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Eyes
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Although
it's just a toon bird, with toon eyes,
they still should look very alive. It's
very important to have good shape and
texture, as well as any detail which would
help to convey character emotions - in
our case eyelids will help us to get all
necessary expressions. Remember, this
bird don't have any real face for expressions,
it lacks eyebrows and other things, so
we will have to do the best with what
we have.
Create NURBS sphere in a side view approximately
in the middle of your sketch eye. Rotate
sphere around X axis -80° and freeze transformations..
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Now
it's time to assign shader to this eye.We
will use for eye just procedural shaders,
which are not only easy and powerful in
Maya, but also gives opportunity to animate
them easy. This way we can add animatable
detail with shaders instead of modeling
it.
Open Hypershade window and create Phong
material with the default settings. Then
click on Map  button for the Color value and from
Create Render Node popup window select
ramp. Repeat the same steps for bump mapping.
And for Reflected Color choose Environment
Textures > Env Sky. We will leave Env
Sky on default settings, but both ramps
has to be tweaked. |
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The
ramp which we assigned for color should
represent iris and eye white. So change
the color of the bottom part of the ramp
to white, top to black and add 3 different
shades of brown like shown in the picture.
Additional black and white bands are used
to get sharper transition of the color. |
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Bump
ramp is made the same way as color, just
that it consist of black and white colors.
One more thing which you will have to
do when you're finished making bump ramp
- you will have to click on output  button on the top of ramp Attribute Editor's window, and it will
lead you to bump 2d placement node, where
you will have to change Bump Depth value
to 1.5 - 1.6 to get right effect from
this texture.
Now from Panels menu select Saved Layouts
> Hypershade/Perspective, in perspective
view select eyeball and then in hypershade
window right click on your eye shader
and choose "Assign material to selection" |
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So
here you have eyeball ready and if you
will switch on Shading > Hardware texturing
on you will see how it looks in your workspace.
To see bums and reflection you will have
to do test rendering, which is not bad
thing to do - you can - you can see how
it will look and maybe will decide to
do some tweaks for color and bump depth. |
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Now
we are ready to make eyelids. Create another
sphere, just this time in Create Sphere
options dialog make radius slightly bigger
and choose X axis for direction. Whis
sphere still selected in the channel box
on your right side you will see line "makeNurbsSphere2",
click on it and some options will open.
Click on text "End sweep" and when it
gets marked in black, with the middle
mouth button pressed drag mouse anywhere
in the workspace to the left and to the
right. PRESTO - eye is blinking, cool.
Later we will make a special control for
that, but for now leave eyelids little
bit open, go to shading menu and choose
Smooth shade selected items, so that just
eyelid is shaded and eyeball is just wireframe.
Now we will need to add some isoparms
at the edges of the eyelids to create
nice rims like in the picture. Two - three
additional isoparms are more then enough,
all you have to do now is to pull some
CV's to get something similar as in the
picture. |
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Select
both eyeball and eyelid and move away
from central plane to the correct position
- where it matches best the beak. When
position is right in Modify menu choose
freeze transformations.
Now it's time to create a locator for
eye control. Go to Create menu > create
locator, then move it to the position
away from eye and center it in front view.Freeze
locator transformations too ( it's not
necessary step, but after freezing you
getting nice 0 transformation values in
channel box, which afterwards can make
your life much easier while animating
). Select both locator and eyeball, go
to Animate > Constrain > Aim, this
will create aim constrain between locator
and eye, so when you will move locator,
eye will keep looking at it. Don't get
scared if eye suddenly start to look somewhere
else when you will assign aim constrain
- just edit constrain properties for correct
axis. |
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Now
select both eyeball and eyelid and create
latice reformer for them. Again 3 subdivisions
in both directions should do the job.
Before starting to pull latice points,
we have to scale latice cage, otherwise
after extreme deformations which we need
to apply to the eye if you will move aim
locator, eye might get out of latice cage
and loose the shape which you intended
for it. So open outliner window, and there
you will find two latice nodes "ffd2Lattice"
and "ffd2Base". Click on "ffd2Base" node
and now you can use normal scale manipulator
to make it larger. |
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Now
you can select lattice in perspective
view and pull it's points around to get
correct shape for the eye. Keep on trying
to move ail locator to check how eye looks
in action, and when you are happy with
the result, create an empty group called
Eye_Left and in outliner drag eyeball,
eyelid, locator and both latice nodes
into that group.
What's left is just to make another eye. |
Wings,
tail and long feathers
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Our
bird starts to take shape, but it still
lacks wings, tail and some long feathers.
We will use NURBS surfaces for that. In
the front view draw EP  curve outlining left side of the feather
starting from the top. Then click on "Snap
to curves" button 
and start drawing another curve for the
right side, clicking first point on existing
curve and dragging it to the very top,
so you are sure that it snapped to the
end. Then using the same snapping technique
draw third curve at the bottom. |
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From
Surfaces menu pick Birail > Birail
1 tool, it will ask you to select profile
curve - that's the last curve we created,
then select two rail curves ( outlines
of the feather) and here you go - NURBS
feather. Click now on "Insert" key on
your keyboard and move pivot point of
your feather to the bottom part of it.
Select your NURBS feather and duplicate
it making some 20 or so copies of it. |
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Now
you will have to disperse your new feathers
on the body, especially around the eyes
and chest. Do it just for one side, you
always can mirror it to another side later.
You will also have to pull CV's of the
feathers to give them some shape and individuality.
Use wan of those feathers to make wing
feather template, it should be slightly
curved, and then duplicate it again making
10-12 copies for the wing. Locate them
at the side of the body in nice bunch
representing wing, just pay attention
that base of all feathers would be close
to each other. Later on we will parent
them to locator for animation. |
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Tail
is made the same way, feathers are scaled
and pulled to form nice looking tail
for our bird, don't hesitate to use
some 30 or more feathers there and disperse
them not only in width but in high too,
placing smaller feathers on top.
So,
at this point modeling is finished,
now we will go to the pleasant part
of texturing it.
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