The Charger

This was an enjoyable process, reading all about the car, studying reference images and the recently purchased scale model. For several weeks, I became pretty familiar with the 1968 Dodge Charger RT.

I’m a big advocate of not retreading the same ground so as well as creating the geometry from scratch I also raid my own models to find tubes, panels and shapes, why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to?

The iconic hubcaps were an interesting challenge to get right. During the chase, the Charger actually loses more than four of those hubcaps. Ironically I had to invent this wheel from scratch.

The Charger was modelled in sections, after work I would pick a detail and get to stuck in. The areas the camera would see were tackled first.

I collected a bundle of reference images, here is a small selection that helped me to get a true digi Charger.

I used parts of other car models I could source to help better understand the shapes in the body work.

The model contains more detail than the camera will see but I had so much fun. I plan on using this model to delve into the RTX workflows in the new year. A personal project is never finished.

The Charger’s car paint and chrome detailing were achieved by modifying Maya’s envChrome. Not a true refection but it helped to show any bumps in the surface of the asset. After looking at the car in the plate so many times I felt that having some imperfections might help the realism.

The final model with viewport materials in Maya. The charger for the shot was an optimised version of the car, details that would never be seen were removed.

The rig for the Charger was very simple, all I really needed was to be able to position the car globally and do some extra chassis rotations. The main rotation was animated as an extra attribute in the channel box.

Not necessarily the car, but I wanted to add the passengers, expertly played by Bill Hickman and Paul Genge.

In the shot you can clearly see that there is only one occupant, obviously for safety reasons but with CG we can add the passenger.

The interior is very dark so only a silhouette of the passengers will be seen, I played with the exposure to see if there was another occupant and you can clearly see that the passenger seat is empty.

Originally designed to be the spitfire pilot in Dogfight, I figured it’s a great reuse of the asset and allowed me to tweak and improve the original Python code. Costume and props were ignored, a dark shader would suffice.