PACK ⬕ Soaring Eagle

TORRENT DOWNLOAD

- This pack contains 43 VJ loops (74 GB)

Inspired by a dream I had a while back. I was flying in the pink sunset  clouds and saw some birds soaring among the clouds and connected to  their wings were long golden silk that was following the movement of the  wings flapping. When I awoke the image was still clear in my mind.

I started off by doing tinkering with a diamond shader with a super high  dispersion factor to create some wild colors. But the real breakthrough  happened when I added a field of spheres below the bird, set them to  illuminate, and yet only visible in the refractions. The eagle is rigged  using bend deformers for the wing and tail motions. To give the bird a  little bit more life when it was just soaring and not flapping its  wings, I also used a wave deformer to add some feeling of undulating  movement.

Interesting to note that the rays were done entirely in After Effects,  thanks to carefully keying out specific colors and then applying many  layers of the fast radial blur effect. I had planned on doing the cloth  in Maya but wasn't in the mood to deal with a cloth simulation, so some  quick experiments out of desperation proved to be fruitful. It's a  different effect than what I originally had in mind but I'm pleased with  the result.

For the clouds I was trying to get Mental Ray working again but didn't  wanna deal with an older version of Maya. But then I realized that I  could easily render the cloud using the Maya Software render engine. I  normally stay far away from the Maya Software render engine but  rendering Maya fluids in Redshift is a total pain. I'm surprisingly  happy with the result and gotta explore more abstract Maya fluids  sometime in the future.

It's been satisfying to render my own 3D animations and then inject them  into NestDrop to hunt for some gems. It's playtime! The bird renders  were perfect for this and I had to limit myself to only a few absolute  favorites.