Over the Christmas break, decided to look at the hood assembly design. At the moment the body-shell skin is a rough patchwork of surfaces. By this method you can more quickly come up with a basic shapes that you want without all the time needed to ensure that the surfaces are joined and flow together perfectly. Making class A surfaces (perfect surfaces) as you are trying ideas would be very slow and make it more tempting to keep a shapes as they took so long to make.
This is a “38 Willy’s” style pickup model with the body skin surfaces redrawing to a class A standard. Rendered using Maxwell Software with an spherical Hdri background which also creates the shadows and reflections on the model.
The above shows what the final surface model looks like, after it’s redrawn to class A standards and then rendered with a high quality render engine software (in this case Maxwell click here for details).
Going back to the Roadster project, the class A finishing is a long way off. As the suspension designs are still awaiting new software to check the design oft the moving coil-over system (see previous blog) and the detail changes to the chassis are awaiting some rear suspension part to be measured up and digitized. The body shell needed to be progressed.
As the original hood top design is a very rough and the original hood side is short designed before the hood was lengthened, further work is required. A hood side was roughed in to the grill surround, it’s basically a straight panel curved top to bottom. As the Ford Coyote Engine is a wide engine so some form of vent or bulge is required to clear it. The pictures below show the first effort at a design.
The cutout for the engine was based on a shape designed to clear the rocker boxes of the engine, in particular the angle of the lower edge. The bulged vent cover was added as the “hole” looked to big. The is a first attempt at the vent/cover and still needs work. The best method is to leave that element of the design and come back to it later (the best ideas just come with time). Next the grill surround needs a little some work. The one shown is a basic set up one, the sectional shape is wrong and the flow from the side to the top area needs work.
Note….Designing is all personal and my practice is to design the left half of the car and mirror to the right hence all the renderings of new designs are of the left side of the car.
Working on the Hood Assembly