Bird Groom

Last semester for I tried to use Shave and a Haircut to do a groom for this bird I modeled and rigged. In hindsight I don't think I would have approached it this way, I definitely would have painted on his head and arm feathers, rather than grown the hairs on those smooth areas I think, but this was good practice. and I think its an ok render. Nothing amazing, and I find new mistakes everywhere, buy it was a learning experience for sure.

I'm going to upload some stuff about my rig and some test animations sometime, since that stuff turned out way better, so stay posted.

Bird Animated

Here's a playblast of an animation I started on today using my new and improved bird! Its not anywhere near finished, but I thought it would be cool to show what I've been working on lately.

Besides, who doesn't want to see a bird singing Sinatra?

A Preview of what I've Been Doing

Remember this Bird that I was working on a few months ago? Well I realized that it was completely awful in every way so I'm in the process of rigging a BRAND NEW bird, that is way cuter, a more operational rig, and will have more impressive feathers, so stay tuned!

A Hodgepodge of new art.

Here is an apple I painted in photoshop 

Belly Dancer for Character Design class

I'm going to Model this bird in Maya in the very near future. I want to learn how to be awesome at rigging wings. 

Zoo Sketching!

Last week, some friends and I went to the Hogle Zoo. That zoo is nice, its a cute little zoo that is easy to walk through in a couple hours, but its also one of those places that makes me miss Maryland where I was only a few metro stops awayfrom the National Zoo which is huge and free. Anyway, here are a few of my sketches from that day

I tried out a new calligraphy pen, and a super fancy pentel brush pen...that just leaked everywhere. Thank heavens for water soluble ink...

Bird with his feathers

I''m getting further on that bird I was working on a while back, I'm working on the feathers, they're a bit too muppet-like for my tastes, but they're better than they were before. Maya Fur is what I used.

Right now I'm fixing completely redoing a horrible rig I made for him, so you'll see an update soon.

Birds and other Sketches

In a previous post, I mentioned how I was modeling a bird in maya, well here are some of the sketches that led to that...

This was my first sketch for the bird. I've been looking a lot at Brittney Lee's artwork and decided to try and make a bird in her style. Later on, I decided to take my water brush pens for a spin and I painted him with a little watercolor palette I had laying around.

I then figured that first one, although he is cute, is way too planar and flat to try and model in maya. So I looked up some photos of some lovebirds and based this guy off of them. I watercolored this during church, and I accidentally squeezed out way too much water from my water brush pen, and the red smeared everywhere, and, since I was at church the most absorbent thing I had was a program, and those aren't super absorbent, so I rubbed it into the page outside the lines. Oops. I could clean it up in photoshop but I don't feel like it right now... Moral of the Story: Don't watercolor in church when you should be listening to the testimonies.

And this is me just trying to figure out what birds look like from the front. I was really inspired by the upcoming movie Rio for all this.

And here are some other sketches for good measure

And here's a pine tree I drew and liked

And here is a girl with a sweet fro that I drew after I drew the headband girl which is why she's floating there.

Modeling a Bird

I am modeling this bird right now. I plan on giving him feathers and I am going to rig and animate him. (He is in smooth proxy mode right now, which means half of him is still unsmoothed, and the proxy side will show what he will look like smoothed when you tweak stuff around.

Let me know if you think I should make any major changes, because I think I'm almost done with the modeling stages

Update: Here is the finished Model