Hi gang, I've been trying to make a car using Carrara 5 Pro ONLY.  Now my question, has anybody ever made a car or truck using Carrara 5 Pro or know where I can look at models created strictly using Carrara 5 or 6?  ---Mark?

Ps Mark I read your tutorial in June's issue of 3D World Magazine---great tut. 

Reason for asking, if it can be done, then I will keep on trucking---Jan

Just read up on poly modeling + cars. (Yes, there will be a ton of stuff to go through before finding one that seems approachable.) Carrara pretty much follows that concept and approach. (Unless you play around with lofting or whatever it is that is more NURBS-like.) Also the level of detail or realism you're going for will affect how you go about modeling. And even then some people differ on whether they mostly use a top-down approach (shape out the model first, and cut into parts) or bottom-up (build each piece individually and assemble into the car.)

If you find modeling in Carrara to be a little bit slow or bothersome, Carrara imports .obj just fine. I'd recommend Wings 3D for modeling and exporting to .obj, if you haven't tried it yet. (It's free btw.) Never hurts to keep a few options open if it isn't to be 100% all Carrara. (But if it's some kind of challenge that requires 100% Carrara, then good luck on your quest!)

Thanks for your quick reply and I will do a Google search with that phrase.  I have Wings 3D but I have a devil of a time getting my mind around it.  I've been working with lofting-most of the time it works, but it gets tricky-I'm trying the compatibility mode with Carrara instead of Vista, hopefully it will stabilize the "I will work if I want to" portion of the software.  Jan

 Hi Plutom,

Yes, I've built quite a few vehicles with Carrara 5 Pro. The best tools to use are the advanced modeling tools in the vertex room: Gordon, Coons, Double Sweep and Ruled. These tools make it fast and easy to create the compound curves that autos have.

Mark

This site shows car modelling in Carraras sister programme, Hexagon.
Many of the hexagon tools are now incorporated in Carrara. .

http://tutengraphics.com/tblib.php?lib=Computer Artwork/Hexagon Carrara Images

Brian

Thanks guys,   I think I got me Coons and Gordon functions working (switched Carrara 5 Pro to compatiblity mode)--Jan

Well gang, I'm on me way to making my first car entirely in Carrara 5 Pro , got the tires down (more or less) and the front hood and front face (less or more) using Gordon and Ruled and poly lines.  For now I'm taking the pieces mode.  The hardest part is mating the sides to the hood and front-the reason why that is the hardest for me is that I haven't gotten to the rest. 

I'm not using car prints---YET because I can't find any freebies.  Does any body have a site or two that have them?  Jan  

 Give this site a try: http://www.the-blueprints.com/

Thanks Mark!!!    Jan

Scratchmade Cars (smcars.net) is also pretty good. You'll have to register (free) to see the archive. It's not always the best quality, but the archive of blueprints and reference images is quite diverse. If you have an idea of the make/model and year, odds are good they'll have it.

I recall seeing a few other sites that seem to have had better quality stuff print-wise, but they were fairly biased to the high-end or European makes. (If looking for references for an American make and model that wasn't a classic or sports car, I remember being SOL at those places.) If I only I could recall the name of one of those (otto-something? It's been too long.), I'd recommend it if you were into Euro-cars. Simply because of quality/consistency of the prints.

And this sounds funny, but sometimes to tell if a website has good prints is to compare them to photos and overlap them. If they have orthographic prints, the lines will be different in some areas. (More noticable the further out you get from the center of the image.) If its a trace-over of yet another photo, it's more likely to have the same types of perspective distortions and be closer to your photo. (Perspective distortion tends to be bad if you're trying to do accurate work.) In some cases though, photos or photo-based drawings will be all that you'll have to work with. In which case it's going to involve more tweaking work for consistency across multiple viewing angles to get things close.

Thanks for all that info and I'll try the website.  Presently, I've done a pretty good tire.  Since it's all cylinders, spline work for the lug nuts, and grabbing a pretty good tire thread .jpg, the work wasn't too bad.  Just had to use flat mapping in both color and bump channels.

I can get the backgrounds for the top/bottom, left, right, and front rear.  However, they don't appear in the perspective view so sizing and aligning all three views aren't working too well.

Most of my half made cars look like they've been in an Alabama wreck--all 19 of 'em.  I think though that I'm on to a technique that may work.

After creating a side with the curves I want, I'm doing the duplicate with symmetry thing and rotating the duplicate 180,  and align it with the master (keep on forgetting to move them away from the "wire" skeleton--when you use polys and Gordon, one gets both the skeleton and figure). 

It looks like everything can be easy IF you don't forget simple things like the above and if Carrara 5 Pro doesn't freeze or gets that rendering failure error and I loose everything. 

