Weekly Car Post 1

As mentioned in my previous post, the car that I chose to recreate in 3d for this assignment is the Fiat X19 from the late 1970's. This car struck me as unique in that it was somewhat angular but petite. I especially like the pop-up headlights and the over sleek shape of the car's body. It sort of makes me think of a retro-futuristic ideal, akin to media such as Alien or A Space Odyssey.

To begin bringing the car into 3d, I gathered some reference photos from a few different angles of the exterior and interior. I tried to stick as close to the same model for each picture as I could and tried to find the highest resolutions possible.

Once I had my references, I gathered some blueprint images with each main angle to bring into Maya and line up with a cube that was roughly the same dimensions that the car should be.

Once I had these lined up, I hid the cube and created curves along the most prominent shapes of the car to use as guidelines.

Once these were situated, I created a plane that I would then use to incrementally fill in the spaces between each guideline, adjusting the curves and angles to fit the images as well as I could. I only made half of the car, as I plan to mirror it along the X-axis once the half is finished to save time and increase symmetry. Once these blocked out areas were all connected, the mesh looked like this:

The mesh is still rough and not fully modeled, but by using the smooth preview in Maya you can see a glimpse into what it might look like once the topology is fine-tuned and divided.

So far, I feel it is going quite well despite some challenging areas that are difficult to understand at first. The hardest parts for me so far were the front-underside of the car and trying to connect the wheel wells to the body smoothly.