When starting up this "New Beetle" project I had a few goals to achieve. I wanted the model to be 100% perfect or close to, the final output should be better then anything I've done before. From the beginning I chose not to have a deadline, I wanted to put the time that I needed into this project, no shortcuts.

First thing to do is to find reference material, lots of reference material. This is a crucial part of modeling an object perfectly, you need to know how it looks to make it perfect.

Fig 01. Shows a 1/18 scale model, this reference was probably the one I use the least. Besides the scale model I bought an 80 page book about the New Beetle, it got some great images of the car, and some cool history about the car. The last piece in Fig 01. is the brochure about the car that I got from my local car dealer, I don't know if you can see it on the picture, but the back of it is almost falling apart! Fig 02. Is 66 pictures I took with my digital camera on a field trip to the local dealer. Also very useful because I could take some close-ups that I didn't have in the book or the brochure. Plus I could take perpendicular pictures of the lights and other stuff I could use as textures later on.

Fig 03. Is the most valueable reference you can ever get when modeling a car. I got 3 sets of print of the Beetle, but one of the sets was far from precise. So remember to check the prints if you want to model something, is the headlight in the same height on the front and side pics? And so on.

When all the reference material was found, I analysed the model to figure out how to model it. As you can see on Fig 04. I divided it into parts, the red parts is of course almost the same part as the back. My plan was to model the front arc (red part) and then mirror it and adjust it to make the back arc. These two parts should of course fit 100% to the blueprints, but even though they fit, it's not necessarly right.
The blueprint is only 2d, so we can only see wether the outline is right or not. But if I made an intersection between the green line and the red parts, I could see on the front and back view on the blueprint if the 3D model was right or not. it's pretty essential to do this kinda cuts to see if the 3d is ok when working with blueprints. If the front and back arc is ok, it's going to be relative easy to make the side (blue part)