Making of Tiger ZooAuthor: Massimo RighiSoftware: Autodesk MayaIntroductionPhotography has always inspired me; I love especially shots of natureand wildlife from magazines like The National Geographic. During arecent travel in the South East of Asia, I visited Sriracha Tiger Zooin Thailand and I took many photos of all the animals living there.There is no better reference material to use than the one youpersonally create winkFrom a crocodile farm with over 100.000 crocodiles to elephants, and ofcourse, tigers. I've never seen in my life so many Bengal tigers (morethan 200) all one single place, it was amazing.As for all my 3D models, I didn't want to create it only for an attemptat a realistic render. I also wanted it for future animation purposes,and that's why I wanted to do all the steps ranging from the standardlowpoly model - to the posed highpoly renders.I used Maya 8.5 for the modeling, MentalRay for rendering, Photoshopfor creating the textures and Shave and HairCut for the fur of the head.ModelingUsing a simple polygon plane and extruding it according to the globalshape, I created the head first. Then I moved it to the rest of thebody, leaving holes where the legs where to be connected.This is my preferred modeling technique because I can keep on switchingbetween the four views, which will allow me to have good control overthe step-by-step modeling process. Once I was satisfied with theresults, I went to model the legs in the same way... started byextruding the edge from the legs' holes and finally I extruded thepaws' faces to obtain the nails.At this point, I checked the geometry topology in order to obtain quadsand loops. Finally I modeled the gum, tongue and teeth. In addition tothe photo taken at the Zoo, I used some scientific skeletal referencesfound online.I modeled each tooth starting from a polygonal box, pulling verticesand pushing vertices and I ended up with 4030 polys for the main tigermesh and 3166 polys for eyeballs, teeth, gum and tongue.Then I had to start the UV mapping process before adding details. Ineeded to mirror the UV layout, and in order to do that first, I madethe UVs for half of the model and then duplicated the other half andmirrored the UVs by flipping them.I used various projections to make the UVs using planar and cylindricalmapping tools... For some parts like ears and portions of the chest, Imade some detached projection in order to avoid some stretching when Ihad to apply the textures.I used a simple checker, applied to a Lambert shader, to check the overall process while tweaking the UVs.After the UVs, I made a polyxxooth of the model and started using theMaya Sculpting tool to achieve some detail by playing with punch, pull,xxooth and the very useful relax tool (new addition in Maya 8.5).TexturingI believe that the texturing part is extremely important as themajority of the final effect is created by the textures. I decided togo for a 4k resolution map which I think was good enough to achieve thetextures' details such as the fur stripes.In Photoshop I started creating the textures using a Wacom Tablet witha mixture of photographs previously taken at the zoo and freehandpainting. I used the clone tool as well as custom brushes, alwaysswitching between Maya and Photoshop to check how the textures behavedon the model.Once I was pleased with the Photoshop work I moved on to adjust theseams. The texture's seams were created by the edges where the UVs werecut during the mapping process and I used the Maya 3D Paint Tool tocorrect them, using especially the clone tool. I finally went back intoPhotoshop to create the other maps: specular, bump and diffuse. I useda Blinn shader for the body, a Phong for the eyeballs and a Blinn forthe teeth.Posing the TigerI decided to go for a pretty classic pose, with the tiger lying on therocks. In order to do that, I first created a rock starting from apolygonal plane making it pretty dense, and sculpting it using thesculpting tool to achieve the desired shape. I made a UV projection andapplied a texture created from my photos. For the background I used asimple plane with part of the same texture applied.I built a simple rig for posing the tiger. Then I adjusted the mesh toachieve the different muscles definition given by the actual pose.Shave and HaircutThis was the first time I was used Shave and a Haircut and Iimmediately noticed how powerful this tool is. I decided to put the furonly on the tiger's head and in some side parts of the legs and pawsbecause for the rest of the body, I thought I could achieve a prettygood fur simulation through only the use of textures.I created a total of six hair systems. Now I will focus on the mainhead fur; taking into consideration that for the other hair systems,I'll have used the same procedure which I am about to explain.I selected the head's faces excluding the nose, inside of the mouth andthe area around the eyes and I went to Shave ---> Created New Hair.The first time I did that, I noticed that the hair normals werepointing inside of the mesh so I reversed the normals and created thehair system again. Everything was fine this time round.Using the Brush tool, I started scaling the hair according to thephotos and when I was satisfied with the hair length I used "RecombHair". This command made the hair comb nicely around the head. The onlything left to do was to use the Translate and the Puff tool tofine-tune the hair style.Then in the Material Properties of the Hair system I assigned thetiger's color texture to the Tip and Root Colors and the specular tothe specular field. In the screenshot you can see my settings for thathair system.To be able to render the hair out using MentalRay, I went to 'ShaveGlobals' and selected 'Hair Primitives' as Hair Render Mode. I alsoenabled the Irradiance in the ShaveGlobals---> MentalRay tab inorder to involve the hair's shader in the Final Gathering process.To setup the scene I created a camera and enabled the depth of field.To further explain how I managed the depth of field: I made a “Distancetool” placing one locator point of focus on the model (in this case itwas the point of the tiger nose), and the other on the Camera lens.Then I parented the locator to the camera so that every time I movedthe Camera, the dimensional value also changed and I had the exactvalue to insert in the 'Focus Distance” field. Then I played with theF-Stop and Focus Region Scale till I found a DOF result I liked.For lighing the scene, I used an HDRI probe and three PointLights. Ienabled one of them to RayTrace the Shadows and increased the 'LightRadius' to 3000 and the 'Shadows Ray' to 5 in order to soften them.RenderingFor the Mental Ray rendering settings, I used the Gauss filter with Min =1 Max =3 Sample Levels.The final render is 3636 x 2772 and it took about 15 hours on a QuadPentium. I then made an Ambient Occlusion pass and added it withinPhotoshop. I duplicated it in two different layers, setting one'Multiply' and the other 'Overlay', I tweaked those layer'stransparency then enhanced the contrast and the color gamma till I washappy with the final result.Next I tried another angle view of the tiger because I wanted to tryand get a different feeling. I changed the camera angle focusing on hishead. That was pretty much the same pose, I only changed the head andneck position.I learned a lot throughout the 'Making' of this image and loved playingwith Maya, Photoshop and Shave and Haircut trying to do what I reallylike. Hopefully I have given an insight into the idea behind thecreation of this Zoo's young tiger. I also hope it will prove helpfulin some ways to all who are reading. |