1950's Alien Invasion - All Weeks - Part 3

Finishing the Car

I wanted to separate the car into it's own section as there is a fair bit to talk about. The first of which is creating the car tire. It's my first time creating a car tyre, however the process in how to create one is very similar for something that I did in my second year. The first part is creating the treads, if there is any design to them then it must be made so that it can tile repeatedly. 

Once you have a small piece you can duplicate it as many times for whatever diameter is needed. I'm never quite too sure on how long the tread strip should be, so I always make a copy of the model so that I can just go back and forth until I get the right amount. Create a circular spline, or select and edge loop on the edge of the car wheel and 'create shape from selection'. Then using the path deform modifier, play with the settings to get a decent result. If the strip is too short or too long, undo your actions or change the duplicate you made. 

This is the end result. It's fairly simple and works great. A piece of advice I would give is to make sure that you path deform the low poly, since you can always add extra loops afterwards to change the smoothing of edges.

My approach for the creating the car, after you last saw it. Was to focus on what can be seen from a standing or straight on view. I don't need to create the bottom structure of the car, since it wouldn't be seen. However, if there are any gaps that can be seen through, such as the front and back fenders. The wheel does cover up most of the space, but there are still gaps. My solution to this was to have a some solid walls that's roughly in the same shape as the original.

Some of these parts underneath I deleted later on, because they couldn't be seen. Such as the purple model. 

Although I came to the decision to not create the underneath of the car, I still gave it a first attempt and found lots of relevant references to help with modelling. I found one video especially useful that was showing off the car in an aim to sell the pickup truck. Click Here





The wheel was created in slowly building layers. Since the location of the wheel is inside a barn and attached to a farmers truck. I thought that there would be some dirt build-up from both use and due to the location. However I wasn't wanting to coat it in a thick layer of mud, since I wanted the wheel to have roughness variation from the rubber to metal. I found through my research that even moderate use of the car will lead to some sort of dust/debris building up in the treads. Although my ref was mainly used to inform the shape language of 1950 tyers.

 

This is what the car looks like in Substance Painter. As you can see there is only one headlight glass and one tyre, these will be duplicated after texturing to be efficient. My thought process for texturing the car is to be used but not rusted. There would be areas of rust starting to expand from crevices and concave shapes that would water would build up, leading to rust. To add contrast in the roughness I would use both dust, rust and mud to break up the reflective metal paint. And since its been a while since it was buffed, the metal sheen wouldn't be as present. I looked at references to help support my decisions and texturing. 

(I focused on using the blue car near the middle as my main point of reference, and use other references to help guide other details.)



The windows are blacked out and dusty. I know that dark windows are un-realistic for a 1950's period time, however this has the purpose of blocking out the insides of the car. If you could see through the window, I would then have had to model the interior. The bottom line of this project was an environment, the vehicle is a hero asset but still part of a whole environment. I had to choose where to put my time wisely since I realistically only had 2 weeks to create this environment.  



There are some critiques I have for myself. One is that I should have probably added more loops to the bonnet/hood of the car so that its a smoothing curve in the silhouette. There are also some elements of the car missing entirely. Such as some side grills, chevrolet iconography, side mirrors, rear lights and a license plate. Some of these details are fairly minor and don't affect the silhouette of the car so it wouldn't be noticeable at first. Only on a closer look will anyone realise whats missing.