Conceptually we wanted to represent what we do as a studio, so we came up with the Bird character, which would adorn our sculpture with a printed sequence 'in flight', which is as close to animating as we could get, on fibreglass sculpture housed in a public space, at least.
You'll notice our Elephant sculpture has a wire frame mesh too. We felt painting one on our Elephant was a fitting representation of the process we go through to build a character in 3d.
Maximising assets
Introducing a character helped create narrative, giving interaction and dialogue between the elephant and the bird character. We went on to create online shorts featuring our Bird (so, okay we did animate!), in the run up to and during the stampede. We wanted to get as much as we could out of the assets, given it's such a great cause to be involved in.
Bird's journey
This little chap has been on a big flight! He’s been animated, 3D printed, printed on Vinyl and more. He’ll be ready to take centre stage alongside his Elephant friend and will feature in the Herd & the Bird short, which tells the story of how the Bird & Herd came to be.
Herd's journey
To get Herd’s geometry consistent with the sculpture provided by Wild in Art, we took 3D scans of the elephant and used these for reference when modelling in 3DS Max. Our Herd & Bird sculpture is now ready for the big reveal in July. Keep an eye out for Herd & Bird’s story, to be released online during the stampede.
Some cool tech stuff...
who doesn't like a good excuse to buy a 3D printer? With some great team effort and technical understanding of tolerances it didn't take long till our Bird was complete!
Follow the Stampede
Keep up to date with Herd of Sheffield at www.herdofsheffield.com
