2010 Camaro Tutorial

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Next I think I am going to finish off the lower portion of the fender lip, then work my way forward.

 

 

 

 

All I need is the one edge. I am going to use the edge of the fender lip as Dir1 and the new curve as Dir2.

 

 

 

This part of the car is really where it pays to look at pictures. The blueprints aren’t really helpful in determining the shape of the nose in this area. I am going to give something a shot and just see how the shape turns out.

I start by trimming some more of the bumper to get rid of the hard edge.

 

 

 

Then I start fill in a small patch panel. The spline shown is tangent with the bottom edge of the air dam.

From the top I do the same thing.

 

 

This gives me a projected edge that will hopefully make it easier to blend these pieces together.

 

 

 

I think this will work out nicely looking at a quick render.

 

 

Looking at pictures of a lot of different cars I can’t find one with the same bumper as the blueprint so I am going to make a slight change starting with this.

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I think it looks a little closer to some of the images on the Chevy site. Without a reference photo that relates to the blueprint image, it’s hard to figure out what it was supposed to look like. This is another one of those artistic license things. Nobody is going to see the model and think it’s not a Camaro.

At this point I knitted everything together except the A pillar surface. We still have a lot of roof work to do so I want to keep these separate for now. I am going to fill in some of the grill area then move onto the hood. While we are here lets go ahead and cut away the air inlet on the nose cone.

Now what you want to do is offset your upper nose line and then your grill opening line.

 

Trim what I didn’t want and added some fillets.

 

 

 

 

To fill in some of the grill area there are several ways we could do this. We could use a rule surface but they can get messy when you are dealing with surfaces with lots of shape. What I am going to is create a curve that we can use for a boundary surface based on an offset surface. Now earlier in the model we could have knitted the upper and lower part of the bumper together before we trimmed for the grill and made an offset surface. Since we have done several things it would be a bad idea to go back and try to do this unless you really want to see what happens. What I am going to do is create a 2d curve then fill in the grill opening, create an offset surface from that and trim it with a 2d sketch on the front plane.

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I use a boundary surface. Direction1 selections are the 2d sketch and the straight line on the fender.

 

 

Direction2 are the top and bottom edges of the opening including the rounded corners. Make the top edge Tangent and all the rest with no tangency. This surface isn’t perfect but for what we need, it will work just fine. Offset it 0.125” into the grill opening then use the Delete Body feature on the surface that we filled the grill opening with.

Now we can make a sketch on the front plane to trim this surface where we want for the edges we need. What I did was offset the bottom edge of the opening 0.5” and then manually drew the rest of it.

 

 

 

I made my spline coincident with the edge just before the fillet on the offset surface.

 

 

 

You can see some bad geometry (wrinkle) in the surface. Next I convert the Top edge of the offset surface, and then add a fillet between that and my spline.

 

 

I changed the color of the offset surface so you can see what we are working with. Our boundary surface will go from the grill opening to the edge of the offset surface. Then we will delete the offset surface.

 

 

 

I decided to use a Lofted Surface for this since I think it will give a better surface. Follow the same procedure. Use the selection manager and select the entire edge of the grill opening and then the edge of the offset surface.

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The next surface we need to add can be a ruled surface since it will go straight back. For your Type you will want Perpendicular to Vector. Your Vector selection should be the Top Plane. I made mine 2” back because we are going to trim it.

 

 

 

 

This surface will cross over the Right plane so we will need to trim it with that first. In the Trim Surface trim tool selection, select your Right Plane. Next we can draw our trim line on the Top Plane.

To make it easier I hid the majority of my surfaces.

 

 

We are going to have to sweep this surface in order to get it right. To sweep this your path will need to intersect your sketch.

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t worry too much about the sketches at the moment, after you sweep the surface we will need to tweak them to get them right. You can see mine just barely hit the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a little tweaking of both sketches I think it's good.

 

 

Trim your rule surface with this then use the Delete Body to get rid of the swept surface.

