Motorcycle renders

I've spent pretty much my entire spare time this month rendering the motorcycle that I've been working on. It took a lot of time to try out different materials, lights etc. But it has all been worth it up to this point because I really dig the results so far. Lots of grunge, dirt and attitude.

What I did was I exported the Maya file as an stl and then refined the setup a bit in Blender. Having done that Blender Cycles was used to render all the images. Some images needed higher sampling so I allowed them to render overnight for up to eight or ten hours per frame.

There's still some work to do until I think I'm done with this project. Oh, and I've now edited 55 hours of time-lapse footage down to just two hours. The video only needs to be put together at this point!

I have some more cool angles on my hard-drive but here's some of the finished pieces that I can share.

Haven't decided yet which of the images go to my online portfolio.

I'll post the time-lapse video once I get it done.

I also uploaded the model to Sketchfab. Check out the interactive preview below!

Motorcycle project update

I've been working for the past two weeks on my latest personal project, the Harley WLA 42 motorcycle model. Building up on where I left last time I posted about this piece two weeks ago.

As for the 3D modeling part using Maya I think it's now pretty much all done. The modeling phase took me over an entire month: I started on 30th October and finished today. It's the longest time I've spent working on one single 3D model. I might have went a little overboard with some of the details but oh well.. There's so many little details that just had to be included in the model. I had fun making the parts and at this point I think it looks very satisfying:

It's crazy to think how long time it actually takes to produce quality models.

I tried to work something like two to three hours a day on this project. Some days even longer than that and some days not at all.

I've been pretty busy with other stuff so sometimes things get dragged.

I have now over 50 hours of screen recordings on my hard drive. It covers the whole process of creating the geometry, fixing topology, redoing stuff, searching for reference images and even changing tracks on Spotify.

I'll edit the time-lapse video once I get this whole thing done.

I'm very satisfied with the motorcycle. It looks very accurate while being relatively light 3D model to adjust when necessary. The topology is pretty much all quads with just a few ngons. Overall I think my hardsurface modeling skills have improved a lot. During the last year or so the quality of my work has become pretty solid I think.

Here's more screenshots from different angles:

Next up: shading, lighting and rendering!