Reply To: [ENDED] BC3-1806 – June 2018 Class Homepage – Vehicle Modeling with Blender

[Jake Korosi]

@shiennar The secret to the dashboard is the shrinkwrap modifier.  I made a very simple version of the dash with just the two big gauge cut-outs being the only details, duplicated it, and used the duplicate as a shrinkwrap target.  After that I could add more geometry, even tightly-bunched geometry, and the shrinkwrap modifier kept the surface from ever becoming un-smooth.  The only thing is if you make details that need to stick out or protrude into the dash – like there is an inset area where my glovebox is for example – you need to add the vertices of those details to a vertex group that is excluded from the modifier.  This video explains the trick better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rlMzsBWtPY

I used a bunch of shrinkwraps in this interior.  Especially modeling knife-project details like the CHEVROLET letters into the dash bezel and the steering wheel horn would probably be impossible without shrinkwrapping those base objects first,  or at least it would take hours and hours of work and tricks I don’t know (or patience I don’t have) in order to solve the topology to make them look smooth on their own.  

One potential downside to shrinkwrapping that I found out is that it’s not like the mirror modifier where eventually for whatever reason you can apply it and get on with life.  As soon as you apply the shrinkwrap modifier,  artifacts from any tight or questionable topology become visible again.  So the modifier must permanently stay in the stack and the target blank object will have to permanently live in your .blend – which isn’t a problem if all you’re doing is taking pictures or animations on your own; but for example Sketchfab doesn’t recognize the shrinkwrap modifier – it will apply it while uploading, so in Sketchfab any shrinkwrapped surface will look un-shrinkwrapped and that might not look great.  And on top of it, Sketchfab will also upload and make your target blank visible, even if you have it set in Blender to be invisible.  That will screw with the look of any inset details in Sketchfab.

For the gauges, I did an image search and a regular web search for “Chevy 3100 gauges”.  Just doing a straight image search got lots of nice images but nothing really usable;  but with the web search I found a store that sold the actual gauges, and that store had very nice and big pictures of them.  In GIMP I blacked out all the unwanted parts like the needles and bezels, and touched up the markings so they were all bright white.  Then I color-selected just the markings, pasted them onto a new transparent background, did any final touching-up there, and exported it for Blender.