Week 23 The Toyota Pickup

Toyota Pickup before texturing.

One project ended, another started. This week we started the zombie Toyota Pickup truck brief. The project will be made up of two phases - the simple Toyota model (3 weeks) and then we will need to zombify the car to turn it into a zombie killing vehicle (2weeks).
In this post and the following two weeks I will talk about the process of phase 1 of the project.
After having the brief introduced and a reminder of photobashing basics, we were given supporting reference and images set up in 3DS Max to immediately start the car model. I have made the decision to do the car model first and generate ideas of a zombified version after.
Starting the car model I had to follow a tutorial to create a Toyota that looked as close to the real life car as possible. I used strip modelling and started with the chassis part of the vehicle. Switching between the side, top and front views helped me hasten my work progress.
As the reference images didn't line up perfectly I had to keep checking the perspective views and keep fixing edges. I have modelled the wheels, chassis and the body as separate objects. One of the best things in this project is that only half of the body needs to be modelled, as the car is a symmetrical object. The only thing I will need to do at the end, will be to apply the symmetry modifier and it will save me a lot of valuable time next week.

Warm up one minute drawings.

Longer drawings, focused on more detail.

In life drawing we focused on hands and feet as a lot of students had trouble with the proportions and sizes of them in the previous character project. The aim was to try and draw either two hands or two feet in a short period of time. I found it quite hard to draw foreshortening on the toes as the model kept changing the positions. I also picked a spot in which the feet were in the same position most of the time. It was really fun to draw hands and feet, so I did not find it that hard to sketch and I am quite pleased with the end result.
Post mortems:
The busy week ended with critical studies explaining how to write project post mortems. The lecture was given at a quite good time, because we had just finished the character self assessments. I used to keep my assessments very short, but the lecture gave a plan which it be best follow writing about what happened in the project and how to improve the analytical part of the assessment.