Logo Recreation from 2D to 3D advice

[Cabbit]

Heya folks i have a logo for my to be development as can be seen in the header of my university group project website(This is made my me for the group to post there work).

But as you can see it looks a little well untidy, and i was thinking that i would be interesting to re create it as a 3D model in a something like 3DS Max(i have a 6 month student licence) as the original was created by scanning in a feather and putting a gradient over it.

I have very little in the sense of design capability, i am a developer ah heart the design model i follow is to make the application easy to use and accessible without to much fluff.

My reasoning for wanting to recreate my logo is so i have a very high resolution version for printing onto business cards and hopefully something that looks a little more vibrant and fancy.

My question to the community is if this is is something 3DS Max can do well or perhaps Maya and if there is any tutorials out there in making feathers with 3D modelling tools.

I am pretty competent with 3DS Max 5 but this new version 2010 version has got a lot more tools at my finger tips.

 

[LeviG]

the fundamentals are still the same in 2010 as in 5 so you should be fine.

If you were to use max (it should be able to do what you want ) I would look at doing the below. It's based on a tutorial (a leaf one) iirc from 3ds so you might find it hidden away
This is a quick breakdown as I'm working from memory and I never seem to remember all the names etc.

In photoshop -
Take the feather images and make into individual layers, add any colours you want as in the current logo.
Create their bump maps by creating a simple desaturated version of the above images and then play with levels to make the bumps more obvious.
Now depending on how the above layers were done you may need an opacity mask file too - it's simple black and white solids of the area to cut out and the 'solid' section. If the layers are already with an opacity mask you should be able to skip this section and use alpha channel iirc.

In max
create a plane and apply the above 1 set of the materials to it so that it has the feather when rendered, adjust to your liking.
Now using the tools on the right (I can never remember it's name) click the second tab and look to edit the mesh. Now use this to adjust the shape of the plane to add curvature/flex/twist into the plane.
This will be replicated onto the feather when rendered.

Repeat with the other feather and arrange as required.
Add some directional spot lights with shadows enabled (mental ray shadow maps if using the default of mental ray renderer). Personally I play with the falloff too but don't worry too much if you're not sure on this.

Add a third plane for a surface for base shadow etc.

You may want to change the background colour although you can get an alpha mask if you save in tiff format (or similar) and use this to remove any backgrounds in photoshop - note there will be no bottom shadow unless there is a bottom plane.

Hopefully that all makes sense

 

[Cabbit]

Thanks for the advice i'll try it out over the next few weeks and see how i get on.

 

[LeviG]

if you get stuck post here and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction