VW Ladybug Remodeling

One of my very first Computer Graphics assignments was to make a bug.

Simple as that - just design a bug, model and texture it in Maya, and submit a still image of the bug in context. The assignment was purely about the character design and the composition of the image we turned in, so we didn’t need to know anything about rigging, animation, or most of the modeling toolkit. This was a beginners class, so we learned just enough about making primitive shapes, manually adjusting vertices and edge loops, and smoothing the mesh to make the most basic of models. Our only deliverable was a single image, so it didn’t matter if the model was in pieces. As long as the image looked good, we could get away with a lot of poor practices.

So, when I decided to take on the challenge of rigging my VW Ladybug, I quickly realized that the model wasn’t yet worthy of a rig, and the project shifted to remodeling instead.

Step One was retopologizing some of the model's pieces, such as the hood and the chassis. I'd originally made them out of spheres, which created odd-looking pinch points wherever the sphere's longitudinal edge loops converged.

This was especially a problem for the bump mapping I'd done across the hood; I didn’t know anything back then about editing UVs or retopologizing a shape to get rid of the pinch point, so I'd just painted the bump map across the jagged edges and angled the camera to hide it.

Step Two was to cut the model in half. As long as the bug was going to be symmetrical, it didn’t make sense to do twice as much work. From the front view I highlighted all the right-hand faces, deleted them, and then moved all the center vertices to the center line.

Step Three: unioning the pieces together. Maya's boolean operations made it easy to combine all the bits of the legs, the hood, and the body together. All I had to do was select the pieces, hit union, and delete the history to unite the model and get rid of any unnecessary internal geometry.

As long as I was fixing my mistakes, I figured I could also take this opportunity to make some improvements. To prepare for future animations, I decided the legs would look better with a little more articulation in the wheel wells and the headlights could use some eyelids. 

The seats could use a little more definition, and the license plates ought to have a mount surrounding them.

The windows received a total remodeling as well; rather than attempting to fix the mangled planes, I decided replacing them with hand modeled cubes would be faster and look better in the end.

Not every piece was joined together. The headlights and windows remained separate, just as the eyes and teeth might be separate meshes for a human model. When I was considering how the model might move once rigged and how I wanted to texture the different parts of the bug, it just made sense to keep them isolated.

The final step of the initial remodeling was to clean up any remaining internal geometry. The boolean operations got rid of a lot of it, but not everything. Combining all the rounded shapes caused a few spires and spurs in the wheel wells that no one would ever see, so I had to go in and remove them before I could move on to laying out the UVs.

Step Four: UVs. I let Maya auto-generate the first set of UVs to give me a place to start, and then refined those UVs with a tool called RoadKill. Any time I made an adjustment RoadKill would automatically update the layout to match, which sped up the process considerably.

What did not speed up the process was all the crashing. I'm not sure what about my model or my computer's environment made RoadKill so unstable, but there were plenty of occasions where the program crashed and I lost all my work on the UVs.

In the end, I used Maya's UV tools to make a mess cutting and welding the edges, and then brought the UVs into RoadKill to clean up the layout. That way RoadKill was more of a supplemental tool and didn’t have the opportunity to delete any more of my work.

The model wasn't made whole until I'd fixed all the UVs for just the half. That way I'd only have to do the fiddly bits like the legs once, and then I'd just have to weld the UVs down the center line for the symmetrical model.

Once all the shells were shaped the way I wanted them, I still had to fix how they fit together in the layout. RoadKill did a good job of making sure all the shells were shaped and relaxed in a way that made sense, but certain pieces deserved more surface area in the texture than RoadKill allotted them. So, I sorted all the pieces by what part of the bug they belonged to, and then fit them back together in a way that maximized the available space. Pieces like the license plates and the spotted outer shell got scaled up to allow them more resolution, while pieces like the toes or the license plate mounts were sized down to give other pieces more room.

To finish it all up, Step Five was to redesign the bug's textures. The old texture map wouldn’t match the new UV layout, and as long as I was redoing it anyway I figured I might as well add some new details. I maintained the basics of the old design by using the same shades of black and red and outlining the doors and outer shell, and then I took it a step further by adding some displacement to the outlines and the ridge on the hood. While looking at some ladybug reference images I noticed that some ladybugs had white spots in addition to the normal black spots, so I made sure to sprinkle in some white details as I added the spots to the design.

Once the layers were rendered out into a single texture, all that was left to do was add in the license plate textures and assemble a material for the bug.

With the remodeling completed, I was free to move on to rigging.