way to scan a model for them?.. I know of something in Maya that does. Also, for something like this that will not be animated are n-gons still a bad thing?

Xoliul

Hmm, well looking at that wireframe, I would say you don't fully grasp the ideas behind SubD modeling yet.
It's mostly the front that seems like the big offender. The rest of the body is OK, the flow there is actually quite decent.
If you look at the side reference, you can see the front end of the wheel arches bends, there's a wide corner at the top there, above the headlights. yet in your wireframe, I see nothing that even suggest you want to achieve this shape, I think you're just hoping the turbosmooth wil round things for you there. If there's a curve, you should model it out roughly, so the smoothing will know what to do. Right now the edge distance at that corner even varies: some edges are closer, some are further, it's totally not consistent.
Next, N-gons: they're not necesarily bad, but they are when they're in an area that will be curved once smoothed ... like the front of your Landrover. With N-gons, there's just not enough control over the shape and you will get pinching and bumps.
There's actually no reason for them to be there: you can create a loop that runs around the indented area, controlling the edge sharpness.
The way to look for Ngons would be to use the Graphite modeling tools, they have this select Ngon button type of thing.

It really feels like the front area got a bit out of hand. If you want, I can model that quickly as an example for how you should try to do the flow ?

Oh and just another thing: it looks like the height of the glass area's in your front windshield is too low, compared to the ref. They look slightly higher.

Gooner442

I'm still a bit of a novice with modelling so still having problems when I need to extrude rounded shapes for example, it would be really helpful if you could show me how it's meant to be done, hope it doesn't take you too much time!...

Part of the problem I've had is that my blueprints are from a Land Rover Series 2 so there are points where I've gone with the blueprint and not consulted the photos enough, so I'll go back and rework it. Thanks again for your help

Xoliul

Here you go mate:

Gooner442

Thanks very much for that!... I'll work on sorting out the front

Gooner442

Okay, reworked the lights, though I need to clean up a bit, harden a few edges etc and see if I can terminate some of the loops earlier, seems to of created many loops that I presume are not really needed. Any C&C appreciated.