Artist - Ross Mansfield
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It was my job to build the lightcycle model for this project, here's an overview of what I did along with a couple of little tips on how I went about certain things. I use Modo but most of the techniques should be adaptable to your favourite software. For help with specific Modo tools, the Luxology forum is the best place to look.
Normally I start any model by building a simple blockout to quickly get the form and proportions correct, but in this case the client supplied the game-resolution model so I just had to turn that into a nice high-res SubD model. Most of the details in the game model were in the Normal map so I had to interpret those and build them into the model properly.
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The game bike has several big differences to the one from the Tron:Legacy film, amongst other things the rear wheel is a more traditional 3-spoke design. I started by building the outer rim and 'tyre' at the origin using a cylinder with a multiple of 3 sides, 15 (because the wheel will have 3 spokes) and using edge extrude and the scale and move tools to create the various radial grooves.
Once the rim is complete I simplify it down and work on just one spoke, using the radial array tool to rebuild the rest of the wheel later. This is the best way to make almost any wheel and is a big timesaver. With the shape of one spoke defined, I then built the central hub of the wheel starting from another cylinder with 12 sides this time, so that the subdivisions roughly matched up with where the spokes would be joining it.
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Now it just remained to join the top of the spoke to the hub - thinking ahead a bit about how many subdivisions to use at each stage and where you will need edge loops makes this relatively easy, the edges almost line up already they just have to be carefully stitched together and some extra loops added to tighten up the joins. Then I just used the Radial Array on this one-spoke segment to rebuild the entire wheel.
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Most of the bodywork was fairly straightforward modelling, I had the game model for reference so it was just a matter of studying the surfaces in the low poly model and translating them to nice smooth SubD surfaces with some careful modelling. Depending on the particular topology of each area, I either used the game geometry in the background and remodelled it from scratch, or made a copy of it to work into and turn into SubD. The seat was a slightly tricky area because all of that detail was just in the normal map of the game model, so it took a little bit of time to figure out how to go about reconstructing it using actual geometry.
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The little holes in the side are a good little modelling study, they're the sort of thing people constantly have problems constructing so here's how I went about it in this case. First I mostly ignore them and concentrate on the surface that they sit on. It's much easier to get a subtly curving surface like this right first, then cut into it, than it is to do it the other way around because you'll have a lot more fiddly geometry to deal with that way.
The minimum number of sides you need to make a nice round hole with SubDs is 4, so I started by making a little 'ring' of quads, just by creating a plane, bevelling it in once and deleting the center. This is then easy to duplicate and join together a few time to make 7 rings. That's the topology around the holes pretty much complete, they just have to be stitched in to the side panel now. I made a little video to show how I did this using Modo's background constrain and push tool to get the hole geometry aligned to the surface -
Once most of the bike was finished we started pushing the details beyond the game model to make it look better in the high-res render, adding extra panel lines and detailing at the front and some changes to the 'exhaust' and footpegs at the back.
And that's how I (re)built the Tron Bike! Here's a few more close up images -
