As I have been building I had updated the stock photo with new ideas or how it must be once alterations to the donor shell have finished. A bit of a recap here to the current stock body at factory ride height. Running board to ground clearance is 315mm or 12.5"
Then the body was lowered until the running boards were 175mm-7" from the ground at the rear, and the front down to 150mm-6". Keep in mind that the SRT8 donor only sat 115mm-4.5" off the ground with the stock suspension. So there is room to go lower and also still be above the legal 100mm-4" of ground clearance rule. The front guards will need to be remade with a higher arch above the centre of the tyre as there is only about 40mm-1.5" of room for up travel as it sits now.
Using Corel Photo-Paint 9 program, which came out in 1999, I'm showing a 10" stretch between the firewall and the front of the rear wheel arch by adding 125mm-5" to each door. This stretches the wheel base from 113" to 123" which is 2" longer than the Willys 8-88 which was offered at the same time as this model.
The next thing I came to realise was that the whole angle of the body from the windows sills upward would have to be angled up from the stock 0.5° to 2°. This is to make sure that the rear most window would be higher than the parcel shelf being reused as part of the rear bulk head construction from the donor shell and not have it too high above the dash line.
Extending the doors over the frame cover 50mm-2" has been added to reduce the look of the length of the doors as well as improve the window to door height ratio.
Then whole rear wheel arch has to be raised 50mm/2" as well to allow enough rear wheel up travel, bringing that distance between the top of the arch and the beltline back to what it was before the wedge was added.
In this shot the C pillar has been moved forward 50mm-2"and extra width added to it so the upper seat belt mount lined up with the donor seat belt reel and C pillar position. The bonnet side was also brought down to match the extended doors.
To improve the proportions of the longer body compared to bonnet/hood length, I brought the cowl to bonnet join back closer to the windscreen post. This creates an illusion that the bonnet is longer than it really is as I have not changed the length of the car overall.
Felt the length of the side vents looked too short now, so they also were extended and the balance is better I feel. All these photo changes were done by cutting the body in the program into pieces and adding or stretching them before putting them back together again. Some by cutting pieces out and overlaying them some where else to get the result I was after. Very time consuming way to do it but it is a program I was used to and owned.
Now for the first time in my life I tried AI. I had seen people post colour changes to their car but had no idea how to do it. Saw ChatGPT mentioned and didn't even know what it was! That is how green I am to AI. Weird as until recently, used to build all my own computers from the motherboard up. Hardware doesn't worry me it all or even programming the Trucks ECU for all the changes I had made. Anyway to give me a head start I found this program within ChatGPT that helps you with the prompts, as any help was going to be a god send. Real Car Painter, change the color of your car. I setup a free account which limits you to about 3 uploads a day and some revisions. Just clicked on the + next to the chat window in the program and uploaded the last picture I had altered. Asked it to paint it dark gold and for some smoothie wheels for it. It came back with this. Looks better, but boy did it make a lot of other changes, even though I said not too! I think my car not being common and so highly altered on top of that, it tried to change it to something it knew. It did things like move the cowl/bonnet line right back where it was and added a brow above the window. Changed the outline of the windows and lengthen the bonnet too! Frustrating after all that work I had done. It did however lift the front guard higher over the tyre to the profile I was after without asking.
Asked for some centre caps and it changed the window outlines again. Least it is closer to what is stock but weird that things like that change without asking.
Tried a different shade of gold, wheels and also for the chrome pieces to be a bronze colour. Notice it added rubber running board covers as well. I used the erase tool in Windows picture viewer to remove the brow. It also added two rear door hinges.
At this stage I went back to editing with Corel Photo-paint again. Shortened the front back to stock again. I also used the circle cutout tool to cut and enlarge the smoothie wheels from the other photo to be 18" with 255/60R18 tyres front and rear. Also wanted to see what removing the cowl to bonnet side join would look like. We didn't like it. Each major change I would make like this I would send the photo to my wife Lisa at work and ask her opinion.
We liked the look of the cowl join around 100mm-4" from the door. Also squared up the front door window opening back to stock as well. Moved the hinges and added another front one by cutting and pasting in the lower one to where my new hinge mounts are.
Thought the roofline looked too high in the back, so lowered it by angling it down from the top of the A pillar. Thought it was a bit much though.
Settled on this height with the rear door window opening parallel. Went and measured the stock one to see how I need to chop it by and it was already like this! Another change by AI without asking. Also changed the upper front door line to be straight like stock as well.
Re uploaded the last altered picture in just a normal ChatGPT format using this prompt: Without altering a single pixel of the gold car, remove the background and place in an abandoned warehouse. I still had to ask it to return the car to original proportions but got this result after that, but think the rear most window is longer than before and the front wheel/tyre smaller?
Then thought I would give the Google Gemini AI a go, uploading the same picture where it is still under the carport and unpainted in its last modified form. Using the create an image option and said to place the car un-altered into a 1930's street scene. It did a great job and you are not limited on the amount of uploads and changes either with the free program. You do lose some resolution though I noticed, as with ChatGPT.
Even managed to get a darker gold colour as well which is very close to the colour that Lisa has chosen for her car. This was all done a while ago with only the stretched doors and before I knew exactly how many more changes would be needed once the donor floor and door openings were completed.
So how does reality stack up now? Well a lot different I found out. I had to
move the C pillar forward of the rear axle centreline a lot more than planned to
keep the donor fuel tank under the seat and reuse the whole rear substructure
that also holds the independent rear suspension. Moving the C pillar forward
though balances out the rear door length as would have continued over the rear
wheel arch more if left stock. The bonnet had been shortened too much as I had mistakenly measured forward of the new firewall corner of the
donor, rather than the centre of it due to the fact it is now curved where the
stock firewall is flat.
So after making all the changes this is what we have to the closest inch as I
see it now. I calculated out proportions of door height to width and made sure
it was the same in the photo. Once I had a known length I could calculate out
the rest of the body including the body shell length from the very back to the
windscreen, and the proportion of the windscreen to grille from that. So what is
still stock? Window height, centre of rear axle rearwards and A pillar to the
front of the grille length.
Above was the first time I got AI to make a change for me other than colour and background that worked! I asked Gemini if it could make the D pillar wider like the two door version of the Willys. On the second try it got it! Strangely, actually having a conversation and being polite seems to help rather than barking orders. All a bit weird to me to be honest and am still getting comfortable with that concept of talking to AI. This brings the rear most window back to stock in size and just moves it forward with the new C pillar location and length. Visually shortens the rear from the C pillar back. Not sure if that helps proportions or not, even though it hasn't changed the overall length at all? Makes it look less limousine like?
This better shows where the main changes in length and angle have happened. Was
interesting to see how much the adding the wedge to the beltline added by the
time it gets to the rear of the car starting at the grille. Measurements were
added using the free Canva photo editor that I used for the first time.
The car looks huge until I compared it to our
daily driver which is a 2010 Jeep Cherokee, (Liberty), which is the smaller
brother of the Grand Cherokee in the Jeep line up. Bumper to bumper it is still
200mm-8" shorter! For cars of the 1932 era that the Willys was made, it puts it with
the Lincoln, Cadillac, Franklin and Packard straight eights etc.
For some reason it gave me a bonus shot without asking with a door opened and an interior fitted. Must be because I said it did a good job! :D