Lion Project

In the planning stage for this project, I wanted to complete it from sculpt to rig entirely inside of Blender. Because of personal deadlines, I had to abandon that idea and use Autodesk Maya and ZBrush to complete the project.
However I did start the project inside of Blender, using it's sculpting toolkit to create the initial base mesh.
The retopology was start in Blender, but was quickly moved to Autodesk Maya to use it's Quad Draw tool and UV toolkit to complete the retopoligization and UV mapping proces.
From there, the high poly sculpt was completed in ZBrush using a variety of Alphas available both in the base software and Pixologic's useful Alpha Library.
https://pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter/alpha/
From there, the model was moved into Autodesk Maya to create and complete the rigging process. The base mesh was moved back into Blender to use it's Cycles render engine.

This is one of my favourite projects so far, mainly because I got to once again delve into the realms of rigging. It was quite a technical challenge to create a animation rig for a quadrupetal character.
The main requirements I set out for this animation rig were:
- Switchable FK and IK controls for the tail and all four legs.
- Stretchy spine and tail.
- Automatic tail animator via deformers.
All of those requirements are currently met barring a couple of bugs which are still present. I currently haven't attempted to create a

For future interations of this project, I'm want to look to develop a full facial rig with joint based animation accompanied a picker tool and blendshape animation.
I need to makenumerous small adjustments to the mesh to combat poor deformation and compression issues, mostly around the armpit and rear of the creature.
An revamp of the texutures will likely come with the update to the geometry. Likely alongside a update to UDIM maps to preserve skin details which are faded with 4096x4096 texture maps.
Finally I would like to dabble with fur for more higher fidelity renders.