'Maya'

Software Used :

Hello everybody, my name is Luis E. Nieves. I am a digital artist currently working as Technical Director at Lightstream Animation Studios and based in northern California. In this Making Of I would like to share my workflow and also some tips with you. This project was done using Autodesk Maya, mental ray and Adobe After Effects.

I wanted to push myself and see how far I could go with this project, so I decided to build a piece capable of making an artistic statement. I didn’t want to feel that it was just another 3D model. Being an automobile nut, I, like some of you, had the idea of building a car from the first to last bolt. For this kind of task I’ve found that a good set of blueprints is never enough. So I spent around a week collecting photographs before starting the modeling process and I was still collecting references at the end of the texturing and rendering steps.

If you are trying to make an above average model then I would advise starting with planes, boats or cars that have been restored. You will easily find categories, illustrations, schematics and diagrams of objects with historic meaning. For this image I quickly selected some of the GT-40 pictures I’d found during my research (Fig.01).

I usually try as much as possible to start from spline cages. It becomes very handy to have a tridimensional blueprint of your model; it will guide you when you’re making decisions about size, position and where your components should be organized, even before you model the shell. Later on, you can use the spline curves to loft panels that will be the base mesh of your car body. Once I had my cage done, I started modeling the chassis using photo references (Fig.02).

The next step was modeling all the components that have a direct relationship with the chassis. I started by creating primitives to establish rotation and proportions, and then I went into detail using pictures. Here I used techniques like nurbs revolves, lofts and extrusions that I then turned into polygons later on. Finally, I used lattice and nonlinear deformers to achieve the desired shapes (Fig.03 – 05).