As a recent convert to Maya, one of my first stock illustration projects I did in that software package was a simple forklift. I’ve always wanted to build one so that I could use it in a variety of my other stock illustrations, but it was hard to get it right in FormZ. It was certainly possible – but I kept putting it off and, well…you know how that goes. But I’m happy to report that building something like this is much easier in Maya, so I now I didn’t have an excuse anymore.
Forklifts are nice as conceptual objects for stock illustration. They represent things like “storage”, “organizing”, “movement”, “warehousing” and so on – all of which are topics that aren’t represented well in my existing portfolio of images.
Unfortunately, being that I’m a Maya newbie and all, these four renderings took far too long to complete. The biggest problem was rendering times. Holy crap! The image below with the globe took 24 hours to render, which is something I’m not used to at all. Even my most complicated FormZ renderings never took more than a couple hours. I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve got the quality settings higher than they should be, so I’ll definitely have to look into that. My short attention span demands it!
Anyway, here are the final illustrations from this first batch, all measuring 1024x728px. Feel free to use them however you wish, and look for more illustrations with forklift-based themes in the future!
