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.
