Random Vehicles

I’ve been binging through different vehicle designs over the past month trying to get better at figuring out their forms and trying to get some design languages down and explored.

01

Wanted to see how an integrated roof basket could influence the overall design of the vehicle. The bump in the hood is a bit more dramatic that i intended but it also started out with much different proportions.

01 - “Explorer”

13 - “jeep”

13

Ended up a bit more conventional than i was anticipating but kept it fast and gave it a snorkel so you know it’s serious.

15

Through many of these sketches i was playing around with the same basic repeating angles for the wheel wells and also for removing large parts of the front and rear panels for better approach angles.

The corrugated panel line on the side was really fun to play around with.

15

LEGO spaceships and paintovers 2

Grabbed a few other micro LEGO ships from an Imgur user and kept the theme going…

“Keg Barge”

This one immediately invoked the feelings of a large barge type ship. I reduced the scale of the bridge a bit to help it feel more substantial.

This second ship had less obvious purposes so hot off the heels of the barge I decided an escort tug boat would be a great option.

LEGO spaceships and paintovers

Last year I went through a phase where I would spend free moments during the day recombining an Advent calendar LEGO Snowspeeder and Falcon into new micro scale spaceships and fighters. I took pictures of most of their permutations and decided that giving them paintovers would be a fun way finish and flesh out their form.

I love working within constraints, and I really enjoyed working with these limited amount of LEGO bricks to make these and then paint over them while still respecting their overall form and shape.

The renders took an hour or 3 each. I tried to keep them to a consistent level of detail and polish, but there was some drift, especially when i came back to one after a few weeks or month.

Rocky Mountain National Park Plein Air

Managed to escape the bustle of the family vacation to RMNP with my iPad Pro. This isn't work i do too often so it's always fun getting into a rhythm and finding good shaded spots to set up on.

"Huey Truck" WIP 1

A few directions that ended up at the Helicopter + Wheels design.

One technique that I probably don't use as much as I should is block modeling. It's something I've used infrequently for years but since the lengthened development time and increased complexity rarely pay off for the scale of work I tend to do I usually just sketch through the tricky parts. 

With some coaxing from a friend I decided to do it for the 4th design in the "vehicles that shouldn't have wheels" series I am currently riffing through. 

A render of the Frankenstein Sketchup model at what I would consider my usual 3/4 angle of comfort.

Since Hueys have some pretty fun organic shapes to them - and since Sketchup's 3D warehouse has more than I need to 'kitbash' this thing together I decided to go for it. I wanted to go with the front cockpit of the 'Venom' model but kept the body from the original Huey because the top engine cowling is more streamlined.

Here is what will probably be the final camera angle that I will render with.

Since my goal was only to model this up to ~50% I don't really have any drive to take this into keyshot and render passes or anything. I want to keep this process fast and loose which is always something i struggle with when building upon a 3D foundation. Hopefully I can do this more often and find a better balance.