Go ahead and make a rule surface using the same procedure for the air inlet in the nose cone. Use the same type and Top plane.

 

Before we move on to the rest of the fender and hood let’s go ahead and finish the lower grill opening surfaces as well. If you look at pictures you will notice that the upper portion and side roll in a bit. I am not going to exactly mimic this but I am going to use a Tapered to Vector rule surface for part of it, then fillet.

Start with a Tapered to Vector rule surface using the Front Plane as the reference vector, and 30degrees as the angle.

 

 

 

Next create a Perpendicular to Vector rule surface for the bottom edge using the Top Plane as the reference vector.

 

Now before we do any more let’s use the Trim Surface function. Use the newly created rule surface to trim the previous rule surface. Then follow the same procedure using the first rule surface to trim the second. We are making the ends of these two surfaces meet.

Now knit both surfaces together with the bumper and then apply a fillet to the edges shown. I used a 0.125” fillet.

 

 

 

The reason we don’t fillet all the edges is because we want the bumper opening to roll in. If we apply a fillet to all edges it will produce different corner geometry. Next I added a 0.625” radius to the bottom edge. Under the fillet options drop down I check Round Corners.

 

 

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There is one thing that bothers me about this opening. Our first rule surface was 0.25” in length but it was tapered at an angle. Our second rule surface was the same length but it was straight back. Looking at the model, the second surface goes farther back. This isn’t a huge deal but later on when we make the grill it would have to be addressed. I’d rather take care of it now while the surfaces are fresh in the feature tree. On a top plane sketch I convert the back edge of the lower surface, and the vertical edge where we want this surface to hit.

 

 

 

 

In the sketch I want to leave both converted edges there and offset the longer edge. The distance doesn’t matter because we will delete all relations with it. You will notice after you delete the relations that the edge is still black. If we just were to delete the relation for the converted edge it would be completely un-defined. Now you can use the Move Entities button and move the offset curve.

 

 

 

Now the Trim Surface option may get messy here because all of our surfaces are knitted together so we have a few options. We could make a split line on the face, then Delete Face. Instead I drag my sketch up the feature tree and drop it just after my Surface-Trim operations.

 

 

 

Now I can drag the end of part line up behind this sketch and trim my surface without worries.

That should make the back opening of our surfaces meet at the same spot.

 

If you take a look at the model from the front view you will notice all of our rule surfaces overlap the Right Plane. This will cause issues later when we mirror the surface. You can see this best from the top plane. Here I made a sketch that’s just a vertical line through the origin. I will use this to clean up these edges.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a round-about way to trim the surface but because the surface is now so large, using trim would produce some issue. I use this line as a split line on all the offending surfaces. After you have split lines on the surfaces you can use Delete Face to remove them.

 

 

 

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Okay now it’s time to move on to the top edge of the fender and make the hood. From the top view you can see we have a little piece of the fender and nose left.

 

 

The next set of images will show you the order in which I made the curves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the back edge we run into the same problem we had on the grill area where we need to use an edge and a curve. For this one since we will have no tangency with the A pillar I am going to create a 3d curve to use.

I make my projected curve first.

 

 

I notice from my side view that my hood line is a little lower than I want so I’m going to edit it.

 

 

 

 

 

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Now we aren’t going to use this curve, but I want it for a reference. For your boundary surface select the small curve at the front edge for Dir1. Select the top edge of the fender and our longer projected curve. After the surface is created we will trim it to fit the A pillar.

 

 

To trim the surface hide your projected curve that we didn’t use, but make the top view 2d sketch visible because we are going to convert it into another sketch. In this new top sketch you also want to convert the edges of the A pillar.

 

 

 

If you look at the surface you will see there is a gap at the A pillar. We can use Extend Surface to fill that.

 

 

 

Since our A pillar parts aren’t knitted together you will have to do this twice. Use Extend Surface. For End condition you want Up to surface.

