CPSC 3710 Computer Graphics Project

Alex Wall

Preparation:

For this project I decided to try and model the 2008 Chevrolet Camaro SS. It is something I knew I would enjoy for the most part modeling. I had no prior modeling experience before this project so it was a little difficult to get started. I decided to use blender to model the car. I watched a lot of YouTube videos to understand the basics of blender and there are many videos of those who have modeled cars which was helpful. The first thing I did was get blueprints for my model. Thankfully there were very good blueprints out there for this car. I aligned all of the blueprints in blender and was ready to start modeling.

Modeling:

I started at the hood of the car and set up a mirror modifier along the center of the car so that I would only have to model half of the body. Most of the time while modeling the body I extruded off of points and faces that I had made already. This worked well as most of the body of the car was a continuation of faces. I moved on from the hood to the top and side of the car to the back. I found the most difficult part of the car to be the grill in the front, so that is the part of the body I did last.

After I finished the modeling of the body I applied the mirror modifier and the body was united as one object. Then I started a new object to create the tires, I started with a torus and made them larger to form the tire for the car. I finished the rim and then duplicated the tire three times to get the other tires. I then joined the tires to the car to create a single object once again.

This is the car after modeling without any texturing:

Texturing:

To do the texturing, I set up a uv map and used a simple paint editor called kolourpaint on Linux to paint all of the parts. This was a slow process as the set up of the uv map was pretty bad. It was difficult to find all of the correct pieces to paint and many were extremely close together on the map. I started by painting the windows, I decided to go with a tinted look as I did not make any interior. I then painted all of the rims a silver color along with the exhaust tips, then the Chevrolet emblems gold/yellow. Then I did the lights, next I painted all of the black parts, the tires and the front grill. Lastly I painted the rest blue and then looked over everything multiple times trying to get rid of blemishes.

The uv map:

The End Product/Rendering:

For the Rendering I created a flat simple background in blender to bring out the car a little more. I set up a subdivision modifier for the rendering to smooth out the edges. I took one picture without ambient occlusion which makes the overall look of the picture darker but still decent. The ambient occlusion as seen below brightens all of the textures on the car. I also changed the picture quality to 1080p for higher quality. There are blemishes in the painting of the car and can be seen in the pictures, of which I tried fixing. In the end I spent around 25 hours on this project, with the majority on the modeling. The following pictures show the final product.

Without Ambient Occlusion:

With Ambient Occlusion:

Conclusion:

I very much enjoyed doing this project, well at least the modeling part. If I were to make another 3d model I would find out other ways to do the texturing of the car, as the uv mapping did not work out very well in the end for me. I think that blender is a good program for free, although I have not tried others, it was pretty easy to learn and there were lots of videos explaining how to use it online. This was a time consuming project but it definitely gave me more of an interest in creating 3d models and the process it takes.