Freelance Car Design

A while back a nice guy got in touch with me asking for some help modelling a custom car design he had. I believe he had based the designs off some modifications he made in a video game and wanted to bring the car to life and build it in the real world.

I thought the design looked pretty cool and was happy to help. Although it was a fun design to model I became frustrated with the limitations SolidWorks has when modelling complex organic surfaces. SolidWorks really isn’t cut out for modelling something as complex as a car (in terms of 3D surfaces). I often found myself struggling to get various surfacing features to give the surface curvature and continuity I wanted. It’s also very tedious if not impossible to go back and modify surfaces early on in the design tree as this will often cause the rest of the model to fail. As I was approaching the end of the design the program would often crash and corrupt the file. I don’t know exactly why this was happening but I suspect possibly the model was too complex with numerous 3D surfaces and the underlying mathematics/algorithm was not able to handle it.

It was a fun little project but I decided I probably won’t model any more cars in SolidWorks, it’s simply just not cut out for it. I understand that Catia (Software also from Dassault Systems) is much better suited for such a task.