When I was coming up with the idea for the BR-PLR my inspiration was from the work of Longque Chen, I wanted to come up with a few animal-themed vehicles of my own.
I started looking at Polar Bears, how they moved, rested, and their general body language.
I looked at vehicles used in the Antarctic today vs 50 years ago. What features they deemed necessary such as bright "International Orange" to be seen better in the lower visibility of the snow.
As I began blocking out my idea in Maya, I incorporated more elements of Sci-fiction and started to reference the Power Ranger animal "Zords". I really liked the geometric design of the Zords but still wanted to keep the "realistic" design and function to my vehicle.
To model the treads, I found help from a few youtube tutorials and fourm discussions:But the most helpful was the included tank tread example already located inside Houdini (20.0+ )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3aeEutYulw
https://forum.vizrt.com/index.php?threads/the-tank-tread-thread.251906/
After getting a majority of my Polar ATV modeled, I wanted to flush out some ideas for the textures. This led to researching more of the colors used in Antarctica, as well as the history of the flags and why they have Orange vehicles. I created
For a more detailed history of the Flags: https://www.truesouthflag.com/flags-of-antarctica
The nose art of the Bear is from a photo I took while visiting the Soviet U-Boat 434 in Hamburg, Germany.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_B-515
As I was texturing, I decided I wanted to change my model a bit more. I needed more elements that would help display the scale of my model and show its additional functionality, This let me flush out side access panels, mechanical crane arms, rivets, doors notches and etc.
