Indiana Van

Hello everyone! Happy to share with you my final submission, hope you like it. Unfortunately I did not spent a lot of time on it, but overall I am happy with the result. Enjoy!

Hello everyone! Happy to share with you my WIP of this project. It was a bit challenging to find the idea, because the only associations I have with VW Van are Hippie/Hipster/Travel/Surfer Van. I did some brainstorming to figure out what kind of story I want tell and it was definitely adventures! Last TV show I watched about them was "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" from 1992. As I thought about Indiana Jones the first thing that came on my mind was to put a hat and a whip on this car.

As first I downloaded a free hat model from internet and threw it to maya with a van model to take a look if it works as I imagined. Then I added some thickness and few fixes to the hat model, modeled the whip and smoothed some parts of the Van to get more pleasant curves later. Next I studied the texture sets in Substance and threw some basic materials on every texture set just to get the idea how the shapes are looking.  After everything was prepared technically I started to collect references, I also did some color palettes  and downloaded some png´s  that are matching to this theme to paint them on car later.

My main goal was to get a good looking body base, I spent a most of time with it. I decided to do it from scratch without smart materials to think better about the process and to have more control if I want to do some adjustments later, so I am more familiar with a structure. I used a simple technique of layering fill layers with adding black mask and playing with generators. 

For all other pieces I just threw smart materials on them and made some adjustments. As I said my focus was on the body, because it´s ca. 80% from a whole Van. Later I can work more on details and spent some more time with every single shape.

The shapes I really struggled with were the headlights, I wasn´t able to set a different shader to them. I studied Substance docs, but it seems to me the Information is outdated, because I don´t have this options on my texture sets, I have just the one option "main shader" as you can see on the screenshot below, but maybe I did something wrong. I would be very happy, if someone can help me to fix it, maybe it´s obvious but I can not find it.

Here are also some pictures without environment:

The next step is to figure out what should I do with the headlights and to work more on the details. I hope the holidays are not going to stop me :D 

feel free to give me a feedback!

I wish you all happy holidays and see you soon! P.S. Sorry for my english it´s not the best.