CGSociety

This was one of the first organic characters that I created awhile back using Maya. I wanted to make a cartoony character that looked like it may have come from Toy Story. While I had fun building the character, I wish I had built more controls into the rig to give the character a wider range of motion. I also didn't spend much time on the texturing part, but I figure that if this was to look like a plastic toy, there wouldn't be too much detail on it anyway.

I created the simple smoke trail from his rocket pack by using Maya Dynamics. I wanted to portray him as flying through the jungle in a "make-believe" adventure (as seen through the eyes of the child playing with him).

I rendered the smoke with Maya's software render, and used Mental Ray with image based lighting (IBL) to give the forest reflections on his plastic body. The forest is just a random forest picture. I then combined the various elements into After Effects.

Comments are welcomed.