I love designing machines and my task for this tutorial was to design an amphibious vehicle. When I was in the designing phase and was thinking about my amphibious armored protected car I decided that I would call it AMP (as it is short for amphibious). This tutorial will not be about modelling, but will be about design and post-production in Photoshop.

I spent around two day (roughly 20 hours) working on this image from beginning to end. I started with a rough concept that I would later create in 3ds Max, but first I wanted to create the tires to help set the base for the creation of the model (Fig.01 – 02). Getting the wheels in place also helps you when designing the car. If you were to draw a car from the side you would probably put the wheels in fairly early on.



I then went on to create my design in 3ds Max. It is always better to initially design your car whilst looking at it from the side because it is easier to view the form and helps keep things simple. I created the shape of the car using the Line tool and by making extrusions in 3ds Max. I mainly use 3ds Max to nail down the design as it helps me to see the car from as many different angles as possible (Fig.03). I don't worry too much about making the model clean, and I don't have to worry about overlaps either as the model is just a base that will be manipulated later in Photoshop. When creating the body of the vehicle I was thinking of a frog-shaped snout and the shape of a small boat. This seemed to fit pretty well with the idea of an amphibious vehicle.



It was necessary to detail the rough shapes that I had previously marked out with the Line tool. I did this with the Edit Poly option and used FFD modifiers to achieve the bulges and curves that you can see in Fig.04 – 05.


After I had created the base of the vehicle I spent time gathering references of images from vehicle factories so that I could get some ideas about new elements to add to the vehicle. Again, this was done in a certain way so I could watch the development of the overall model in 3D. You can see the additional features and how they were added in Fig.06 – 08.