Old School Motorcycle WIP

I've been working on a new portfolio piece for the last few weeks.

Since I made the Chevy Impala vintage car last spring I decided to make something in line with that while still totally new and interesting for me:

A high poly version of a Harley WLA 42! A classic motorcycle from WW2 era.

I'm going to make it a truly high poly model with pretty much all the visible details that I see fit.

For example the wheels alone took me something like 6 hours to make. And they're not even perfect duplicates so I had to tweak them individually.

Close-up of the tire detail

The whole thing is still very much a work in progress.

It has been a lot of fun (but frustrating at times) to search for good reference images. And there's always different variations of the same vehicle type so I have to kinda judge what I think looks best.

Still have to find better angles and close-ups of some of the parts like for example the engine. My version of it is still something that I roughly blocked out at the early stages.

I'm using Maya 2014 Student Version for the project. Maya's modeling tools are kinda pain to use but so far I'm fine with it..

Quad view inside Maya

If all goes well there'll be a time-lapse video about the entire process sometime soon.

Purebox visualizations

I promised to post more results from our latest industrial design project and here they are:

Poster design in A1 format, it's huge

As I mentioned in the previous post, the entire object was modeled by me so it was natural for me to make the visualizations as well.
However, I didn't do any of the actual layout, texts, logos, image placement; the graphic design part so to say. CG is my thing.

It's a very graphic and simple poster design and I like it personally a lot. Striking focal point that grabs attention and then some additional information below. It instantly communicates unlike basic studio renders.
My friends didn't have a clue that this sort of thing is even possible to do so at least they were pretty amazed by the result. The splash effect itself was based on an old Blender tutorial that I then modified further. In the end I think this type of imagery suited our concept design very well.

The first thing after importing our model from Creo was to create a simple proxy object to guide the simulation. The proxy object was essentially nothing more than just a cube with rounded corners..
I parented our geometry into the proxy and then keyframed the simplified proxy object. I had made a simple rectangular volume to act as our fluid and adjusted some settings to make the water as high res as possible.
Simulating one second (24 frames) of fluid motion took for a while but was totally worth it.

The 3D view inside Blender

I made sure that the proxy is not rendered, it only guides the motion so to say.
The shaders were relatively simple: different plastics with a glossy component and the water was just a refractive transparent material with the correct IOR of water. I had a wide mesh light acting as an area lamp just outside the frame to provide the main source of light.
Rendering was made using the Cycles path tracer that comes bundled with Blender. Full global illumination with real caustics was used to achieve best image quality possible. (Some visible caustics can be seen on the surface of the object.)
Since we needed a big image for the print it took "a while" to render our image. About 10 hours or so.

The Blender compositor: Sun Beams node highlighted

I had to use the Reduce Noise feature in PS to clear some artifacts, do some sharpening, adjust contrast etc. I used a new feature in Blender called Sun Beams to create the diagonal streak of light coming from above as post processing effect.
This was one of the most complex things I've done in a while. Learned a lot about fluid sims and animating which is always nice.

100% CG imagery

Oh, and I even made a short teaser trailer about our product and uploaded it to Youtube. Even though it is never required to make such videos I think it's fun to show how things work for real.
Besides, I like making videos and stuff.