African Elephant

Hello!

Here's a little personal project I did during my 4th & last year of CG Studies.

I love making animals, and for a long time I'd wanted to pay homage to the incredible creatures that are elephants.

Symbols of power and intelligence, these brave creatures are endangered because of littering.

I wanted to depict a specimen in its prime, in all its splendor, standing tall before us. 

I'll show you my process for creating this image.

If you've seen my previous animals, then you may be used to the workflow:

# Step 1: References

The goal was to find references for each step of the process, beginning by the sculpt. To do this, I searched for anatomical references, drawings, skeletons, studies and other 3D realizations.

I looked for side, back, front and close-up photos of the head, trunk, eyes, feet and tail.

All these references would be useful for the lookdev too.

#2 - Modeling, UV, sculpt

I started by making a base model on Maya, quite simple, giving a consistent basic shape.

Then I switched to Zbrush and made a lot of adjustments.

I went back to Maya to unfold the UV and then back to Zbrush to do all the displacement work.

#3 - Texturing 

Then I exported my High Poly model and switched to Substance.

I baked maps that would be useful for texturing, such as Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, Thickness and Normal, from this High Poly model. This way I could recover all my sculpt details and use them for texturing.

So I painted my base color and a rougness & specular maps. I also added a few bump details.

#4 - Lookdev

I plugged my maps onto a PxrLayerSurface to make layers of different materials. 

Given that the elephant lives in an arid environment, I added a level of dust using a Facing ratio in Y, and blended the resulting mask with a fractal to obtain areas of dust on its body. You can see it in the specular map bellow, because dust reflects light differently from skin.

#5 - FX

I wanted to create a cloud of dust under his paws. So I switched to Houdini.

Since it was a still image, I had several techniques to achieve this cloud.

I chose to use the pyro technique (as for making fire & smoke), and I made a simulation for a few seconds to see different intensities and shapes. I choose which cloud I liked the best and I exported it in vdb and imported it into my Maya rendering scene.

#6 - Rendering & Compositing

I rendered with Renderman & made the compositing in Nuke.

I compiled the different layers of environnment (which is a megascan), dust, and the elephant. I did some lighting adjustments, grading and added physical effects like DOF, lensflare, chromatic aberrations etc.

Final image : 

I hope you enjoyed this African elephant ! I really enjoyed making it from scratch ! 

No animal species deserves to be massively killed for reasons as futile as the value of ivory in the case of these elephants. It's just another human stupidity.