McLaren P1 GTR

barnesy · Nov 2014

Hi Polycount,

I thought that it was about time that I had my first proper crack at modelling a car as the last one I attempted was around 6 years ago so it doesn't really count lol

I have decided to model the P1 as it is one of my favourite cars of all time. After starting it I've quickly realised that I may have bitten off more than I can chew as the shapes are proving to be very hard to control.

I started watching a few car modelling tutorials but the cars they seem to model are box like which doesn't really help me with this car in particular lol

AlecMoody · Nov 2014

Your topology doesn't look too bad- if you stick with this it can be a really nice car model. Most of your issues are just vertex placement. Once you put an actual car paint shader on there it is going to be even more exaggerated. To me it looks like you are following the blueprints too closely and as a result small details that don't 100% line up between views are being forced into the wrong spots.

I would suggest you back up and delete all your panel thickness. You can leave panels as separate sub objects but don't worry about their edge definition until you are done working on those panels. After that you just have to spend a whole lot of time tweaking each vertex so it sits along smooth regular curves. You do have a few topology issues but it seems like you can work those out on your own.

For a sense of how dead on the vertex placement needs to be, here are some un-smoothed views of cars I have done in the last few years:

barnesy · Nov 2014

Thanks Alec!

Your car models are so clean. If I can get this model even half as good as them then I will be a happy man!

Did you model each of those cars with NURBS or edge extrusion?

Also, what metallic material do you use to preview your model whilst you work?

I think I need to reduce the density of the model as I can imagine it will be nightmare to smooth each vertex out manually lol

AlecMoody · Nov 2014

The cars I posted are all just manually poly modeled with edge extrusions. I always expect to spend a lot time moving verts around and making sure each line flows smoothly in every direction. When possible I start with fewer segments and leave out the tight details and then afterwards I work on adding more edge loops to support small and sharp details.

I think your density is actually about right for what is going on in the real car. Tweaking vertex positions is kind of a nightmare but that is just part of the process. With fantasy cars you can usually simplify or move details around slightly so they are in more convenient places. With real cars the intersection of curves and details are so specific that you have to just brute force it with polygons.

McLaren P1 GTR

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