Low Poly Car Contest: 1999 Ford Crown Victoria Taxi

[multimediaman]

Okay, going with the 1999 Ford Crown Victoria Taxi Edition

I'm making blueprints of the Taxi now, and will get some progress on it posted

[XSImatrix]

grand prix my cousin has one, (2003)

[Johnas]

Crown Victoria sounds nice to me. Plus I wanna have the prints of it also

[multimediaman]

first progress shot of the thing... I'm going with the taxi cab. The scale model I'm building it off of looks awesome, using the textures from my blueprints doesn't give the thing justice. Anyway, this is NOT the way I plan on texturing this thing, FYI. I will build out some carefully crafted textures in photoshop, rather than just wrap a cheesy photo on. After all, I'm designing this to go into Motor City in the future, not a static car on a construction preview animation.

You're looking at about 2 and a half hours of modeling work, 45 minutes of blueprinting work, along with 1 hour of trying to find the model car in a store. So this has taken me around 4 hours of work spanned over 6 hours of time. Hopefully the modeling work will be done in 1 more hour, providing the interior doesn't give me any issues. The interior will be fully modeled and textured, none of that gran turismo 4 "make you think it's detailed" interior, where there's just a flat black plane at the bottom of the windows, and pitch black sihouettes of seats and a dashboard protruding from that plane, along with the occasional detail here and there like the rear view mirror.

so yeah, first WIP shot, back to work

oh yeah, and it's around 1300 faces here

---edit---

okay, vast majority of the exterior is done, now onto the chassis, a couple extra areas for that extra "oomph," which I won't give away just yet, and then I'm gonna have the interior underway

here's a small update. 2326 faces so far. So I've got just over half of the tris used up as of right now. The interior should determine just how much extra oomph this car will get heheheh

[Johnas]

Looks like a smooth start sofar. Nice to know full interior is coming also.

[Grungy Harry]

Wow, you're working really fast! 8o Even too fast (i wanted to vote for the '90 Grand Prix, but okay, i'm late).Now we got the 2nd US-car among the competitors. And what a car, a CrownVic, the last true Yankee Tank along with its "cousins".

[multimediaman]

heheheh, well, if I'm gonna participate in this contest, it's gotta be done within this christmas break, or else I'll never get the thing done. Once work starts up again Monday, I'm not gonna have time to do squat and I'm reserving Sunday for working on stuff for work instead of my own 3d things, so I gotta make a quick swipe on this one. I woulda liked to do the grand prix myself, but I figured this would show off a little bit more mesh control than the GP would... anyway, here's what I got so far, weighing in around 4096 faces or something like that was the count on my last render..... so now it's just texturing. I was thinking of modeling some of the major things on the chassis out, but on my model, they're so close together, it forms too much of a flat surface to model out anyway, but at least I got the engine compartment in there. Anyway, this is my last update for today, me need sleep

[Johnas]

Fast indeed but the quality doesn't lack because of it. Nice work

[Grungy Harry]

ENGINEBAY?!?

[revelli]

wow, what a speeeed
so you are at the end?
i dont like the images you show, very blurry

[multimediaman]

eheh, end... nope, not yet. I've still gotta texture and unwrap the thing. You see, I'm just using the relatively awful blueprint pictures I took of a scale model to hint at the final look and feel. The pictures were blurry, and the car wasn't real, that's why the blurriness. But yeah, these textures are crap compared to the textures I will have on it.

[Johnas]

Unwrapping is I think the most boring part modeling a car Looking forward to see it textured. It will be top work I bet

[revelli]

yea i agree, unwrapping is the most boring part in lowpoly car creation
i cant wait for the textures

[multimediaman]

unwrapping IMO isn't bad, it's just time consuming. it's a nice little treat to see your whole model unwrapped with perfectly sized, barely stretched squares all across the board


I'll post my unwrap once I get the car body piece unwrapped, the doors and the hood, along with the wheels and interior will come shortly



okay, here's an edit with a quick unwrapping progress... I would say I'm around 1/3rd of the way there... for remapping purposes, I'm probably going to use a 512x512 texture for the body decals which don't changed based off of vehicle colorations, a 512x512 texture for the interior and body paintjob, and a 128x128 texture for the tires... but yeah, unwrapping

[Johnas]

Mapping has gone well I see I'll have to start map my car also next

[multimediaman]

as far as accuracy goes, I was shooting for quite the accurate model, so, after I got all my exterior mapping done, I threw this image together, based off of my real-life references. turns out this toy car is extrordinarily accurate, which is a good thing

anyway, got the steering wheel, rear view mirror, the front and rear seats, and there's a dividing wall for the taxis that I've got left to unwrap. looking at the 3d side view of this, and ignoring the fact that the facets on the interior of the wheel well are going to be so dark that I intentionally left major detail out of them, but the wheel well walls on the outside make the tires look dreadfully lowpoly in comparison, so what I'm gonna do is subdivide the tires some, and fix the unwrapping. I've also decided to go ahead and use some of my extra faces on the chassis of the vehicle. won't go overboard here, as I still want the police car version of this thing to fit within the 5000-face guideline. weighing in at 4,054 faces, this car's got detail to spare. I'm also going to be putting that little spotlight on the front left of the car... so don't be surprised if it appears there's a lot of wasted space on my uvw unwraps when I post them hopefully tomorrow. Oh yeah, I'm also going to be considering my headlight/brakelight, siren, taxi light, and turn signal glows in my final face count, so I can't be too crazy with the faces for that matter as well.

[4yBaK]

almost perfect nice modeling m,an

[Johnas]

Indeed very accurate job.

Actually if you'd put the car ingame, tires wouldn't look so lowpoly. I noticed it while I exported my Diplomat to GTASA. I used 12 sides for tires and you didn't noticed it in SA. They look more round ingame than in Max for example