Making of Tiger Zooby Massimo Righi, Italy Web: www.massimorighi.com
I modeled each tooth starting from a polygonal box, pulling vertices and pushing vertices and I ended up with 4030 polys for the main tiger mesh and 3166 polys for eyeballs, teeth, gum and tongue.
Then I had to start the UV mapping process before adding details. I need to mirror UV layout, in order to do that first made the UVs for half of the model than I duplicated the other half and mirrored the UVs by flipping them.
I used various projections to make the UV’s 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 while tweaking the UVs.
After the UV’s, 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 useful relax tool (new addition in Maya 8.5).
Texturing
I believe that the texturing part is extremely important as the majority of the final effect is created by the textures. I decided to go for a 4k resolution map which I think was good enough to achieve the textures details such as the fur stripes.
In Photoshop I started creating the textures using a Wacom Tablet with a mixture of photographs previously taken at the zoo and freehand painting. I used the clone tool as well as custom brushes, always switching between Maya and Photoshop to check how the textures behaved on the model.
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