Modeling the Bus

As we know from the previous post i already knew what sort of bus i wanted to recreate for my story, the Bluebird TC2000. The american school bus is very common and alot of images have been released showing of the different angles however its really hard to gauge the exact sizes of certain features. So i decided to fork out and buy a “Blueprint” of the bus. It was great for getting the rough sizes and the distance between the windows however in reality someone just threw together a Photoshop file with inaccurate sizes. This isnt much of an issue to be honest because the bus isn’t going to be full pbr just more stylized.

After modeling the main shell of the bus i started to get the important wheel arcs out of the way. I simply deleted the faces then extruded round to the other side and merged the verts to keep the mesh complete.

The next step was modeling the face of the bus. This was a longer process than expected due to the inaccurate blueprints but after it was modeled i had to focus on the curved edges. I didn’t want to smooth because it would add unnecessary poly and beveling wasn’t giving the curve i wanted so i decided again to remove the faces and combine it with another object. I used a cylinder which was quarter then shaped to give the desired bend. So i simply combined the two objects and merged the vertices.

I used similar techniques for the wheel arcs and the roof to the bus however i did a test to see how smoothing would effect the model. I didnt like the low poly look for the roof as this would be the main focal point from the birds eye view so i compared smoothing the model compared to just changing the mesh display. In the end the smoothing just added poly and didnt really effect the roof however uses the smooth face tool in the mesh display changed the light hitting to be more rounded without adding more polys.