 

 

 

It looks much better but now the projected edge we used to trim our surface isn’t in the right spot. I just delete the trim from our feature tree and start a new top sketch.

 

 

 

Small details like these are the things that make your job that much harder later in the model if you skip them. Take the time to ensure the little details are acceptable when you come across them.

 

 

 

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Next surface will fill in the top edge of the nose.

 

 

 

 

Note that the front curve does not coincide with the surface just above the nose.

 

 

 

 

 

For the right view I give it just a little bit of curvature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the hood if you remember way back I mentioned how the cowl on the hood blends into the nose cone. To start this we are going to trim the surface we just made.

I drew the entire spline so I would have it for my projected curve, but I am going to use it for the trim first.

 

From the side this gives us a nice point to make our spline coincident with. I also apply a tangent relation with the trimmed edge. This is a hunch that I hope works. I also add a coincident relation between the other point on this trimmed edge. The hope is that our cowl hood matches this edge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Note that from the top view you need to add a horizontal relation to the handle that intersects the Right Plane sketch. This is so you don’t have a hard edge on the back of the cowl when we mirror the body. We do not want that from the front view because the car has a hard ridge on the hood.

 

 

 

When making your surface make sure the front edge of your cowl has a tangency with the nose surface. This will make sure it blends nicely.

 

 

 

 

 

At this point I knit the hood and the skinny edge together (all shown in blue). This is for filleting reasons. We still need to draw the panel for the back edge of the hood at the windshield.

We can see from the top view the trim at the A pillar is totally wrong.

 

 

 

I need to go back and fix that so we can have a tangency here.

 

 

 

 

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Remember that any curve that intersects the mid plane of the body needs a horizontal relation if you do not want an edge there. This means all the curves that define the edge of the windshield.

I use my projected curve and the edge of the fender to create a boundary surface.

 

 

After seeing this panel I realize that I don’t like the shape of the last hood panel we made so I am going to back up a little bit. I re-do the projected curve for the back edge of the hood by rolling back my feature tree and adding a front curve as opposed to the side curve I used previously.

After modifying my curves my hood now lines up roughly with the panel we are working on.

 

 

 

 

 

For this cowl vent panel I convert the hood edge and finish off the curve from the top.

 

I did the same thing from the front view.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just to make sure all the work done to keep a body ridge in the middle was done right I mirror the body and do a quick render.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s very important that the body lines work well together so every now and then its good to mirror things but you want to make sure you don’t work like that. You want to stick to half of the body as long as you can.

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It’s a good idea before we move away from the front end to fillet the hood and the rest of the openings if we need to.

I added a 0.625” radius to both edges for the main grill opening.

 

 

 

 

For the air inlet I use a few different radii using the variable fillet option. This is because the angle of the angle greatly changes so the bottom starts at 0.125” and the top ends at 0.03”. My six numbers go like this: 0.125, 0.125, 0.08, 0.0625, 0.035, 0.03.

 

 

 

 

For the cowl hood I use a variable fillet for the top edge going from 1” at the back to 0 at the front.

 

 

Same values for the bottom edge. There is a small section up front that I leave 0 as well.

 

 

 

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For the back of the car I am going to draw it without the spoiler and maybe add it back on later.

 

 

 

 

 

From the back view:

 

 

 

 

Always remember when you need to use tangency and with what curves. If you don’t the renders will show it!

Since this is another one of those large pieces that has some intricate geometry we have to break it up a bit. I am going to use my C pillar lines to finish off the trunk even though there is no body line there. When I make the next panel I will make sure it has tangency with this face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you remember earlier when we made the back corner of the rear fender I mentioned the edge wasn’t correct from the back view. At this point I don’t think we need to do anything about it.

 

 

 

 

 

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You can see from the side view there is a little extra overhang on my model. I’m not worried about it though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you take a good look at pictures of the car there is a hard line on the back of the bumper that is not in the blueprint images. Little difference like this can make a big difference on the finished product.

The next step is to create the rear bumper shape so we can trim some away and add in these details. There is a tough bit of geometry here because of the fender flare. I haven’t seen any great pictures of this area so I just kind of let the surface blend itself. If I like the end result I won’t worry about it.

I start with a 2d sketch on the Right Plane. In this sketch I include the entire profile of the bumper, but I make the other two curves references that will be used for creating our projected curves. A nice thing about doing it this way is that if any modifications need to be made, you can go back to one sketch (for the side view).

 

 

Next I start a new sketch on the Right Plane and convert the lower curve.

 

From the top view I rough out the shape. After you create your surface you may decide you want to tweak these curves.

 

 

 

 

 

The next step is a small departure from the normal procedure for me. I start a 3d sketch and convert the surface edges from my rear fender. Then I create a spline that is tangent to this edge and intersects my first 2d sketch. The reason I did it this way was because of the need to have both the surface edge and a new curve as a guide rail. I avoid this whenever I can, but every now and then it seems that I have to do this. A way around this would have been not to cut out the tail light section but if you remember that was one of our very early surfaces. The only way (in my case) to avoid this was to have drawn the car first and figured out these little problem areas.

 

 

 

I use a Lofted surface for the bumper lofting from the fender lip to our first 2d sketch.

 

 

Next I trim the lower portion out from the back view. If you have noticed I am not putting screen shots with the blueprint images in here anymore. You can follow the blueprint images on your own. At this point it’s simply just too hard to see these sketches with all the surfaces and images in a screen shot. I still use them until the end of the model.

 

 

The next thing I trim is approximately where I think this feature I want to add is. My vertical line is coincident with the edge of the rear fender surface.

 

 

On the Right Plane I now draw where I want the new profile of the bumper to hit.

 

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This is used for a loft surface from our recently trimmed edge to this curve. You want this loft to be tangent to the surface of the bumper, and you want to make sure that at the Right Plane you do not have a any relations that will remove our nice ridge/seam from the middle of the car.

 

 

Now trim a portion off of the bottom of the new surface. Since we don’t have a blueprint reference for this you will have to guess at it (if you even want this feature in your model).

 

 

 

Just be sure that you have enough room for your license plate cutout.

A simple lofted surface between the two edges to fill part of the gap. You want the surface tangent to the upper edge but you want it to pull in at the bottom edge. You do this by changing the weight (called the tangent length) in your Start/End options section of the loft dialog. If you notice I did not use all of the upper edge. This is because we will need a small section to blend all these together.

 

So I trim a small section out of the edge.

 

 

 

I give this boundary surface tangency to every face except the bottom edge. It will not work with the surrounding geometry if we apply a tangency to this edge.

 

 

You should now have this nice lip feature on the bumper that blends itself in.

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Knit all of these bumper surfaces together so we can make some room for the license plate.

I start with a trim from the Right Plane.

 

 

I tried to follow the curvature of the bumper but this is going to cause issues when we look at the model from the back.

 

 

So we make another trim, from the rear this time, using the lower corner as a coincident point for a vertical line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So we make another trim, from the rear this time, using the lower corner as a coincident point for a vertical line.

 

 

 

 

 

In order to make some details for a surface to fill this area I create a plane offset from the Top Plane by selecting a point on our lower edge.

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In a 2d sketch on this new plane I draw a horizontal line from the lower corner of this opening to the center of our model.

 

 

Then use that for a boundary surface.

 

Do the same thing for the top creating a new plane and a 2d sketch.

 

 

Now you can use the available 3 edges to create a boundary surface for the tag area and knit them to the bumper.

 

The next part will be a little more difficult than the bumper area. We need to fill in the area around the tail lights. The reason I say it will be more difficult is because we are going to meet up with a few different surfaces all with different curvature so we need to be careful. I start with a 2d sketch on the Right Plane.

 

 

Note that it doesn’t intersect the bumper. It’s above it and slightly in front of it (to the left).

