Modeling Citröen 2CV in Blender (Intro)
When I was a kid, Dyanes and 2CVs were all over the place, along with cardboard Trabants, Sharks (Citröen DS), and, of course, Yugo Korals, that Yugoslavia has produced after all. But then the country became poor, and it was ages before most people could afford a contemporary vehicle. The classics like 2CV remain in my memory as the vehicles, still. As my very first car modelling exercise in Blender, I chose Citröen 2CV.
image credit: Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by Pinkdylan, CC-BY-3.0
Research
As with most project, I like to familiarize myself a bit with the subject. It turns out the 2CV is a very special car. It was one of those creation in true Bauhaus spirit, a commercial product that would combine high-end engineering and design with economy, a true problem-solver for masses. Just think of the modern car that solve your problems only proportionally with the amount of money you throw at it. This vehicle, on the other hand, really solved people’s problems with style, and didn’t charge extra for extra attention to details. The kind of industry I would like to work for one day, no doubt.
2CV is a vehicle whose history goes back to 1948, when it was first revealed during the Paris car show. It’s one of those classics that can comfortably stand shoulder to shoulder with the Beetle or the Mini. Although heavily criticized by the press at the beginning, 2CV’s design is demonstrating the timelessness of well chosen lines. Preserving the aesthetics of this vehicle will be a great challenge, no doubt.
Reference
As with any car project, you need a reference schematic in order to begin modelling. I’ve stumbled upon an excellent source of blueprints called 3D-car.ru. It has tons of blueprints, and sure enough, 2CV is also found there. It’s a good image, 1500x1000px with front, top, rear, and left views.
Setting up the reference image
I’ll wrap this post up with a tip on how reference images are set up. This is very important, and getting it wrong hinders the car modelling progress a great deal. I suppose there are many ways to set things up, but I used a combination of cutting the images apart and then setting the offset manually in Blender.
First of all, it’s important to determine if the images line up correctly to begin with. Scale is particularly important, and I’ve found that many reference blueprints show different views in different scales. This is a nightmare, and it can’t easily be fixed on small images. Citröen 2CV blueprint I’ve downloaded was no exception: the front and back views were slightly smaller than the top and left views, so I needed to scale them up.
Next thing you’ll have to be careful about is the orientation of the top view. Top view’s front bumper has to point upwards, not left. In most blueprints, the top view points either left or right, so it needs to be rotated 90 degrees in appropriate direction.
The best thing to do, in my infinitely humble experience, is to slice the images up into separate views and set them up separately. While doing that, you need to watch one more thing. Images of different sizes will appear at different scales in Blender. To maintain the relative scale of the four images, I pasted them into a same-sized square canvas and saved them as 1000x1000px square images rather than using the original size. I’ve also created the right side view by flipping the left view horizontally.
Once the images are properly prepared, you can use the background image in Blender to load the reference images that will show up behind your modelling space. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Q will bring up the quad-view. It shows the top, front, and left views, as well as the camera view, and splits the 3D view into equally-sized quarters.
Press N to bring up the properties sidebar in the 3D view. There, you’ll find the Background image tab (see the screen shot above). It has a checkbox that you click to enable the background images. The interface for adding new images is a bit confusing, but it’s not too complicated. To add a new image, click the Add image button. This adds a new slot. The slot has Not set box with a small triangle. Click the triangle and load the image. Choose the appropriate view from the Axis from the drop-down. Rinse and repeat for all 5 images (top, front, back, left, right).
Using the grid, and the offset controls (in the image above), align the images so that whatever you are doing in one view matches the others. I used a simple plane, moved it around and scaled it to test if the images are aligned properly. After a bit of fiddling (it’s not a lot if you’ve done the previous steps right), you get a nice environment to start modelling.
One final steop I like to do on this type of project is load in some photos. Close the properties sidebar by pressing N, then convert both properties and outline panel on the right to image viewers. Load the photos and click on the pin icon (right of the image name). Merge the 3D view into the sequencer controls, so that you have as much space as possible (I have a small 19” 1280x1024px monitor, so this means a lot). The workspace is finally ready for modelling process.
In the following posts, I will be modelling, texturing, and rendering the Citröen 2CV.
