>> Here's a screenshot of a car I'm working on by drawing the mesh from
>> scratch.
>
> I wish I had your talent with car modeling, you've posted some great stuff 
> in the past.

Thanks!

I learned by following some (blender?) tutorials about drawing cars from 
blueprints.  You can get the blueprints from a lot of different websites, 
then you set up the 2D views in Blender so you can essentially just trace 
the lines in the blueprint with vertices and edges, making sure they line up 
in all views.

After a while you get faster at doing this and learn how to use the 
different tools in Blender.  It took me a while to figure out how to use the 
mirror tool properly, so you only need to draw half the car and it correctly 
merges the central join with normals nicely as you go along.

I just need to work out how to properly constrain certain vertices and edges 
during the automatic smoothing stage, sometimes it rounds off corners too 
much that I want to stay sharp.

Blender is a PITA to learn sometimes, the GUI is just not in line with every 
other application for Windows, but if you persevere with it you can get some 
stuff done in it!  The really weird file open and save dialog boxes annoy 
me, the seemingly random way the different "panes" in the toolbars get half 
hidden and put on top of each other, the weird way that program settings are 
saved with each model and not with the program itself, I could go on and 
on...  But it's free!

Anyway this model was meant for a game, so I want to keep the low-poly 
version looking as realistic as possible, as a side process I will try to 
create a higher-mesh version for export to POV (of course) :-)

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