Shelby Cobra 427/Rhino Tutorial
This is a small demo on making a Shelby Cobra car body. I won't go through all the
small stuff, like the tires and gas tank lid, etc..... You probably know how to
do this or will soon. The car body is the hardest, it is a very smooth object
and can be very difficult to make. I picked a very hard one, a Shelby Cobra. I
have a toy model of it I to use for reference. Oh yeah, the Rhino workspace is a
custom one I made for myself, you can use it also if you like. |
| If you study the picture above, you will notice what looks like a wire
frame of the car body. You must frist study your photographs, drawings or
objects you are useing for reference for these contour lines. A contour line is
a outline of a shape. Unlike poly modelers, N.U.R.B.S. modelers use splines to
crate shapes. It is very important that you study the makings of a shape as
contours, like an artist studies shapes for a 2d drawing. |
 Above is a Interpulated
Curve. From the drawings I have for reference, I could tell that this was the
single most descriptive line of the car body. Now keep your eye focused on the
object, and find the next important change in the surface. |
| I made this second contour line by copying the first curve and moving the control points to make the next outline. |
| Above you can see that I jump head to show you several hours of just curve making. Every once in a while I would loft the splines together to see how things were working. |
 Now to loft all the
curves at once. In the Surface menu, under LoftCurves. Make sure you click all
the curves at the same spot. I like to use the type in looseloft command. Above
you can see the results of the loft. |
 After you have made your
car body shell from lofts you can start looking for the negative space in your
reference. As you can see above, I made an object from a extuded spline to split
from the main car body. |
| Again, another extruded spline split from the car body. |
| As you can see, the negative space made from all the splits to the main object helps define the car body. |
 Above you can see I
duplicated an edge and made a second copy of it. I scaled down the copied curve
and moved it away from the car body just alittle. I did this so I could loft
them together make a small fender. |
| Well, the body is alittle to long, but its a start to a Shelby Cobra! Also, its good practice in lofting contour lines together to make a shape. Image how many other objects you can make this way. |
| This is what it looks like after a couple more hours of little details.
Notice, I hade to split the back end of my body and shorten the car. The tires
and rims are just simple revolves, the pipes are just piped splines, just simple
stuff.... I am going to spend alittle more time on it. Happy modeling! |