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The final model for Eagle- posed
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| And from above |
As with Meerkat I started off by gathering plenty of reference imagery, as seen earlier in the blog. I then drew up some othographics.
Modeling WIP:
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| Starting out I created the rough shape of the eagles head and body. |
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| Created details such as the beak and legs separately before combining |
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| I then refined the shape until I was happy with it. |
I created the basic shapes for the base of the wing, which I planned to later apply the feathers to as planes.
Partway through my modelling process I came across the tutorial below- which was rally great for seeing how someone else would approach modelling a bird
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| Added Blendshapes for expressions |
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| Exploring transparency |
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I hand painted feathers in photoshop and applied the textures to planes. I ended up having to do quite a bit of research into feathers and transparency mapping. In the above image I experimented with threading in a separate transparency map (which didn't work in mental ray- I found out why later), or save my textures as tiffs with alpha channels (right feather)
Originally I had thought to use a feather system to texture my eagle, and looked into a few options, such as the
Dodo Master (only works on nurbs),
This feather system script, and adapting a maya hair system. Like with Meerkat though I decided against this in the end and began my texturing using Mudbox. I actually textured the eagle before the Meerkat, so didn't quite have the technique down at this point.
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| First texture option for Eagle |
I ended up not being completely satisfied with my first texturing attempt, and I had difficult with the colours in Mudbox sometimes not appearing as I thought they should. In the end I decided to re-texture from scratch in Photoshop, as i wanted more flexibility with my brushes.
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| Photoshop Eagle texture |
I used the feathers that I had created earlier and added these throughout the texture. For my bump map I took elements from the normal map I had made in Mudbox and combined them into the textures bump map.
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| Bump Map |
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| Spec |
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Feathers and Wing attempt
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I brought all my feathers into Maya and began placing them to create the wing. However I quickly realized that this was going to be a long, painful job. I also noticed that I had issues with my feathers when the transparent planes intersected- and because I had not spent much time shaping them these could potentially happen quite often once i started animating. I decided to give
Wing Creator a try. This brilliant script sets out your feathers and rigs the wings automatically, complete with blend shapes for feather movement. I mapped my own feather textures onto the system and ended up with the wings below.
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| Wings made using Wing Creator |
I had to match these wings to my model by scaling the rig and moving the controllers.
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| Completed rig |
The rest of the rig was pretty simple, with set driven keys to control the eagles claws.
