A Car is Born

I intended on tracking the progress of my car model, and this is what I've got after two days of modelling.

The front looks cleaner than before, but I may need to fix the headlamps.

The trunk is looking a little crazy. So does the top of the door. I'll have to remember to straighten that out.

The top of the car could use a little ironing out, plus the hood looks pregnant. Otherwise, I could live with the rest.

So, once I fix these minor issues, I'll start on creating my characters for this piece. I'll try to post my progress on that as well.

And this is why my head hurts...

For my next animated project, I'm going to model two cars side by side. It doesn't matter what type of car, but I want them driving up to a stop sign. I also want them to appear somewhat realistic. I don't really know cars very well, so this will be a learning process for me. I spent this past week alone creating the first car. Here are a few shots of what I have thus far.

The car I referenced was the Nissan Altima. Unfortunately, I couldn't decide which year or trim to use, so it turned into a model that doesn't actually exist in real life.

This is after I added the obvious gloss and side view mirrors. Parts of the car appear warped to me. That was not intentional. And the texture on the tires look a little crazy. I need to figure out how to fix that.

I added tail lights, but couldn't figure how to create the cool glass textured design inside the lamp casing. Fail.

And here, the front headlamps appear warped. Not good.

I suppose it looks okay; but, because it doesn't look as good as I originally intended, I may have to do the whole thing over from scratch. Ugh. I'm not sure, yet. Maybe I just need a nap.

My Last Post In September

I am still working on my Melissa Harris Perry caricature. The hair is coming along, but not quite there, yet. After tinkering with the car a bit more as well as the lighting, I will consider this a finished piece.

And speaking of unfinished pieces, here is a video I submitted to an online competition. I was hoping for it to be more elaborate; I wanted to create sand blowing in the wind; waving flocks of hair; and perhaps some seagulls over the horizon. But once I realized I couldn't get "elaborate" to work for me, it became a rush job with three days remaining before deadline. That was on Friday. This is the "finished" video I submitted today.

And now: Work in Progression....

I am still struggling to fix this hair in Blender. Urgh. Do hair stylists have to go through any of this? Apparently, because there is no fool proof way of creating long tiny braids in this program, I've been reduced to faking it. 

Let's review.... Here is the hair that I am trying to reproduce for the purposes of this caricature.

After several attempts at this, I resorted to creating a sphere from which the hair strands would magically sprout. I then tried to turn the strands into braids using Blender's lame braid making system. 

The next trick is to insert the ball-o-hair into the head of my unsuspecting character. Then position it look pleasant to the camera.  

And once all is said and done, it looks something like this....

So, what do I think? The hair looks sloppy; I don't see any braids; she looks like a boy; and I'm not happy with it. Oh well. back to the drawing board... so to speak.