Black Leopard

Final panther : 

This panther is one of the main character of our short movie, AMOK. Feel free to take a look !

#1 - Concepts 

It all started with these concepts by Léo Ceccaldi

#2 - References 

I did a lot of reference research to find the shader we wanted for our panther, as well as the look of its fur.

I gathered my findings on a PureRef, and searched for refs from all angles, as well as close-ups for the head, eyes, mouth and paws.

#3 - Modeling

The panther body was modeled by Océane Faure & Adrien Wolfert in my team.

To support the modeling department, and for future use, I've modeled a panther skeleton and muscles. I knew we wanted to do muscle simulations, so I studied the anatomy of these felines and reproduced the whole thing in 3D.

#4 - Grooming

The crucial preparatory work of painting maps : 

I painted a lot of maps on the panther skin, to isolate certain areas or to manage the length, density and thickness of the hair in different zones. These maps were masks and/or mutliplier coefficients, and they controlled the whole groom!

I performed operations between these maps to add, multiply or subtract certain infromations or zones, in order to obtain the most accurate maps possible.

GUIDES

Let's place the guides ! Following my references closely, I placed the guides manually to get the best possible hair flow. I've completed this step using the amazing Groombear tool in Houdini.

FUR

After the guides, it was time to generate the fur. As it was my very 1st groom in Houdini, my workflow was quite experimental!

#5 - Texturing :

I moved to Substance Painter to paint the skin & fur shader.

For the skin, I imported the high poly model from Zbrush & I baked some interesting maps. Then I started painting the skin base color.

For the fur, I made another Substance project and I basically painted the fur color with spots & variations.

#6 - Lookdev & Rendering

I basically plugged all my maps (Base Color, Roughness, Specular, Displacement & Bump) into PxrSurface for the skin. For the fur, I plugged my base color to a PxrHairColor connected to PxrMarschnerHair.

Then I made some tweaks, especially for the roughness & specular & I rendered with Renderman

#7 - CFX 

Of course, this step precedes rendering, but depending on the shot, CFX is more or less necessary.

Using the skeleton and muscles I had modeled, Adrien Dussaud (a teammate) created a muscle simulation model in Houdini.

This gave to certain shots an extra layer of realism. As for the fur, given that it's short, most of the time it was simply deformed and not simulated (with the exception of whiskers in some cases).

Here's an example of a shot I did with muscle simulation.

#8 - FINAL

Here are 2 clips from the short-movie in which the panther appears 

The AMOK Team :

The concept & studies were designed by Léo Ceccaldi

The base model was created by Océane Faure & Adrien Wolfert

The rigging was done by Luce Douillon.

The animators were Léo Ceccaldi, Matthieu Barbazza and Jade Hoffstetter.

CFX were produced by Adrien Dussaud

I was responsible for the groom/lookdev and a few CFX.