Making of Tiger Zoo by MassimoRighi

Introduction

Photography has always inspired me, I love expecially shots of nature and wildlife from magazines like The National Geographic.

During a recent travel in the South East of Asia, I visited Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Thailand and I took many photos of all the animals living there. There is no better reference material to use than the one you personally create;)

From crocodile farm with over 100.000 crocodiles to elephants and of course Tigers. I've never seen in my life so many Bengal tigers (more than 200) all in one single place, it was amazing.

As for all my 3D models I didn't want to create it only for trying a realistic render but I also wanted it for further animation purpose, that's why I wanted to do all the steps ranging from the standard lowpoly model till the posed highpoly renders.

I used Maya 8.5 for the modeling, MentalRay for rendering, Photoshop for creating the textures and Shave and HairCut for the fur of the head.

Modeling

Using a simple polygon plane and extruding it according to the global shape, I created the head first than moved to the rest of the body leaving holes when the legs where to be connected.

This is my preferred modeling tecnique because keep on switching between the four views I can have a good control over the step by step modeling process.
Once happy I went to model the legs  in the same way starting extruding the edge form the leg's holes and finally I extruded the paws faces to obtain the nails.

At this point I checked the geometry topology in order to obtain quads and loops.

Finally I modeled the gum, tongue and teeth. In addition to the photo taken at the Zoo I used some scientific skeleton references found online.

I modeled each tooth starting from a polygonal box, pulling vertices and pushing vertices.

I ended up with 4030 polys for the main tiger mesh and 3166 polys for eyeballs, teeth, gum and tongue.

I than had to start the UV mapping process before adding details. I needed to have a mirrored UV layout, in order to do that I first made the UVs for half of the model than I duplicated the other half and mirrored the UVs flipping them.

I used various projection to make the Uvs using planar and cylindrical mapping tools.. For some parts like ears and portions of the chest I made some detached projection in order to avoid some stretching when I had to apply the textures.

I used a simple checker, applied to a Lambert shader, to check the overall process whilst tweaking the UVs.

After the Uvs I made a polysmooth of the model and started using the Maya Sculpting tool to achieve some detail playing with punch, pull, smooth and the very usefull relax tool (new addition in Maya 8.5).