Tesla Model S

Description

This 3D model of a 2017 Tesla Model S electric car is my first complete vehicle model. For those who haven’t heard of it the Model S is Tesla Motors’ flagship model holding the world record as the quickest production car ever manufactured.

Since there are no official blueprints available the main reference for the model consisted of numerous images I found online. As this was my first car model I was fine-tuning my technique as I was going. I started out with a rough wireframe model, which you can see below.

tesla model s wire model
Wire model of the Tesla

Going from there I started to fill in the faces. Blenders Grid Fill tool helped me a lot on this manner.  Perhaps the biggest difficulty when modelling a smooth car body is getting all the creases right, while also trying to maintain a nice edge flow. This was more or less a lot of trial and error combined with a huge amout of manually tweaking single vertecies.

tesla model s opengl render
OpenGL render showcasing creases and edgeflow

With the modelling done I went on to create the materials and lighting setup. For the car paint shader I used a node setup from the BlenderArtists forum. For lighting I decided to go with a studio light HDR as this gives very nice reflections with a low complexity setup. The HDR resources I used can be found here,