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.

The software lets you view the model from all different angles while you work. Here's the finished 'mesh' for the cow. I've tried to make the mesh as simple as possible because it makes it easier to work with.

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.

Here's 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. 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 my computer about 10 hours.

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 apart from that, the 3D software did the rest.

How the Cheddar Warrior picture was made | Back to the gallery of 3D art

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