Osprey Custom Cars Website by Chase Richardet
Capstone Project Website: http://www.buildyourosprey.com/
Working with a current employer, this project is a new and improved update to a website for a custom car manufacturer that allows users to customize different car models to help customers envision their ideas.





For the past 3 years I have been working at Osprey Custom Cars. Our primary product is Corvette LS engine swapped Land Rover Defender replicas. We build these trucks from the ground up, all new parts around a modern engine (with 435 horsepower) this creates a luxurious design of classic aesthetics with the ease of a modern drive train. The first thing visitors see when opening our website right front and center of our home page is our motto, “your dream, our team.” It is our goal as a company to allow customers to be able to design the vehicle of their dreams, built to suit them aesthetically and functionally.
Land Rover Defenders have fourteen different distinct body style variants based on three different chassis. These three chassis are named after their wheel base length in inches(distance between the center of the wheels), these chassis are the 90, 110 and 130. Being an older and very popular vehicle, there have been thousands of different accessories made throughout the years (obviously I won’t be modeling every Land Rover Defender accessory ever made, just the ones we regularly use). On top of all of that, being a custom car shop we have the ability to paint our products any color the customer wants.
All of this adds up to one of our common issues, customers placing an order for something and then changing their mind when they start receiving progress pictures and realize that the image of their Defender in their head just doesn’t look right to them in reality. This drives me and one of my coworkers insane as we work inventory and are stuck ordering parts for these last-minute decisions– the topic of one of these build-a-truck sites would often come up between us on our lunch breaks, usually on Fridays while venting about work problems that had popped up throughout the week. These conversations and a project I did in another class (CSC-430 with Dr. Morago) inspired me to start this project. I will be building a site for Osprey which will allow users to quickly create a digital visualization of their dream.
I talked to the shop manager Barrett Edwards, he believes a site like this is a great way for customers to be able to see what their ideas look like, sometimes the mind’s eye is flawed and fixes things and makes them look better than they really do. There is a surprising amount of artistic design in this business, just a simple color change can make something simple like a bumper look completely wrong. A massive issue is due to the Defenders long existence there’s a distinct difference between Defenders going for a classic look and Defenders going for a modern look, sometimes people will try to mix the two and it never looks right (especially to those of us who work around them) and often the customer asks to change it.
For the visualization of the Defenders, I will use renders of 3d models, I built these using vector images and measurements and references directly from the trucks we produce. During the modeling process I would often show my coworkers and employers the models, so I got as many experienced eyes as possible to check for modeling errors ensuring the highest-level accuracy possible. One of the major errors was called out by Barrett, two of the 130 models were too long, and I didn’t realize this as I had never seen one in person. Most of the modeling time was spent on the front end of the trucks as it’s the most complex part and is used on all thirteen variants, so it had to be perfect to prevent having to fix the same error thirteen times later down the line. An easy fifty to one hundred hours was put in this front end alone, along with several check ins with coworkers for second opinions making sure everything was perfect. I used these vector images pulled of google to get the basic dimensions of the Defenders, and then make edits and perfections using physical measurements.