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Next is a top sketch trying to follow the curves of the bumper the best you can.

 

 

 

 

I started by filling the entire area here but because of the fillet corners from our very early trim on the rear fender, the surface looked awful. So in a boundary surface I pulled back some of the edges and ended up filling a section like this.

 

 

To address the surface issue I drew a sketch on the Right Plane to get rid of these corners.

 

 

 

 

 

I used a spline that was tangent with the upper and lower edges that would completely remove the flat corner and fillets. I then use Split Line and Delete Face to remove this corner. You might be thinking “why didn’t you just use Trim surface?” Well at this point the body has a lot of panels knitted together and Trim Surface doesn’t always work the way it should. If you ever run into this problem you can usually split the surface and use Delete Face to remove unwanted sections.

Now I used a loft from our previous boundary surface to this edge up to the point we just trimmed.

 

 

 

Make sure that you apply tangency to the faces.

 

You will notice a wrinkle in our new surface! This is not acceptable but thankfully the tangency pushes the wrinkle away from the edges a bit so we can work around it. I am kind of happy we ran into the problem because it gives us a chance to use Fill Surface. I make a 2d sketch oval to trim away the wrinkled area. I use an oval because I want nice rounded edges. You could have used a spline as well, but make sure that you do not have straight edges or hard corners. It may hurt your surface when we apply a tangency.

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Using fill surface you only have one edge to select and it will fill in the area. For your Edge settings you want to make sure and select Tangent. This will make our fill surface tangent to its surrounding geometry and leaves us a nice smooth patch.

 

 

 

I knit our new surfaces with the bumper surfaces we have.

 

 

 

 

Next we need to make the surface between our bumper and the tail light panel. I start this with a sketch on the Back Plane trying to match the lines of our bumper opening.

 

 

 

 

From the Top is do the same thing and try to match some of the lines of the car.

 

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For the surface I Loft from the edge of our bumper back to the projected curve. I make the surface Tangent to the bumper but I reduce the tangency length. Mine ended up looking good at .6.

 

 

 

 

I purposely drew this surface a little farther in than I think it should be on the car. This was so I could trim it to shape and have some nice edges to work with. From the top I drew a nice spline that had a horizontal relation so when we mirror this surface we won’t have a hard edge.

 

 

On the inside edge I create a Boundary surface using the upper edge of our loft, and the edge of the trunk.

 

 

 

This surface will overlap the Right Plane so use the plane to trim the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

Next is the actual panel around the lights. Looking at images this appears to bulge out a little so I create a sketch on the Right Plane that I think looks right.

 

 

 

Then create a Boundary surface.

 

 

 

 

 

For me this produced some issues in the corner, but that’s okay because it needs to be trimmed away for the light.

 

 

That pretty much finishes up the rear end so I am going to move on to the roof. I start by drawing the front windshield curve from the front view. It’s very important to understand that when you want a surface to cross the mid-plane (after the mirror) with no ridge or seam, that you need a horizontal (in our case) relation on your spline. This is so the mirrored version will end up tangent.

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Same thing from the Top, make sure you have that Horizontal relation and make sure you project the front view (as a construction line) onto this sketch and apply the relations so that both curves hit the A pillar surface at the same point. If you don’t do this you will run into issues because your projected curve will not intersect the surface edge.

 

 

 

 

Same thing for the rear in regards to horizontal relations. Now this car’s rear window doesn’t hit the Pillar surface but your curve needs to. These curves are going to serve as cross sections for our surface and not the actual boundary of the window.

 

 

 

 

 

I do the same thing for the lower edge of the rear window. The reason is because we want to ensure our surface doesn’t end up with a seam at the midline for when we make our glass.

 

 

For the roofline you will need a sketch on the Right Plane. It’s important that this curve is coincident to each one of the 3 projected curves in order for our surface to work properly.

 

 

 

When creating the boundary surface you will need to alter the amount of curve you use from the rear of the car and the roof line .