Early last year I was hugely lucky and privileged to write a tutorial for 3D World magazine. I was asked to create a steampunk character and was more or less left to my own devices for the entire design of this little guy which is pretty rare and was so much fun. There were quite a few little tips and tricks that I picked up while researching for this tute too, like constraining objects to a surface to add smaller details and projecting curves on to surfaces to extrude other details from. In terms of textures, everything was rendered through mental ray, were all basic shaders and there was only a diffuse and normal map applies to most materials. As the final render was going to be pretty large and 300dpi for print, the HDRI lighting was taking far too long to render so it was finally lit with a traditional 3-point set up. There was also an extra rim light that was light-linked to just the geometry with the gold metal material to make it pop a little more.
I posed him just before he took off, as if something had just caught his eye and he was about to investigate. Without animation sometimes it's difficult to portray a sense of motion and I felt like it was important to get that feeling into this image as he's such a dynamic character, even though those wings may not be the best at keeping him in the air. . . .
You can still catch this tutorial online here http://www.3dworldmag.com/2012/08/30/build-a-steampunk-model-in-maya/
I posed him just before he took off, as if something had just caught his eye and he was about to investigate. Without animation sometimes it's difficult to portray a sense of motion and I felt like it was important to get that feeling into this image as he's such a dynamic character, even though those wings may not be the best at keeping him in the air. . . .
You can still catch this tutorial online here http://www.3dworldmag.com/2012/08/30/build-a-steampunk-model-in-maya/