Finding Good Design Inspiration
The guide to finding appropriate and replicatable design inspiration and help to make realistic designs.
Preface: This is an expansion on a point in Yangs post above about how to use inspiration vehicles effectively. I by far do not consider myself the best designer on the forum, but I would say I am pretty decent and this post is only meant to explain how these steps helped me improve. This guide is not an end game design recipe but should help you establish some design rules and proportion fixtures effectively to then expand your design on to.
Part 0: What do you want to achieve?
The most realistic Automation designs look as such to the point you could see them in real life, take for example MGR’s Elwood Iroquois, or RK38’s Sachiuri Sagitta. These cars have taken inspiration from real life examples and then fused them with their own design language. Creating a unique design but not with Mitsuoka Orochi levels of standing out were they to be in the real world.
An important fact to note with your own design ideas is that if it has not been done on a car before in some way, it likely does not work. You do not need to try and reinvent the wheel.
Take this tailight arrangement for example, I thought “hey that’s unique, nobody has done that before on a luxury SUV, I’ll put it on my car” but taking a step back and listening to another opinion, I realised why that design has never been done before … because it looks like arse.
The point I am making is that by taking things from reality you can create an affective design basis to which you can add alterations. But still have your own idea in your head as to what you want to go for.
Part 1: Choosing your inspiration.
The most important and maybe obvious piece of advice in choosing your inspiration is to use cars that are a similar shape to the vehicle body you are using, there’s no point in using a Range Rover as a starting point for an supermini, they just do not match up.
Take this 1970 supercar, though the Lamborghini Miura was the iconic supercar, it’s iconic front end cannot be effectively placed onto this body, you can see by just looking at the starting body’s formation. So what to do, find vehicles that A: Use the exact body you want to use, and/or, B: find ones similar to create the bulk of the starting design. Your inspiration must be befitting to the body you want to use.
Details however can come from different models as the tailights and under door trim of this model are similar to that of a Miura P400.
You can see clearly this inspiration vehicles share definite qualities with the body I used and so the design aspects taken can be placed effectively.
Part 2: Using your inspiration without copying.
The easiest way to not look like you’re simply making a replica is to use a lot of different aspects from a lot of different cars.
Take for example this current day hatchback :
I would say that I cannot pinpoint what real world example this car exactly looks like, this is because I used a large amount of different aspects from different cars and mesh them all together.
Another obvious point is to know which nation your car is going to be from, this being a French vehicle I naturally used a lot of French inspiration and then built upon it to make it more to my tastes.
Inspiration vehicles for modern day hatchback
Intitial grille design
The rolled over front of bonnet look
Bottom air vents
Initial tailight design
Extra: Full length bonnet trapezoid from this became part of my company’s design language
Linking to Yangs previous post, using inspiration that has it’s fixtures already in the game can come as a huge time saving benefit, EG: The Meganes fascia vents and Corolla grille are already similarly modeled in game so I needed not craft my own fixture and therefore saved a large amount of time. So choose inspo that could be easily replicated in game to start with.
You can use other guides in this thread to aid with tweaking existing designs and so create a more unique design.
My final point is that just using appropriate irl cars to design from can really give a boost to your design realism and that by doing this for many cars you begin to understand how to proportion and place fixtures properly, and learn more about era appropriate features and shapes, so long as you use appropriate inspo.
Basically replicating, copying whatever you want to call it call it provides a solid start to a design and if nothing was copied in the first place cars wouldn’t have 4 wheels, so you aren’t cheating or being a bad designer by using other designs to help.
A strange way that I look at a finished design is “does it look like a GTAV car”, in that does it look inspired by an irl car using a real life body but not totally copying, think Karin Sultan vs Subaru Impreza/IS300, they have the same vibe but are not total copies or eachother.
Thanks for taking it out of your time to read that, hopefully it can help someone!