A re-creation of my family’s pet dog Becky. Originally created as a realtime project for my final year studying Games Art at Staffordshire University, but re-rendered in Blender with Cycles for some higher quality renders.
High poly sculpt: ZBrush
Retop: Blender (17,995 polys)
Texturing: Substance Painter and Blender
Groom: XGen (Maya)
Rig and Posing: Blender
(the realtime version was rigged in 3DS Max for simpler export to Unreal Engine 5)
Renders: Blender (Cycles)
Truly outstanding. Looks very real. I had a Border Collie when I was young and makes me remember him. Great job grooming the fur and very convincing poses.
Fantastic. I’m absolutely envious. I won’t repeat what has already been said.
The only thing I’d have to “criticise”: it’s too clean. Eyes, tongue & teeth, and the shadows are to bright imo, pupils & back of th mouth lose contrast. The tongue, except at the tip, looks a bit plasticy, too smooth, no (visible) texture. The corners of the eyes could use a slightly different material, I think.
What fascinates me the most is the unruly fur. Incredible. The expression, too!
If that was for sale, I’d buy it for Archviz in a heartbeat.
This is awesome! I have a question. Have you tried the new grooming system in Blender? How would you compare it to XGen? Is it easy to integrate XGen grooming into Blender?
I have tried it, but not long enough for a proper comparison yet - though I liked what I saw. For my next project, I’m going to groom a cat in Blender, so will hopefully learn more soon(ish)
It was quite easy to use the XGen Groom in Blender, I imported it as an Alembic cache, then converted to curves and bound the curves to the animated mesh. I found this tutorial useful for showing how to bind the curves to the mesh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82X6eeHPjZI
Thanks as well for the detailed critique
You’re quite right, the textures are too clean on the tongue and teeth - sadly I had to spend less time on them to prioritise the fur.
There is normal detail on the tongue (not very good though) and eyes (quite good, but on a closeup is brought down by the lower quality of the skin), although it doesn’t show very well with the angle/lighting/image resolution. I’ll do a re-render to show the eye detail
Agreed on the tongue looking plasticy - I think SSS combined with better textures would help improve this, but let me know if there’s something obvious I’m missing.
What change would you suggest for the corners of the eyes?
For comparison here’s a photo of the beasty in real life
That was the main aim of the project, glad it worked!
