I’m a pretty big fan of the iconic orange and black Harley Davidson logo, and I’ve been trying to find the time to create some 3d illustrations of it for the past year or so. Heck – it’s been a while since I’ve done any of these Norebbo-style 3d logo renderings, but the illustrations of the new Google logo I created last week was enough to get me itching to do some more. So here you go – this is a full set of 3d renderings featuring the Harley Davidson logo posing with a variety of objects!
I ended up creating two versions of it – one that’s completely 3d (a simple extrusion of all objects in the logo), and a flat version with the only 3d element being the surrounding bezel. I actually thought that I was going to use the flat one the most, but I quickly found that the fully 3d version worked better in a lot of these different scenarios.
The image immediately below is the flat version – it seemed to work well in this instance because of the hard gloss and bright reflection, but it didn’t work out so well in other environments.
Harley Sale! 3d rendering of a large red SALE tag attached to a metallic Harley Davidson logo
Here are the rest of the images that feature the fully 3d version:
Building a Harley – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with puzzle piece letters
Harley Davidson noise – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a large speaker cut out of the center
Harley Engineering – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a hole cut out in the center revealing a large gear
Harley Davidson Facebook like – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a large blue Facebook Like button in teh center
Harley precision – 3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo with a large pair of precision calipers sitting on top of it
3d rendering of a metallic Harley Davidson logo over a dark gray surface
Although the fully modeled (3d) version looked the best, it was by far the most difficult one to work with due to how Form-Z generates solid objects. In a nutshell, smooth (solid) objects in Form-Z are very dense – and there are lot of individual pieces that make up this logo. All those individual pieces made for a very complex object which brought my computer to it’s knees every time I moved it within the environment so it was a real pain to have to fine tune positioning and make small adjustments.
I could have spent weeks creating different variations of this Harley logo (yeah, I like it that much), but I decided to cap it at these 8 illustrations. I can certainly make more depending on how popular these are, and as a matter of fact I’ve got a ton of other ideas which might make for some pretty cool renderings. But there’s no point if nobody needs them!
Norebbo
My name is Scott, and I started in the design industry over 20 years ago with a bachelors degree in Industrial Design from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. I have an extensive background in both 2D and 3D illustration, and these days, I spend a majority of my time creating aircraft templates and airliner art. I’m basically an airplane dork.
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