Time to tackle the tricky bit of this image! The crow. Taking this evil beast down wasn't just a case of beating it with a stick. Unfortunately the crow bears similar levels of evil to the water and the leaf. It's an odd shape. So, having downloaded a few images of crows, I sat and worked with them as a 'template'. And so the fun begins...
The start was by far the worst. Making the head was the best step to make (It generally is in designing stuff), but that oh so much easier said than done. In fact, I managed to type it in around 10-15 seconds. Unfortunately, working from a sphere in 3DS Max is another matter. You have a sphere and editable vertices... now what? How do you pull the shape to look like a crow's head? What vertices are nudged inwards, what ones are pulled out... pretty much guess-work, using a pair of eyes and the pictures as a guide.
After some tinkering, I ended up with this. Looking kinda crow-ish... let's see what it looks like with a beak.
Ah! There we go! That's starting to come along nicely. The shape of the head isn't too bad. Unfortunately, the crow's beak cannot be done with the same level of incompetence as my penguin from long ago... so no cones here! Time for a lot of tweaking...
Luckily, there is a handy bit in the 'Modifiers' menu when you make most shapes called "Slice from" and "Slice to". Basically, it works along similar lines to the 'Hemisphere' tool for spheres. It basically allows you to chop some of the shape away, without having to Pro-Boolean the thing. It's perfect for a beak, which can then be cut so it's only the top-half. After this, its was just a case of more fun with the 'edit vertices' tool, and pulling the beak into more of a beaky shape.
Repeat with the lower beak, and there we have it! Starting to come along nicely now. 
The eyes were given a slight tweak, to look a little bit more realistic. Unfortunately, there aren't really many spheres in nature. God didn't want it to be like that. No, he had to be awkward. However, he did invent Zorbs after flooding earth, so it's not too bad. Jesus himself loved a bit of zorbing.
The body of the crow was yet more fun with pulling vertices here, there and everywhere. Take out another 5-10 minutes of pulling blue dots to the tunes of Bruce Hornsby, and we have a rough crows body.
And there it is! Slowly getting there...
Add a bit of Turbo-smooth to the head and torso, then add a few slightly morphed spheres for the upper leg muscles, and it's starting to look like something. At the moment, it's sort of like a sinister duck. Those little toys kids pull along. The duck on wheels. It's a bit like that, only for the evil and truly deranged children of the world.
The legs were cylinders with a bit of tweaking via the 'Bones' tool. If you want to know how the 'Bones' tool works, I made a mini tutorial earlier on in the blog. Should be posted before (Chronologically) May's details.
The feet were pretty similar. The claws were going to clutch onto the bucket, so they needed to be easily editable. Once again, bones save the day. Very fiddly process.
Getting there! Now it's like an evil Kiwi.
Here we go! The tail feathers are made in a pretty similar way to the beak. They're all just cones that have been cut to pieces with the 'Slice From'-'Slice To' tool. As the body was now, in effect, completed, the head section was rotated 90 degrees. This was intentionally how the crow was supposed to look (Standing one way, looking the other way). Of course, it was just a lot easier to build it straight and rotate after.
Finally, something that looks like a crow! The wings were constructed from the line tool. Extrude it and have a bit more toying with the vertices... and there it is, a basic wing shape. It's not perfect, but it does the job. Place it into the current scene aaaaand...
... there we go! That's the bulk of the image done. All that's left is a bit of fine tuning and tweaking. I admit, I was a bit of a wuss and didn't texture the crow yet. The construction took some time, and getting a feather effect wasn't quite what I wanted to do immediately after... Eating had come to mind, and as all men can confirm: Stomach gets veto. Fact.
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