Bird 3d Model Production

The first model I made for this assignment was a small blue bird, and the character originally was designed with pixel-art in my digital graphics assignment, and because I created multiple viewing angles (viewing the character from the front, side and behind), it doubles-up as very good reference material to work from (shown below). The bird fits to a very stylised artstyle using block colours with cartoon eyes, and matches the cartoony theme very well. It's designed to look like it would fit right into a PS2 or Gamecube platformer game with its design, but I upped the poly count to make it feel more modern and smooth, while still being easy to tell the design I'm going for.

The front and back view of the bird, importing the image into 3ds Max projected onto as plane was very useful so I could get the correct proportions whilst modelling

The sideways view of the bird, the eyes are in two different places for both the front and side views, so creative liberties were taken and I decided to put the eyes at the front further on down the line.

I wanted this bird to be an original creation that blends together concepts of different species of birds for different body parts, meaning that I needed a variety of reference images to get inspiration form. So I researched a variety of images for different birds before I started modelling, including: peacocks, parrots, toucans and ducks. And I even got ideas from other animals for the character, like the antennae of an anglerfish. Here are the reference images I used and the part that inspired my bird:

Cartoon parrot used to trace beak. (Georghiou, 2015)

The duck I traced around body the body shape of my bird. (Ducksfollowme.tumblr, n.d.)

A peacock image I referenced from to create the huge tail feathers for my bird. (Mishra, 2016) 

An angler fish which my bird's antennae was based off. (vladstudio, 2015)

A 3d model of a toucan I used to shape the feet. The bulge in the leg and connection in the toes were especially useful to use as a reference (3D Magic Models, 2016)

Another bird 3d model I looked at for the design of the feet, and how a cartoony style can be applied into the 3rd dimension (Turbosquid, 2010)

During production at the start I originally used the line tool (under splines) to trace around a cartoony image of a parrot (shown above), however it didn't really fit the posture or style I was going for. So I instead created the beak first from a simple box, and added numerous edges around the outside, from then I was able to curve it round into the shape of a beak. I then curved the body with the move tool where appropriate into a pose that more resembles a duck, still still keeping a very boxed-in a square shape for the base body. From there on the bird's eyes were easy to replicate, while still sticking to the original style. I created a vertically scaled cylinder and removed the half of the sphere that the player wouldn't see (to optimise the model and save a few polygons). There was an issue though: in both of my digital art reference images the eyes are in two different places at once, on the side of the bird's head from the side-on perspective and on the front of his face when viewed from the front. I decided to take this into my own hands and simply placed the eyes on the front of the bird, since after trying both angles it looked more natural and cuter that way. All of these shapes I made were recoloured with simple, block colours within 3ds Max, so I can have a good idea of what the model may look like before I even start texturing on the details (like his belly).

I created the bird's base body to match  the twists and turns from the reference image to give the character a more organic and natural feel, while still having cartoony proportions.

The bird's beak and eyes. The beak's shape was curved from rotating segments of a box shape and welding the pixels at the front to create a more rounded finish. His lower mouth is actually a duplicate of the upper beak only rotated upside-down and reshaped to slot in nicely with the alcove inside the beak.

I also tried adding feathers using a particle flow source in 3ds Max, in order to emit various randomly generated feathers along its body to create a more naturalistic feel. However it didn't work out and just looked bizarre. Instead I decided to do it by hand, which makes the feathers look a lot better and more natural too. First I created a plain, and imported a feather texture file in Photoshop, with another black and white image I created for the opacity map, which shows transparency around the edges when applied to the model (or else the applied feathers will also include an unwanted background, making them look rectangular in shape). Afterwards, I duplicated the plain and resized the copy as needed to create a giant tail which resembles a peacock's. Another advantage of this method is that plains are very low poly and not be resource intensive, meaning I can spawn many at a time without much of an issue. But in the end I actually removed the feathers from the bird, I as looking at the final appearance it just looked off and didn't fit the style of my original pixel-art reference image. So my final solution was to carve the shape out of a plain, bend it, and then dublicate multiple copies of different sizes to act as the various layers of the tail.

Doing the tail this way actually worked out well later on, as the bird's wings look very similar to the tail in shape. So to create those I simply duplicated one of the tail feathers, changed the colour and modified the shape of the points to more resemble the reference image. Afterwards I added the bird's anglerfish-like antennae, which differs slightly to the original reference image in the fact that the 'bulge' is much bigger than the stalk which holds it into place, as it dangles down in front of the bird giving it more weight to it. The original image depicted the antennae being entirely one component as the stalk merges into the bulge, however I wanted to give a more life-like feel to its size and gravitational direction.

The bird's tail feathers, it curves round in the centre that gives them a much more smoothed  appearance when attached to the bird's back.

The bird's wings, symmetrical to both sides of the bird to make them a mirrored image.

The bird's antennae side-by-side to the original image. It started off as a cylinder which I curved forwards as I gradually scaled it smaller as it got longer. Then, once at the end, I extruded out the 'bulge' and scaled it to a much larger size to make it genuinely look as if it would dangle down in reality.

Last but not least for the bird I made the legs and feet. I did this in a similar way to the beak, starting off with a simple box shape and resizing, extruding and chamfering the different edges and polys. The bird's claws on his toes themselves were designed to have a similar shape to the beak , whereas the feet themselves still contain the early retro 3d visual style I was aiming for. The legs in particular now have an upwards bulge that weren't visible on the original reference image, which were expanded out to give the bird's legs more visible strength and show that they're be able to support the main body, which has more weight to it.

Okay, now all of the pieces are together the last thing to do is to texture it! I began by attaching every body part together (merging the bird's colours temporarily as shown below), then adding an Unwrap UVW modifier to everything. From this point, I simply selected each piece by element and mapped them out onto a single texture sheet (with the clusters rescaled so every part is relative to each other). From this point I exported my map as a BMP ready to be edited in Adobe Photoshop.






I asked some fellow students for some peer feedback on my model to see what they think.

Jason Wood: "I love the fact it looks like the drawings, but 3d. You've brought it to life very accurately, with the beak being my favourite part."

Isaac Iqbal Zamora: "There isn't curvature in the model, which makes the bird look too square. Matches the original character well in everything else though."

Ben Musgrave: "I like the beak, the simple blocked-colours are quite charming and you managed to create your digital graphics character pretty well. The feet could be considered quite blocky, but otherwise the bird is good."

Overall I feel that my finished bird turned out quite well and fits the cartoony style I was going for. A few tweaks to the original source material had to be made in order for the character to properly adapt to 2d (such as me not texturing on lots of the lighting, as they will all be rendered directly by the game engine), and me also deciding to place the eyes on the front (even though they're placed at the side in one of the reference images), but overall I feel this task was great at homing my modelling skills and showing how I adapted a 2d pixel-art character into a fully 3d bird that still pays homage to the original source material.

As a final note I also publicly uploaded the Bird onto Sketchfab, so it's now viewable online and can be embedded into sites and rotated 360 degrees. Here's the link to it. https://skfb.ly/MVxE