The Hot Rod Art Book for iPad teaches you how to draw cars

If you want to draw hot rods and learn the basics of drawing cars, then you’ll want to check out the Hot Rod Art Book for the iPad. A combination of the text-only book and the videos you’ll find at the book’s site and Vimeo, it contains 100 pages of guidance and tips from 13 professional hot rod artists and 1.5 hours of videos. It’s not going to instantly turn you into Hot Wheels designer Dwayne Vance, one of the contributors, but you’ll know how to pen the Powell Motors Homer just like you’ve always wanted.

[Source: Apple iTunes]

Bunkspeed’s MOVE software for design evaluations and presentations

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Bad Economy: Online Car Design School reduces prices

With the economic havoc still raging on, many people find themselves at a cross roads in their life. Having lost a job or jobs just evaporating around every one, it becomes a struggle to decide what to do next: Wait till something heads your way or be pro-active and learn a new profession. If you decide for the latter, do you go for just another thing, or do you finally want to chase you passion and find out if you have what it takes to become a car designer.

The FORESEE Online Car Design School course is aimed at helping people all over the world find out if they have what it takes, before they invest years and money in an education that might not be what they dreamed it would be. With the 9 lessons and the personal guidance of professional designers, it gives a lot of info and does some honest evaluating on talent and prospect.

Now Foresee also offers the same course as seperate lessons and as a full course, but without the personal guidance and without the option to have your homework exercises corrected by professional designers. That of course makes the course substantially cheaper, at $9.95 per lesson or $59.95 for the complete course.

Click here to go to the site to find out more.

40 Years of the Porsche 917

Forty years ago on March 13, 1969 at the Geneva International Motor Show, today’s Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche unveiled a car that, even by today’s standards, is underestimated when it is described as the “super sports car”: The Porsche 917. It became a legend as one of the fastest and most successful racing cars of all time.

Porsche fired the starting shot for Project 917 in June 1968, after the international motor sports authority or FIA had announced a class of “homologated sports cars” with up to five liters cubic capacity and a minimum weight of 800 kilograms. Under the supervision of Ferdinand Piëch, the stipulated 25 units of the new racing car model were completed by April 1969 so that the 917 could begin its racing career in the same year. After it initially dropped out of its first three races due to technical problems, the 917 success story began in August 1969 at a 1,000-kilometer race at the Österreichring with a victory by Jo Siffert and Kurt Ahrens.
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Design Tool Evaluation: Bunkspeed Hypershot 1.7 | part 1

Ever since the introduction of computer aided design tools to our design process, the need to present a realistic representation of what was being created has been of the utmost importance, not only for the designers to see, analyze, evaluate and optimize their proposals, but indeed also to aid the decision making process of senior management to invest time and significant money in the development of proposals.

Among the tools available for this is Bunkspeed’s Hypershot in it’s latest 1.7 version. In this video show we give a brief overview of how quickly we can create a realistic presentation. In this first part we are using high resolution models from the Dosch 2007 car series, in .obj format, and show you how we can assign materials and set up a presentation. We also show how we would add several models in one scene to enable an objective comparison.

In part 2 we will show you how to prepare a model in Autostudio Alias Studiotools for direct use in Nypershot, and compare a quick design study to its competitors.

Sketch Technique: Ballpoint Pen Sketching

We always receive a lot of questions on how to sketch a car and what tools to use, and often people think in very extravagant directions with high-end software and expensive tools. Often though, the designers still rely on quick doodles made anywhere at anytime, to capture the essence of the idea they have, and very often THE tool of choice in that case is a ballpoint pen, on copy paper, napkins, newspaper corners, parking tickets…

Here is an example video of how to quickly get your idea on paper.

Photoshop Sketch Seminar By Nissan Designer Robert Lemmens

In Episode 61 Robert Lemmens, designer at Nissan’s European Design center in London, was willing to show us how he sketches using Adobe Photoshop.

Sketch Seminar using Autodesk Alias Studiotools

Alias Autodesk Studiotools and Autostudio have long been THE tool for professional design studios to do high quality surfacing and sketch modeling, but it also contains a nice section to sketch and render. In this 2006 episode we show you how to do some sketches.

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