Well back to the rendering board with your tips
Jan

Well, I got the top, back, front,bumpers on, along with the tires and glass.  Now what does it look like-well let's put it this way, if I posted it in the freebie section, I would get belly laughs and if anybody wasted their time downloading it, it would be an example of what not to do.  It looks like something Goofy or Donald Duck would drive.  Its getting the front, top, sides etc to mesh properly a problem.  However I'm getting closer--haven't imported prints yet.  Heck, gonna register with that site recommended by Pauljs and try them prints.  Jan

Ahh...  I found the one site I was trying to recall. Way back, he hosted quite a bit of blueprints himself. But now he just focuses on the modeling and uses prints from elsewhere. Anyhow the presentation there is nice enough and easy to follow. I believe he does Lightwave or 3DS, but you can still get enough of an idea to follow what's going on in the Carrara modeler. His links page has a good list of reference sites, some mentioned already some not. From there you can get back to the rest of the site, so take a look around.

http://www.onnovanbraam.com/index.php?links/

Pauljs, will take a good look at it-thanks -- Jan

Well gang, after creating and trashing around 29 "cars", I finally got a somewhat decent body hood front and rear, top and glass windows, no doors, lights grill, wheel wells or bumpers yet.

--had one that looked fairly good.  However I created my thickness, but then I couldn't use my boolean substraction.  Had some problems with welds (if one is not careful one can weld hidden vertices (like those on the opposite side) which causes all the points to converge in the center and welded there-not good).  Why do I weld, because its the only way to align all intersecting points in one sweep (all x,y,z coordinates).

No wonder there is no Carrara tut on making Cars (that I can find) -  where does one start?

Jan

Well gang, I'm now with car model number 30 (most of them looked like they have been in an Alabama car wreck),  I think that I have welding down (avoiding unwanted vertices is a challenge).  Carving out holes for head lamps, grill, rounding windows and doors still is a challenge-everything looks good until I smooth those edges then the dents come in.  Well out to the Lone Star with the $5.00 coupon.

Too darn hot to go outside for any length of time.  Jan 

Hi gang, I'm finished with that car!  The hardest part (outside of mulitiple crashes) is trying to get the body smooth with no dents especially around the wheel wells.  I tried all sorts of methods, put it looks like the cube method works about the best.  Now that I think I know what to look for, I can take one of the professionally made ones that I have, break it apart and see how they overcome the dent problems.  Sometimes changing the smoothing to around 70 percent helps.

I just got a free version of Hexagon 2.2 (July issue of 3D World Magazine - 118).  Trying to find all the tools.  Some tools work better in Carrara like welding poly line groups together, haven't found a way yet to do it in Hexagon.  Yes, once a surface is created everything can be welded the same as in Carrara.

How is that for changing the theme right in the middle of a thread.  Jan

Don't tell us--SHOW us!

Brian

Once you learn Hexagon's tools, car making is a lot easier.

Bwtr,  okay I'll post it here.
Shawn, thanks for the info-making a car in Carrara sure isn't easy.  By the way which method works best for you (using Hexagon)?  Jan 

http://www.raz.ro/tutorials/lotus/lotus1.htm
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=156460&page=1&pp=15
http://www.3dm3.com/forum/articles.php?action=viewarticle&artid=56

Some car  modeling tutes. Even though they're from different programs, the same principles apply.

 Hexagon's modeling tools are more complete and elegant to use than Carrara's. The fact that you can export a model in Carrara format means you can get all the benefits of Hexagon's tool set on low poly models but then have the smoothing information become part of the Carrara model - saving some memory and scene weight. 

For my system (OSX 10.5.7), unfortunately, Hexagon is really finicky now and crashes very easily so I've been using some other solutions. Hexagon has some excellent, common sense tools that aren't even part of some more expensive modeling software. I miss using it.

Mark

Well Brian and the rest of you folks, here is what I did with my model creation, the manor is also my creation (Carrara) and imported into Vue 5 Esprit for for little more work, the scenery.  Jan

Thanks Pluton.
Some good modelling.
Follow up those leads from Patrick Tuten when you can.

Brian

Quote - Shawn, thanks for the info-making a car in Carrara sure isn't easy.  By the way which method works best for you (using Hexagon)?  Jan 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd7-aYP8Y0g shows how to model car parts using both Silo and 3DS as polygon modelers.  Hexagon works the same way.  The trick is having clean/clear 2D drawings to start with.

Thanks Brian and Shawn, been reading the tut on how to model and car (CG  society),  that young fella is pretty darn good and the tut is excellent and extremely detailed.  He does spell out that good 2D drawings make things easy.  He had some not so great ones that he had to work around.

Hexagon is powerful.  However, I need to work the different  "rooms" aka functions so that they come natural.  I've been jumping around in the manual and tutorial-a very bad habit of mine-probably need to do step 1 instead of step 5-can't model a complex thing like a car there yet.  Everything looks come until I smooth (wheel wells, windows, stuff that cuts out etc).  It just takes time, "must not be in a hurry" , " must not be in a hurry", must remember that phrase-I can do it.

Jan