Learn to Model a Cartoon Car in Maya

Lets begin by adding our reference image so we can use it to build our awesome cartoon truck.

Using a cylinder we will model our wheel.

Start building the muffler from a simple cylinder shape.

Finish building the muffler.

Using Create Polygon tool we will create the side of the car.

Next, we will build the main shape of the body.

Lets mirror the car and connect all the shapes by using our bridge tool.

In this lesson we will use the multicut tool to help us build the door and then we will bevel the car edges to give us a more of a cartoony round look.

Lets quickly add the metal spikes to both sides of our truck.

We will create 3 different antenna's for the top of our car.

Next, we will bridge 2 different shapes to create the side engine tubes.

Added front engine by using all previously learned techniques.

We will create our a spoiler for the back of the car.

We will continue to add more details by adding the break lights and then building a bumper for the back of our toon car.

We will repeat our newly learned techniques and model our cartoon head lights followed by creating a front bumper from already existing mesh.

We will build two windows for our doors.

Lets take a simple cylinder shape and extrude it along a curve to create the two door horns.

Finally we will create 2 door handles.

Turning off the lights in the scene and analyzing our silhouette allowed us to realize we should add some more detail to the bottom of the car.

Next we will take each part of the car and unwrap it in order for us to paint it in Photoshop.

Lets work on our side door horns and the six spikes.

Antennas and the front engine are next.

Here we must decide exactly what side decals will be added in Photoshop and based on that we must unwrap our uvs accordingly.

Finish unwrapping all the car parts.

We will spend some time to nicely layout our uvs in order to be able to export them into Photoshop.

Lets quickly export our uvs as a guide!

We will begin painting our uvs in Photoshop.

We finish our texture, define hard and soft edges and finally add HDR reflection in Maya.

Quickly setup a 360 spin of your model.

Adjust the animation curve to create an even rotation animation without slowing down.

View your models on any mobile device. Fantastic way to demo your work.

Example: https://sketchfab.com/uistudios (My Account)

Lets take a look at how we can paint our textures right in Maya.