Looking Good

With most of the incidental items for the gremlin’s garage complete or nearly completed, it was time to look for one of the big missing pieces: the E-type Jaguar.   I had good luck quickly finding a Corvette model that was close to the one that appeared in the Pesky Gremlins comic strip.  I just had to chop the top off and add a few details.  I was hoping the same would be true for the Jaguar.   Unfortunately, I was unable to find a suitable Jaguar model for free and was therefore compelled to see if there were any good Jaguar models for sale.  As it turns out there are several pretty good models for sale.  Unfortunately, most of them were rather expensive and still didn’t look quite like what I was looking for.  In the end, I found a inexpensive model but it would probably need some work to get it to look like what has appeared in the strip in the past.  Here is how the Jaguar last appeared in the strip.

I made my purchase and downloaded the model and was most unpleasantly surprised to see that the model was NOT in the format that I expect or needed. I was certain that I was not the first person to run into this kind of problem and a little googling revealed a free website that could make the necessary file conversion. I was a little skeptical as to whether this conversion would work or not but I had nothing to lose by trying. The process appeared to work. I loaded the results into Blender and this is what I saw. You might have noticed the complete lack of a Jaguar model as I did. After all, I had spent $4 for a Jaguar model. You can imagine my disappointment. But all was not lost. There was a model there. By a fluke of some sort, the model was just floating in space and needed to be brought into view. Here is what it looked like once it was reeled back into the viewport. There are some obvious and less obvious problems with the car, but overall, it was a good starting point. The obvious problems were that it was still oriented oddly and had a giant piece of something attached as some sort of base. Less obvious was the fact it was all a single model with lots of polygons (in other words it gobbled up LOTS of memory) and had absolutely nothing painted. Finally, the interior was from an older model of Jaguar and would need updating or outright replacing. I felt confident that I could make all of these changes, but they would be time consuming.

One rainy Saturday (we’ve had lots of those this year), I got started on modifying the Jaguar model. The first thing that I wanted to do was get rid of the items that I didn’t need or planned to replace. Deleting things in Blender is usually pretty easy but since this was one giant blob it was slow going. I got rid of the giant base, the seats, the rolled up side windows, and significantly reduced the number of points and polygons. I also removed one of the side mirrors and gave it a base color of red. At the end of the day, this is what I had. At this point, the car kind of looked like a plastic model kit that was badly in need of some paint. It is not all that much better than what I had started with but at least my computer could more easily handle it.

The next order of business was to color/texture all that wasn’t red. That would include chrome, rubber, leather, glass, and so on. I would start this effort by picking out all that was chrome. This got tedious quickly as the wheels were chrome and each wheel had 72 spokes with dozens of teeny faces to pick. After hours of panning and zooming to select all of the many faces that were chromed and a few minutes to select the rubber for the tires and the glass that was made up the windshield, this is what the Jaguar looked like.

It still looked like a plastic model, but it was a much better version of a plastic model, now. I took a little break from painting and added Elmo’s custom license plate. The red plastic was also added to the tail lights. Here is the front of the car after adding, the head light glass, the amber plastic for the parking light (which I was not entirely satisfied), radiator metal, and the Jaguar emblem in the center of the grill. If you look closely, you will also notice that the tires now have tread, too. With the exterior more or less complete, it was time to tackle the interior. The easy items of covering the dash and sun visors with virtual leather was quickly done. As was coving the cabin with carpet. t was a little more difficult to map the instruments into the dashboard. The radio and horn button were also done at this time. Leather door panels and shifter boot were next. The car’s red paint needed a little help as it wasn’t quite right. It might not look different in this image, but trust me, it is and will look better in the final renderings. Had to go back to the wheels area again after the paint change. The brakes and brake calipers needed realistic metal finishes. Both were given and iron finish and the exposed brake disk was then given a polished metal material. Time to finish up the interior. Here most of the paint and materials have been applied. The car still needs the missing clock face added to the big empty red circle. A glove box door, a leather arm rest, and, of course the seats remain to be added.

For reference, here is what a real Jaguar’s interior looks like: Oh, those pictures also point out the need to add that bank of toggle switches just underneath the gages. And here is the interior with a everything in it.

Here is another shot of the interior showing the seats with the perforated leather in the center sections of the seats. …just like the real thing! Here are a few shots of the completed car: And here it is in “cartoonified” form: