capreulus capreulus by Katharina Thösen

The idea:

I've been really interested in grooming and so I decided to sculpt, texture, and groom a female roe deer. My goal was to portrait a doe on glazing.

The references:

References were like in my first project very important, especially when it comes to the anatomy part of a roe deer.

• Also for studying the structure of the fur was super important.

• I started by searching a base model, which I found on CGTrader for 5$. From then I completely deformed this base and with help of references I created a roe deer.

 • I did the UVs, sculpted more details, and exported it out of ZBrush.
• The next step was to create a good skin texture for under the fur itself. After that, the same model with an extra UVset ( one Udim) got a Fur Color that I also created in Mari.

• Grooming was time-consuming and analyzing the fur was not so easy.

• I rendered the Skin color with Vray and the fur with Arnold. Within that, I set light and searched for a good Background.

• After rendering I did Compositing with volume and a lot of color grading.

The challenges:

The first challenge was of course the Displacement map it wasn't easy to get the Displacement shown correctly in the render view. I had to research how to how exactly to use the Vray displacement and its options, but in the end, with adjusting the map in Mari it worked out.

The biggest challenge of my whole Demo Reel was the fur. But with switching to another Maya Version It worked out. Within the process of grooming, the Displacement map didn't make it easier for me to groom. Also, a challenge was to manually render the fur out of Maya because even though I put the Fur onto a Geocache and exported Patches to Batchrender, the fur couldn't follow the mesh properly.

Softwares:

I used ZBrush for Sculpting, Retopology was a combination of ZBrush and Maya. I did the textures of fur and skin in Mari. For rendering skin I used Vray and for the fur, I used the Arnold Renderer. I did my Compositing in Nuke.

What did I learn?

I learned not to give up even if it seems to be getting worse.

Also, I learned technically more about the UVset Editor and the Relationship Editor, especially when it comes to UV-texture linking.

The grooming part was really the one where I struggle the most and learned new things. How to create and use Expressions for getting the Fur Color onto the Model and of course how to import a Geocache and render the fur out of Maya.

The planning part was as always so important because even though I did sculpting and texturing pretty fast, I was getting in a hurry with the groom and LookDev.

Credits:

Base Model by CG Trader:
https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/animals/mammal/deer-3d-model-d3ce2783-74ee-486c-96f4-87be7cf3371a