Tutorial: How to make low poly car. By Jirayu Tanabodee

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1 Tutorial: How to make low poly car. By Jirayu Tanabodee I think I would prefer to make my own cars than using stock cars in FSX. Since the cars in FSX always turn their head lamp on, so it is not realistic to use them in the parking lot. I have watched a lot of tutorial how to make a car in Gmax/3dsmax but they are too detail to be use in Flight Sim. I have done many cars in my scenery and finally I think I have develop a decent skill and method how to make it low poly yet still good to look at. The step will be separated into texture work and model work. It is straight forward and no need to get a blue print and make double work load from making reference frame and the texture again. Texture Work The most important thing is the texture. I would not recommend you to take a photo of your car because the reflection of surrounding will make it difficult to make texture seamless. Please look for the photograph taken by the manufacture of the car that. If you can find straight orthographic projection view would be excellent but it is hard to find. Straight side view, front and rear view are good enough. We need to adjust some distortion a bit to make it orthographic-like view. I would recommend the photo from Yahoo Car ( and search for the new car that you want to make. They have variety of car photos in there. My example is Proton Preve which is available only in Malaysia. I got the photo from some where in internet. I have front, rear and side view. Here it is: I laid those view in this order from front, side and rear view. Actually, I need only half of the car and mirror it to make another half in Gmax. So, I cut the front and rear view and take only half of them. As you can see the front view is slightly distorted by wide angle lens. We need to work on that.

2 I put guide lines to the photo in Photoshop. These guide lines should be on the important landmarks that are over the corner of the car where side polygons of the model meet the top, front and rear polygons. The guide lines that I use are:, 1. The bottom of the side windows; 2. Headlamp ; 3. The lowest part of the body of car in front and (4) rear.; 5. The tail lamp. Then I select the part that I have to correct by rectangular selection. And use Scale Transform to move the upper part of that up and then move the section of front and headlamp up to fit the side view. You have to do these with the rear view and the texture that we are going to use will be like this.

3 It is closed to orthographic view. Now we are done with texture work. We need to do it later when we finish the model and make it seamless. The model work Now it is time to go to Gmax/3dsmax. Set up the material by using that photo. In 1024x1024 texture sheet, I have more that 10 cars inside. It is your own preference how detail of the texture it gonna be. I would recommend half of the texture width to be one car area, so you can have about 10 cars texture that can be fitted in. If you make big texture, you will get less cars. Moreover, it will be detectable that both side of the car comes from the same texture. The logo or letters will flip, so less might be enough. You need to make a box. The size of box is the same as the size of the car. You can have the size by looking at the car specification. Then apply the texture to the box and do the mapping as a box. Choose the size of the mapping box to make the texture fit on the length and height of the box.

4 You need to move the Gizmo to make the texture fit right with the box. You can choose to make it fit just the height and put the number to the other boxes of Length and Width of mapping, the rest of the texture will fit in. You can adjust Gizmo to make either front texture or rear texture to fit the front or back of the box. In this example, I choose the front texture to fit the box. Now you have the reference box to work with the model. Go to Element of the box then Flip normal. So you can see the texture inside the box. You can delete the top, the bottom and the back of the box that you don t need.

5 Then go back to make another box, the same width, height and length in the same palce. This second box will be our model of the car. Then select how many segments of the box it has to be. For a sedan, you need 3 segments. But estate, or two boxes car you need two segments. My Proton needs only two segments as figure.

6 You need to decrease the height until you the box fit on the body of the car, leave the roof and passenger area just for now. Then convert to editable poly and move the middle vertices to the area around the front post of the car roof. You can turn this box to transparent and let the view be Edge Face, so you can work easier. Then select the polygon at the passenger area and extrude the polygon to fit the height of the car. (I forgot to take screenshot for this step) In front of the car you can select the polygons and slice them for more detail. Since the front panel of the car must have some slope. Then adjust the vertex to fit the shape of the car.

7 Now you need to select the vertex that is the edge of the car and move it to fit the shape of the car. Since in the middle of the car, the front/rear will project more that the side and the middle of the roof will be higher than the side. You need to do this only one half of the car only. Now when you are satisfy with the shape of the car polygon, you can turn off transparent and delete the other half including reference box. Apply the texture the same way you have done with the reference box. Move Gizmo until the side view fit to the model. You may need to set Flip to your U Tile. Since the reference box is flip, so you model is flip to the texture too. You can unwrap the front polygons and the rear polygons to fit in the texture. Just move them to the right texture area along horizontal since we have made a perfect align texture already. Then make the front windshield fit in the windshield of front texture. Now, you don t have roof, boot and trunk texture. It is rare to have the picture from the top. No need for real photo since these area have less detail. You can select those polygons and map them with simple plane then unwrap it. Rescale to fit the area near the roof, boot and trunk. Select the paint near the roof, boot and trunk and paint of to the correspond area. I often press Print Screen and paste into another file in Photoshop and select the area that I am going to paint include surrounding texture, then paste that area to the texture and do scale transform until it fit in. Then I paint on the area that should be the boot, trunk and roof of the car.

8 Now the car is almost done. The next step you need to smooth the polygons by selecting the boot and the side polygons and click on smooth group. Any number should do the smooth for you. At this stage, you can have the car but there is still some seams due to different color of the texture. You can see the seam of the side polygons meet the roof, boot and trunk polygons. Time to get to work with texture. The texture work to smooth the seam.

9 We already have a decent looking car. You might satisfy with it but I still don t. I think I can improve it a bit. As you can see in this picture the red arrow point the area that you can see the texture of the front/rear and side view do not fit together. We can do a little paint job to make it look better. You can use Eye Dropper Tool to pick up the color of the side texture to paint on the rear/front texture (or vice versa) then save it. Go back to Gmax and reload the texture. Then come back to paint again until you satisfy with the result in Gmax. This is my final result of texture paint. You can barely see the seam of texture, except the real color of the car.

10 As you can see, the red arrow show the area that I painted on to make it seamless. The texture might look weird but the model looks so good. The reason I need to do this painting since any photo taken has different shadow due to angle of view. No way it can be perfect and fit to the model. Now, I have one half of the car. Use mirror on the modified list on the right side of Gmax, not the mirror button. You need to check on the copy box. You will get the whole car. I love this moment! Now I have a full car. You can select the vertices on the mid line and weld them together to get a smooth result. You can add more detail, if you like. You can slice more polygons if you want more detail on the shape (like the way I cut front polygons and make a slope of front radiator grill). Or you can make transparent alpha channel below the body of the car and make wheels visible. To me, wheel contains a lot of polygons and vertices and make less different from opaque black texture. However it depends on how many cars you want to be in your airport. Less cars make you can go with more detail. Have fun with the car modeling. I think it is not difficult but you need some skill to make the texture seamless. Please put some comments about this tutorial at FSdeveloper.com.

11 So I can get your feed back. Jirayu Tanabodee 1 September 2014