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. The pictures below show the finished cow.

I then needed to put the cow into a landscape (below). I couldn’t resist the classic look of rolling green hills. I used the same Cinema 4D software which I’d used for the cow to make the hills, the fence and the foreground grass.

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

This cow skin rug saved me a heap of work in texturing

When it came time to put spots onto the cow I didn’t try to simulate a cow texture. Instead, I took a photo of a cow skin rug. This resulted in a pattern much more realistic than anything I could make up.

The grid of lines is a 2D representation of the mesh I built to make the cow model. By lining up the grid with the cow texture I can control how the cow pattern is applied to the model

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 lets me see the flattened surface of the cow in the same way as a map of the world lets us see 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. Notice that I haven’t bothered modelling the hooves because I know they’ll be hidden in the long grass.

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 on it with the computer. But rendering will change all that.

During the rendering process the computer does all the hard work. It makes an assessment of every part of the scene I’ve assembled and draws up the final image, pixel by pixel. During rendering the computer makes decisions based on the modelling, texturing, lighting and any other effects going on in the scene. It can take a long 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 an hour on a new one.

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

How the Cheddar Warrior picture was made

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