Adding the finishing touches

As we finish up the concept car, I want you to keep in mind that Sculptris is not meant to create finished car models. It's a sculpting tool that's very useful for sketching out ideas and experimenting with different designs. But if you try it to use it to make a rendered quality car model, you'll probably end up very disappointed. So our goal at this stage is to get the car ready for remodelling in a program that's better suited for finished car modelling like Maya or Rhino. So let's finish the car up. Basically, what I'm trying to do here is clean up any problem areas.

I want to remove any unnecessary triangles so that the model is lighter and easier to work with in other programs. So I'm going to turn on Wireframe with W and let's look around for any places where there is unnecessary triangles. So it looks like there is some here on the bottom and also probably some here on the top as well. So I'm just going to get the Reduce brush out and just clean up some of this. Okay, that should be good enough for now. Another thing I might want to do at this point is to refine any shapes of the car that might still need work.

For example the body of the car is overlapping the wheels in a few places. So, right here you can see that it's kind of an overlap. That wheel shouldn't be hitting the body of the car; that would not drive very well. So what I'm going to do is hold down H and click on the wheel and I'm just going to hide that, so I can work on the body a little bit so I can make sure they don't overlap. So I'm going to go into the Grab tool and just try to scoot this around a little bit so I can make more space for that wheel. All right, let's hit Ctrl+H to bring the wheel back and let's see how that fits in there. Okay, much better.

Another thing to fix up is a little bit of lumpiness that's kind of all over the model. So I'm going to switch to then my Smooth brush, actually any brush will work, but I can just hold down Shift to go on a Smooth Mode and lets just try to smooth out any weird lumps. I might also want to go into the Flatten brush and just kind of work with that. It will work kind of like sandpaper to just sand down any rough areas.

Okay, so I could spend quite a while on that, but I'm going to move ahead now. This is also a good time to think about specific details like how panels should join together. So let's try to find the area that's not totally resolved yet. So maybe like this area, right here where the hatchback comes down in the back. It's not entirely clear how this is going to work mechanically. So this might be a good point to try to figure that out. Maybe I'll come in with the Crease brush. Its something that's working a little bit better from a mechanical standpoint.

We try to figure out where hinges would be. So maybe I could figure out where a license plate might go. Something else you can do is turn off Symmetry and try to work in any details that are asymmetrical. So, for example, a gas cap: maybe the fuel gets loaded in on this side and we don't want to have a gas cap on both sides.

And maybe there's a little notch right here where you can lift your finger into it and open up the gas cap there. Don't need to get too specific, just try to work out a simple design for how this might look. You can also put in maybe exhaust pipes or anything else really Remember that for most purposes, this car will have to be remodelled in a program that's more suited for hard surface modeling.

So really, I'm just sculpting enough detail to act as a guide for when I remodel it. Now if I'm working for a client, I usually send them images of the car at this stage to get final approval of the design. Once you know you're done sculpting and designing, it's time to export the model. Let's go to OBJ Export and you can save the model wherever you like, or you could even go into Paint Mode and experiment with different colors and materials on the car. So that's it with the concept car and Sculptris.

Be sure to check out my course on vehicle modelling where I take this concept sculpt and turn it into a finished polygon model that's ready for animation and rendering.