Mercedes Coupe

I turned to architecture for inspiration on this post. I’ve included an image of the US Olympic & Paralympic Museum that intrigued me. I wanted to approach car design with less familiar form elements just as the museum does with unique forms that interact with each other.

I admit up front that the exaggerated proportion of this vehicle is not practical. The high belt line certainly doesn’t aid visibility. This is purely a form study exercise just for fun. 

I started this series with a pencil sketch that Vizcom misinterpreted into a design more interesting than what I had imagined. In fact Vizcom reversed the direction of my sketch. I saw something new in it that I expanded on in Photoshop.

I often try to see what I can do to turn abstract shapes into a car. The human brain is hardwired for facial recognition and will read a face in random patterns. I see car designs in random shapes.

My design has an aircraft style monocoque section just to do something different. You can’t roll the windows down, so the door glass would have to pivot up or you would have to open the entire door.

I decided to brand my design as a Mercedes-Benz due to the Teutonic nature of the surfaces which typically have fuller sections. As long as I was designing a Mercedes, it might as well have gullwing doors.

I had immediate success generating AI videos with ChatGPT Sora and Runway ML without putting anything in the prompt. All the videos are dramatic and mostly free of artifacts. However, I couldn’t get AI to articulate the gullwing door with any realism.

I was about to make the tires black when my ‘Edit Stroke’ was acting up in Photoshop. I use that feature to make ellipses. So I decided to leave the tires whatever color they are in the rendering. If something is working why fix it?

The featured and last two images in this post were created from Sora and Runway video still frames using Photoshop to clean them up. The last image needed a considerable amount of Photoshopping to add the interior and open door. In addition to Vizcom, I use Sora and Runway to elevate my renderings.

I’ve updated my ‘Sites’ category with clickable links to app.clipchamp.com for video editing and new.express.adobe.com for merging videos. I use both and highly recommend them.