Vehicle Project

     So my plan at knocking these out two a weeks hasn't quite panned out, my bad. Anyway better late to a party then never, even your own so to begin with I'm gonna walk through the vehicle project we did maybe a month or two back. Before I jump waist deep with my thoughts on the project a little exposition I think is needed. I love cars. I love engineering and technology and as a handful of you already know I applied for a couple engineering courses last year. Planes, trains, boats, if it has an engine it's pretty cool. You can probably put two and two together and work out I was pretty excited for this project. I think it was our first design assignment as well (not counting the Xmas project) but don't quote me, so I was shifting gears and putting myself in a more design-y way of thinking.

     The pipeline was as followed, begin with silhouettes based on shapes in nature the interested us before moving onto our final form and produce an orthographic drawing from this which would help in the creation of our sculpture. This was very similar, almost identical even, to the Xmas project. Brimming with enthusiasm I was quick to decide on what it was I wanted, a hover car with a sixties sports car aesthetic. Not exactly the most fantastical of ideas but I had a strong direction of where to go. I began to look at the shape and movement of whales and sharks as I feel they have a very strong aerodynamic form and produced very interesting body shapes when they swim and contort.    
 

    And now for the tragic mistake. In my excitement for designing a vehicle I began to focus too much on that aspect of the assignment. What I'm trying to say is the aesthetics of my design took over from the form which is what the assignment was essentially about. I got ahead of myself and this resulted in me tripping up with my "final" design. This only dawned on me however during my presentation the next weeks when it was due. Watching Tom and Fin discuss there vehicle I saw that somewhere I had gone wrong, it's hard to explain but it's like my project didn't fully add up, like in a maths or physics question where I've made a mistake in the formula. I went to Chris and explained what I was feeling and we reached the conclusion that, as I've said above, got ahead of myself and focused too much on the aesthetics rather than the form of my design. Fortunately he gave us a weeks extension on the project so I was able to redo it for him. 

     I knew I wanted to stick to my original concept of the 60's hover car and for the sake of time I thought it'd be wise too. First I reviewed my research and sure enough I saw my problem. It was perhaps a ratio of like 80:20 vehicles to sharks, whales and stuff. Not good. I cleaned it up and was pretty harsh on the car research I really needed, a trap I believe I fell into is that I began to save pictures not because they're 100% relevant to my design but because I liked the car or the manufacturer. This was something I originally feared I may do but I thought I had under control but obviously this wasn't the case. So I trimmed the fat there and beefed up the aquatic section of my mood board so I was looking at more of a 40:60 ratio and restarted with my silhouettes.

 

     This went well and while I didn't produce as large a quantity of silhouettes as I had before I felt the quality was stepped up. I also made special note to not create any "car" based silhouettes and keep them all based on my primary research. I feel you get much more of the arching backs and the aerodynamic form that is so interesting to these animals. From here I narrowed it down to seven developments which are basically simplified elevation views. Up to this point I had completely ignored the aesthetics and practicality of my design but now I began to think about where say the engines would go, the passengers sit, essentially the functionality of my vehicle.
 

 
     I then produced an orthographic including the plan and both the front and rear elevation, I figured a more detailed drawing would aid me better when it came to producing the final sculpture. After this I drew a two point perspective of the final form which I rendered using a handful of Pro-markers. I traced over this and drew three base models which I finally applied an aesthetic style too, one a more angular design similar to that of Lamborghini, a futuristic one more akin to the style of concept cars or those from sci-fi and finally the 60's sports car look which I felt was the best outta three and usin some photoshop wizardry I overlayed the 60's design over the marker rendering.   

     Looking back over the project I'm coming to the conclusion that the mistake was a good thing, it showed me what happens when your personal interest in a subject, in this case cars, and almost hijack a project. This did lead to a slightly rushed second week and if I had more time I could have further efined the design and expanded into the interior and more of the fiction and functionality of the vehicle but I'm pleased with what I was able to produce. It was a fun couple of weeks and a good excuse to ogle at some fantastic cars and ramble to people about 0-60 times, car design and horsepower, all of which I'm sure bored everyone to tears.