How the 3D cow illustration was made

There are lots of steps involved in using 3D software to make an illustration and a lot of really good information has already been published, in books and magazines and online, about the process. So I won't try to explain everything here. Instead I'll show you the basic stages.

First thing is to model the cow. 3D artists talk about how easy 3D software is to use, and once you've learned how to use it, it's true that you're able to work quickly. But it's not so easy to learn! I use Cinema 4D because when I bought it, it seemed to have the easiest learning curve among the various packages, but if you want to do this kind of stuff, expect to put in lots and lots of hours.

Whenever I model an animal I always start with the head. Here's the first stage of the cow model.

The software lets you view the model from all different angles while you work. Seen below is the finished cow.

I then needed to pose the cow and put it into a landscape (above). I couldn't resist the classic look of rolling green hills. I used software to make the foreground grass.

Then I modelled a wheat plant and flowers, which I duplicated lots of times around the the cow. If you rotate them a bit each time you use them, it tricks the eye into seeing them as all being different.

I didn't try to simulate a cow texture. Instead, I took I took a photo of a cow skin rug. This made a pattern much more realistic than anything I could make up

The picture above shows a flattened version of my cow mesh with the cow rug spread over it. I used software called BodyPaint to map the texture onto the mesh. It let me look at the flattened surface of the cow in the same way as a map of the world lets me look at a flattened surface of the globe. That's why 3D artists call this process 'mapping'.

You'll see I've made a few changes to the cow skin and also painted in some of my own colours so things like the cow's lips are the right colour.

I'm satisfied with how the texture wraps around the cow now (above). So I drop it back into my scene and start working on the materials to colour all the other objects.

I've finished the job of putting materials onto everything (above) and am ready to get the computer to 'render' the scene. It looks a little bit strange because I'm only showing it the way I see it when I work in the computer. But rendering will change all that.

Rendering is the process of getting your computer to convert all your hard work in modelling, texturing and lighting into a finished bit of art. You leave the computer to do this on it's own, and it can take a lot of time.

How much time, depends on a whole lot of things, like for example, how fast your computer is, how many objects are in the scene, how complex those objects are, how many lights are used in the scene, and how big you want the final image to be. To render this image big enough for, say, a half-page magazine illustration would take about 10 hours on an old computer or about a couple of hours on a new one.

And here's the finished illustration (above). I've opened the rendered file in Photoshop and added a bit of fuzzy hair around its head and ears, but the 3D software did the rest.

How the Cheddar Warrior picture was made
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