24 May 2003

Sorry about the huge gap between updates..I've been kinda busy. There has been much progress on "the car" particularly correcting inaccuracies in the rear and the underside. There has also been a few polygons added to the front engine intake to subtly round it out a bit more.

The latest shots below are the result of trying out diffent rendering techniques. I messed around with the lighting and the glossiness of the textures to get the desired effect. I still have no idea what I'm doing, but I think it makes the model look a bit more realistic. These are still the preliminary textures...it will look even better after the final textures are drawn and applied.

My buddy Ray Folk has drawn up a ridiculously detailed map of the MKC's dash. Every gauge and letter is clearly and accurately displayed; only the real car shows it better. He spent a lot of time getting every detail right, and like me he's so obsessed with the car that he won't quit improving it until he is completely satisfied. Of course, one would be hard pressed to find a part of it that needs any improving. Great work Ray!

15 November 2002

Here they are...the LATEST pictures of the in-development Batmobile for your veiwing pleasure. 'In-development' for what exactly? I don't know, whatever PC game is editable and can handle it when I'm done with it. Will that be MM3? Time will tell.

I really should be studying now, but I decided I can take a break to upload some more Batmobile pictures. Now you can see what "the car" looks like with it's first textures applied. The world's finest automobile is now finally reunited with it's driver. Batman may look a little weird now, but that's because I was mad stingy on the polygons when I was making him because I had already put so much into his ride. The good news is I managed to get rid of A LOT of the unnecessary polygons from the car so the latest count is 18,978 (many of the elimanated faces were double-faces and other modeling errors). I still plan to semi-gloss the majority of the body paint and make the windows look more glassy. Without futher ado, enjoy---

That's it for now...MAYBE there will be an update during the holiday, but for now, I gotta start preparing for finals.

09 November 2002

What's this? An update? Its only been what? 7 MONTHS!!!. Geez I really should tend to this page more often...but you know how it goes..."school gets in the way". I've done some texturing work on the car, but alas, I have no new pictures to show you just yet.

I do have something cool to show you guys though...While searching the net in my never ending quest to find more 1989 Batmobile information, I came across this guys site which has some REALLY cool images of a custom-detailed RichMan's Toys Batmobile. It's in Japanese, so unless you can understand that language, Altavista-rize it and you can make out some of what he's saying, but truly, the beautiful images are a universal language.

In other news, according to Midtown Madness 2 Central,, Microsoft and DICE software recently announced that the highly anticipated Midtown Madness 3 is not going to be exclusive to the X-Box, but will be ported to the PC as well. There is no mention yet about whether or not it will be possible to add user made vehicles to the game as in the previous two installations so it will be interesting to see if this has any ramifications for the in-development Batmobile. No promises yet ;)

16 April 2002

I figured I should try update this page regularly so I don't forget about it. No real news, just thought I should post a link to Batmobile.net as it was a major resource for me when building the Batmobile. Speaking of links anyone know how I can change the color of my links (blue on this background is kinda hard to see).

I was looking at my official Batmobile stats that are at the top of the page and I got to thinking: "What the heck does ROS stand for anyway?" email me if you know.

3 weeks from today my summer vacation begins and I'm planning to have the Batmobile's mesh COMPLETELY done within one week of that. Then comes the joyous task of unwrapping the UVWs in Max and making textures to fit them (I don't even have a guess as to how long that will take).

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but I'm looking for pictures and information (especially blueprints!) on the 1995 Batmobile and Ecto 1 from Ghostbusters. I haven't decided which I'm gonna do once the current Batmobile is finished texturing, but I estimate Ecto 1 to have considerably less polygons than any of the Batmobile's, so it may be possible to make it for one of the current Midtown Madnesses.

14 April 2002

Welcome to my second Batmobile page. If its anything like my first , it’ll never be updated. Hopefully I’ll actually update this when summer rolls around. I am a comic-book geek. My favorite character is Batman. I don’t know everything there is to know about Batman and I don’t pretend to. However I do know that the Batmobile is the coolest car ever. Its been interpreted a lot by different artists through the years, and while I like them all, I like Anton Furst's interpretation the best. The late Anton Furst was the production designer on the first Batman film. Maybe I’m biased toward his Batmobile above the others because that movie was my first Batman experience that had a lasting impression on me. Or maybe the reason the reason that movie had such an impression on me is because of the car.

If you clicked the first link above, you’ve seen my earliest 3-D work. I decided to learn to a 3-D program just so that I could put the Batmobile into a computer game. Now that I look back at one of my earliest attempts at 3-D modeling, I’m amazed at how simple it is compared to my current stuff. I think that Batmobile was just under 800 polygon’s. The latest one is over 30,000 polygon’s and it isn’t even done yet. I don’t think I can fit that many triangles into any of today’s computer games at a reasonable frame rate, so I haven’t decide what I’m going to do with it yet. Maybe I’ll make an animation with it or something. Maybe DC Comics will license me to design a Batman game. (Yeah right!) If I’m lucky I’ll win the lotto and use it as a reference to build a life size replica for myself.

For my latest Batmobile I did TONS of research on the car just so that I could get its details right. More on that later. If you want to contact me you can email me at either earl_cooper@yahoo.com You can also find me on the DC boards if you want to talk Batman comics.