Smilodon

I present my final project from Foundations Term at Think Tank Training Centre. I chose as a concept a 118 year old oil painting by one of my favorite artists, Charles R. Knight. It depicts the giant extinct Sabretooth Cat, Smilodon Populator. Knight was the godfather of paleo art, and I wanted to pay tribute by re-creating his classic painting in 3D. A huge amount of work and research went into the sculpt alone, starting from a scanned skeleton (obtained from TurboSquid), then building up accurate anatomy in Zbrush (based on Jun Huang's fantastic reconstructions and musculature sheets from Jun's Anatomy). After that, I retopologized a symmetrical version of the mesh using QuadDraw in Maya, went back to Zbrush for posing and baking displacement maps, then Maya again for the fur groom in Xgen (based closely on the fur of a modern day Bengal Tiger). For the environment, I wanted a very "real" look, so I utilized assets from Quixel Megascans for the plants and grass. The trees are low detail, free assets I acquired from TurboSquid. The cliff was sculpted in Zbrush, with a displacement map from RD-Textures giving the high resolution detail. All the creature texturing was done in Mari, as well as the fur color (Ptex map). I originally created eyes in Zbrush, but felt they looked to human, so I switched to a paid asset (Jerod Bogh's tiger eyes). Scene rendered in Vray, and composited in Photoshop. Thanks for looking!