Making Of 'Ready to Fly'

Step 1

I started with a sketch of a bird which had the character base of a kite silhouette (Fig.01). The main tip of this exercise was in focusing upon a strong pose of a bird (Fig.02).

Fig.

Fig.

Fig. 1b

Fig. 1b

Step 2

After achieving a satisfying sketch, I moved on to work on the modelling. All of the modelling was made using polygons, based on simple shapes, like spheres, pipes, helixes and cubes. I started to make the head using a cube shape (Fig.03) and designed the silhouette by extruding faces (Fig.04).

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

After that I arranged the vertices to look like a kite head (Fig.05-07). I put elements for the structure of the head builder from pipe extrude and created a helix. From that point, I then made the mechanism of the head.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

The body has a clear shape of a bird made from a cube shape with some splits, and at the end I made some Booleans to obtain the desired shape (Fig.08-09).

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Step 3

The next step was to create the wing and make it look like a functional one (Fig.10). This was built using the extrude face of a cube and then I added some additional mechanical support, like some joins. The rest of the body was build using the same technique that I used to create the head and I combined all of the small mechanical parts with the large shapes (Fig.11). The texturing part was not so complicated because I used procedural textures.

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Final Touches

For the lighting I use two directional lights and for the ground I used Paintfx for the grass (Fig.12). I rendered one layer in Maya, one layer in Mentalray and a different one for the grass (Fig.13). For the background I used a matte painting with clouds and some land.  Finally, the composition was made in Photoshop.

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Final Image

Final Image

Thank you very much for reading this making of. I hope you will find it useful and learn from it.

Fetching comments...

Post a comment