Designing my own concept car in CAD

After building the Ferrari-F40 in CAD, I wanted to have my own go at designing and constructing a sportscar.

Contents

Building method
Molding the main shape of the body
Building the wheels
Adding the bumpers and skirts
Headlights and taillights
Adding accessories
Paint and rendering
Learning outcomes and what I would do different

Building method

I needed to decide how I wanted to build the car. With the Ferrari-F40 I mainly used T-Splines, as it meant it was easy to follow the canvases. Using this method was very tedious however, and I wanted to refrain from doing that again. Form bodies allow the user to create surface bodies and shape them however they wanted using the various tools Fusion 360 has to offer. I chose to mainly structure the car using this feature, as it meant I could mold the surface bodies with more precision.

Molding the shape of the main body

To begin with, I layed out a plane from the form body section and used the 'edit form' function to push and pull at different edges along the plane. The main aim here was to get the generic shape of the car, from which I could then build on from.

Building the wheels

Next I moved onto the wheels. I first built up the tire using the cyclinder form body function and made sure to add both circular symmetry and a sufficient amount of faces to edit. I then created a new cylindrical form body placed at the center of the tire, this was going to act as the rim. Since I set the circular symmetry for this body to 5, designing one spoke would mean another 4 would be be built. Using the edit form function again, I extruded the edges to complete the design. Finally, after completing the wheel I duplicated it 3 more times to complete the full set of wheels

Adding bumpers and skirts

I moved onto filling out the main body by adding front and rear bumpers, aswell as adding side skirts. This was done simply by selecting faces on each bumper, then copying and pasting them. Using the copied bodies I then molded them to the main body to give the effect of bumpers and skirts. I continued to edit the form bodies until I felt satisfied with the shape.

Headlights and Tailights

The headlights and tailights were next. Starting off with the headlights, I created a body in the shape of my headlight design and used it as a cutting tool to cut through the main body.

I then used the trim tool to cutoff the excess material. The aim was to get a line formation in the shape of my headlight design on the main body. Now that the headlight design had been cut into the main body, the shape is now considered it's own surface body which is removable. After removing the face the depth of the headlight is visible.

Next I began adding bodies into the headlight body which will give of the light. The 3 major lights were made using cyclinders extruding outwards and the smallers balls were added using the line pattern feature. All these bodies were then mirrored to the other side of the car.

The tailights were done using the same method. The bodies that would illuminate light were created by using the pipe function along one of the edges of the tailight. This created a pipe body which I duplicated 3 times.

Adding accesories

To complete the look of the car, I began adding acessories such as a rear wing, hood vents, side canards and more. These were all done using the same method I used to create the bumpers and side skirts.

Paint and rendering

Now that the look of the car is complete, using the appearance section from the rendering platform I was able to add the finishing touches with paint.

Here are some rendered photos

Learning outcomes and what I would do different

What I learnt doing this project:

• Utilising form bodies along with T-splines allows for more creativity
• Managment of my timeline and bodies list improved
• Improved my creative thinking
• I learnt the general process in transforming an idea to a 3D model

What I would do different:

• Utilised Canvases and blueprints by doing sketches on paper first
• Not solely rely on form bodies since you cannot go back and undo changes after a form body is completed
• Design the car to set dimensions
• Incorporate an interior