[Doc]

Originally Posted by ALLTRBO

(quote from the 'old' thread)


Ahh, therein lies the problem. I knew it 99% but couldn't put my finger on that last 1%, and your post helped it click. I now have a new 'perspective'...
I knew the rear end wouldn't be as high as you drew it from this front view even though I didn't mess with the height, but in reality you wouldn't see it at all. You can't have the rear at the same 'pixel height' as you do from the side view because things appear smaller the further away from them you are. Our perspective as you intended is from about the bottom of the lower grille, and regardless of how far away from it you are (and we aren't all that far), the way it's drawn, the rear end would have to be so large that it'd be something out of... (wait for it... wait for it...) ...an anime cartoon.

For my version of the upper grille, I've been visualizing the location of it in relation to the way the rear is drawn, in other words, viewing the car from roughly roof level. That's about where you'd have to be to see the top of the rear as drawn, depending on how far away you are. From that perspective, as you said, the upper grille will appear lower than if you're viewing it from down low as you intended (even then, the rear will appear much narrower than the front, not as wide as the front is... even if the rear is a bit wider in actual dimension). I've also been seeing the hood and tops of the front fenders as being viewed from this level.

Because if this, I think we're visualizing the upper grille at nearly the same actual height, just drawing it differently. What this also means is that my lower grille design is somewhat skewed based on the fact that I've been seeing that at near-ground level. If veiwed from roof level also, it would have ever-so-slightly more of a "U" shape to it rather than being almost horizontal. Seeing it that way makes sense. I don't have time to do any presentable perspective corrections right now but messing about in PSP, I can see how it 'should' look (and it still looks darn good IMO, heh). I think the same goes for the ride height, it seemed artificially high because my brain was basing it on a slightly higher viewing angle (along with the other aspects) even though I knew that the ground level perspective was viewed from... ground level.

So in summary... For your version, you need to delete the entire rear end from view and lower the whole rear window opening accordingly. I also think your hood and front fenders are sloping down a bit more than you want them to when viewed from this perspective, based on your side-view.
For my version, if actually viewed from roof height, I need to narrow the rear end, slightly "U" everything below the license plate, delete the "ground" line, shade the space between the tires to show that you're actually seeing the ground below the car rather than open space, and draw some mythical line for the horizon well above the car (probably right out of the picture).
Either way can work for either version, of course, but it's one way or the other, not both.

On a related note, I've been failing to mention it (though I've known it), but none of these renderings have an adequate ramp angle for the bottom of the front fascia if they were to go into production. The Z/28 is probably the only exception, as it's obviously an exceptional car and gives way to some practicality for performance. The rest of them need a real-life ramp angle, and of course that requires redesigning some bits (isn't this fun?).

Keep up the good work!

Yes that's the problem with blueprint views; they're only showing dimensions on a flat plane whereas in real life a car never actually looks like that even if you position yourself where the blueprint camera view would be. I'm finding out all kinds of things about this design now that I'm starting to work in 3D space. So far it appears that polygon modeling produces the best results but it's tedious beyond belief. You put dots around the lines of the image, then bridge the dots to create surface polygons. Sounds easy enough but the smoothness of the final result depends on how many dots you use; the more you put in, the smoother the result. So you aren't putting a few dots, you're putting hundreds on each body panel. AND you have to make sure you have equal numbers on the top and bottom so the surface geometry doesn't get weird. AND you have to check the location of each dot in 3 dimensional space so that the vertical, horizontal and depth location is accurate. This means you're checking and moving a dot in 3 different modeling windows (x, y, z) and looking in the perspective window to make sure you got it right. For each dot. Hundreds and hundreds of times.

I keep thinking there has to be an easier way to do this but so far after searching through youtube tutorials none of the other methods I've looked at produced what I would consider professional results. I'm doing more searching though, just in case there's an easier way.

Ah yes... ramp angle. That marble has been rattling around in the back of my mind since I first started these designs and I need to address that before going further; especially since I'm working in 3D.

I've had the time to do a lot of this the last few weeks because I was using up some vacation time I needed to use but that's over now so I'm back to work. As a result I'll probably not be updating this thread as often as I have but that doesn't mean I'm not working on things; just that I have less time to work on them. I wish I could do this all the time as I find it extremely interesting to work on, but that doesn't pay the bills lol.

That being said, here's a shot with the ramp angle adjustment on the front of the Base model on the right, and the Z/28 on the left which doesn't have that adjustment since it has the aero package splitter on the lower front.

Besides not having the raised ramp angle on the front, the Z/28 is also lowered so it's ground clearance in the front would be somewhat tricky on the street. Not sure that would be all that realistic for street use. Might have to abandon the lowered aspect and raise it back to the Base model level so the aero front doesn't crunch on driveways, parking lot speed bumps and parking curbs.