Summer Project: Patchwork Bird

As asked, here is the summary of  my summer project.
I’ve got a dynamic piece of music which suggested a story on its own . 

 

 For…around two weeks I was just visualizing the story and with each and every time I listened to the music it shaped to its clearest. For I still wanted to have a lovely summer, I decided to work only on the character, a patchwork Bird, Ivan . So the initial sketching began.

After which it was clear what kind of idea I'm going for and what  I needed to research to push my design. And it was a combination of ships (served as "bricks") , birds ( for the anatomy)  and structures ( over all balance and harmony of design).

Not long after that I went to preproduction. I did Lots of shape tests, colour palette decisions  ect. to make sure I have a strong skeleton and structure on which further and  final designing was developed.

At this point I had everything I needed and it felt  as if I already rehearsed  the construction of the bird . All the problemsolving was finished at this stage, next was the pure building in maya.

Modeling and texturing were quite straight forward. Though I had to go for some modeling tutorials. Oh, I remember how UV layout took me.. 4 days to finish.. This year Alan taught us  how to lay out organic model’s UVs , what takes.. 2 hours  :D  What a bummer I thought  :D

All the textures were hand painted using aquarelle, colour pencil. Then imported to Photoshop for tweaking.

Some testing and final gathering took place....

And.. for my long awaited day, I saw the bird in its full beauty :D

 

Then I spent some time working on his environment. I took idea for that from one of my previous graphic works . By combining both, the handpainted backdrop and the 3d model I've created a presentable still.

Today I'm hoping to successfully work on realisation of the story about Ivan, the Bird.

Full production documentation of the character can be found here.
Thank you :)