The project: Sculpt a bird of prey that will be manufactured as a visual bird deterrent.
The project was exciting for a number of reasons. Free-form organic objects are great... not many people can accomplish them as CAD models, and the complexity of this one was really high. In fact it stretched the demands of my CAD workstations to it's very limits.
Traditionally a product like this is simply sculpted as a master. Which, if the initial pass at it is exactly what the client wants, or at least the right proportions, then there's no problem. However, what if you wanted to stretch it, or re-ballance it. These things are much harder to do on a hard physical model. However, in Maya, there are these things called "deformers" which, essentially, allow you to re-shape the whole model, or bits and pieces. So by going digital, we had opportunities to try out different scowls and proportions really quickly and with highly realistic details maintained.
Of course, the 2.8M polygon model which was the end result of the sculpting was about as unwieldy as you can get in maya! so I had to figure out a way to manipulate a low resolution version and bring back up all the details so that any editing I did to the positions or body parts, or changing the head turn etc, would all be replicated down through the chain - as well as maintaining the color texture map which was another critical component.
The other reason for doing this sculpt digitally is that, in the end, the client (Bird B Gone) had more control over the end result. Which turned out great!
This was, in fact, the second Bird of Prey that we went with. The first was an Owl, but... instead of going with the "typical" I think they were after something more unique and agressive!
Check out the press release here:
New Red Hawk Decoy Press Release
Image of Red Hawk Decoy
The manufacturer did a really wonderful job replicating all the fine digital details that I spent hours sculpting in Maya using displacement maps and sculpting areas by hand.
In the end, I needed to bring the model into proEngineer Wildfire, so that I could add the engineering details, like thickness and feet-bumps as well as the hanger loop on top. Since the maya sculpt was done in polygons, I actually wrote my own code to translate the 2.8M Polygone Maya model into a nurbs surface so that I could then bring into proengineer and detail out these details.
At some point I'm going to have to post the final images I delivered just to show how well these guys did!
The actual product isn't yet up on their website, but as soon as it is, I'll post a link there. :)
Thanks for reading!
VERY IMPRESSIVE MR KELLER....
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