One morning, I was tidying up my art
studio and came across some sketches that I had
done more than five years ago. The brief at that
time had been to design a bike for a
thirty-something "born again" biker who wanted to
rediscover his youth with a stunning, aggressive,
and evil looking bike. This bike would make the
owner feel youthful and turn other bikers green
with envy.
I decided to resurrect, revise,
and model this design as my first submission to
earn the coveted CG Choice Award. The original
spark for this concept had come from seeing a
hooded man. When viewing the front portion of the
bike, you can see an evil figure whose
eyes/headlights are peeping from underneath the
hood. To compliment this evil and aggressive
design I named the bike “Dacoit”, an old Hindi
word for a class of robbers in India who act in
gangs and are usually armed and
dangerous.
The majority of the sketches were
created years ago which gave me a head start for
this new challenge. The initial designs still felt
fresh and contemporary, however I decided to
continue sketching and revise some parts of the
bike. For this project I created three distinct
design directions. A semi-finished 2D Photoshop
rendering was created for two of the design
directions (orange bikes below). One idea was to
combine many of the elements together into one
final bike. I resisted that idea and focused on
the strong linear/non-organic visual identity of
the selected third design direction (sketches
above). Some elements from the other two designs
were incorporated into the final bike and some
were used as inspiration, like the seat back rest,
front mud guard, rear swing arm, and the brake
disc area. In the near future I plan on revising
and bringing the other two designs to life as
well.
Dacoit is a concept bike and close
to a fully engineered bike. For the general
measurements I studied many existing bikes. I had
a clear vision of how I wanted the bike to look so
the modeling process was straight forward. A
combination of Nurb, poly and sub-d modeling was
used and I moved between them as needed. When the
modeling was nearing completion I did several
Final Gather test renders (render results below).
I was pleased with the direction but not fully
satisfied with the renders so I continued to do
additional test renders using Global illumination
(like the one below). Apart from a few artifacts I
was happy with the GI test render, although my
PC’s rendering time did test my patience on a few
occasions.
At
this stage, something else bothered me about the
model. I was not happy with some design details
so I jumped back into modeling mode and
re-modeled the following areas: a) Front mud
guard was revised and made more aesthetically
pleasing b) Indicator lights were added on
the front fairing (just above my logo) c)
The seat and thigh area of the bike was thinned
out and made more ergonomic d) I created a new
circular display stage for the bike.
The
resulting wire frame screen grabs of the final
revised model are below.
After
updating the model I was satisfied with the
design and started to re-focus my energies on
rendering the bike. I concentrated on using
Final Gather without Global Illumination to keep
the render times relatively low. After some
experimenting I produced this render on the
left. The render had an appealing black and
white photographic feel, so I continued to
render the other views with the same set-up.
The setup uses a light panel that is
placed right above the bike as the main light
source. A couple of weak spotlights are added to
achieve relevant shadows and highlights. All of
the following final images are rendered in Maya
using Mental Ray with Final Gather and no
GI.
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