> Out of curiosity, how many days did it take to reach this stage?

The longest part is finding the background images, getting them scaled 
correctly (ie how many pixels correspond to how many metres in real life) 
and placing them correctly in the modelling software.  This takes about 30 
minutes.

The front wing you see, probably took about 20 minutes, most of that time is 
just moving around vertices until they are lined up nicely in all views. 
There are shortcuts like telling blender to draw a circle with N vertices 
lines up with the wheel arch edge, then deleting unused vertices of the 
circle and joining them up with the rest of the mesh.  That makes sure the 
edge is a perfect circle.

More complex parts like the front bumper area might take at least an hour or 
two to get looking right with all the cut-outs and edges/bumps, something 
simple like the roof would take maybe 10 minutes.

Overall all the bodywork would take a days solid work I would imagine, but I 
usually do it bits at a time, often while doing other things so it's hard 
for me to say.

After that you would probably need to spend another day on making it 
realistic looking, so a basic interior, lights, wheels, pretty much just 
closing up any holes that are not bodywork.

> (And where did you get that drawing from?)

You can download the car brochure from the car makers website, and near the 
end they normally have a drawing like this from each direction showing the 
outline dimensions of the car.  However there are plenty of websites that 
specialise in collecting and sorting these type of drawings, Googling for 
"car blueprints" is a good start.

> Also, what software are you using here?

Blender.

> How many GB is it going to take to store the entire finished car?

Hardly anything, because the mesh is only stored at the basic level that you 
have defined, the smoothed mesh is generated on-the-fly.  So far it is 
245KB, and that includes all the bodywork and wheels, I just haven't started 
on the inside or the windows yet.

Of course exporting the smoothed mesh to POV is a different matter, and of 
course depends on how much smoothing you want and what format etc.  If I 
export to a file to be used in a game, and assume perhaps 32 bytes per 
vertex, 100k vertices makes that a 3MB file.

> How do you know that the smoothed mesh will actually match your 
> expectations?

Well you just look - when you edit the mesh with the smooth turned on, you 
can see both the basic mesh and the smoothed result.  If the smooth is being 
too "harsh" around a certain point you want to keep sharp, you simply 
increase the "crease" amount on certain edges on the basic mesh, this makes 
the smooth stick closer to the basic mesh around that edge.  Naturally all 
this is done interactively, so just fiddle about with the settings on the 
basic mesh until the smoothed mesh looks right.

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