Sunday, May 22, 2011

DRIVE MY CAR

I'm about to buy a new laptop so 2012 hasn't got installed yet.  No point in talking about the new features till I've used them so let's deal with what isn't there.
Every year we hope for better stairs & railings.  Never mind.  What else is high on the list ?  Sketchup is obviously one of the elephants in the room. It's easy to convince people that Revit is a much more powerful programme than Sketchup, but much harder to seduce them away.  You'll get answers like: the graphics are better, it's easier to learn, navigation is faster & more intuitive.
Clearly Autodesk are aware of the challenge & have various strategies in place. 
  •  New options in visual styles
  •  Better tooltips & help for new users
  •  New training videos
  •  Conceptual massing environment
  •  Project Vasari

But Sketchup also has lots of great content on the web.  There is Revit content out there too of course, but it tends to look a bit clunky, as if it's been made by engineers & CAD managers (hint).  We need better cars & furniture & trees to populate our models the way the sketchup guys can. 
So here's my contribution. 
It's a generic small family car that has something of a Sketchup feel to it.  Not trying to be too realistic, just trying to catch the essence of a car the way you might do in a quick freehand drawing.


Based on an extrusion with 2 identical void sweeps

The extrusion is just a simplified side elevation profile

The void sweeps are a bit more tricky ... 3 arcs form the cutting edge of the profile with some straight lines to close the loop

The path is another 3 arcs. 2 of them meet at a slight angle to form the glazing line

Two material parameters.  The glass is type based, not much need to change it.  The car body is instance based - quickly choose a material colour for each car.

Add the wheels & that's it.  I based this on a family I downloaded.  Can't remember where from, my apologies.  The source file has 2D information only.  Shows up in orthographic views as a nicely detailed Yaris.  I left this in there set my extrusions to only show in 3d views. 
Hope you like it.  I will be attempting more entourage families in a similar conceptual style, so stay tuned. 

1 comment:

  1. Any chance you can share the car you made in this post? If you mentioned where you posted it sorry I didn't see it.

    ReplyDelete

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