| Desert Iguana |

At Griffith Observatory I was tasked with creating a desert iguana for their show ‘Signs of Life.’ As an Arizona native, I spent my childhood chasing these little buggers into the bushes, amazed at their speed. I never caught one.

Recently I decided to re-render this asset for my portfolio. To my surprise, I’d only taken the basemesh with me when I’d left Griffith. I decided to take that as an opportunity to bring the asset up to the level I hadn’t been able to before.

MODEL | MAYA

Using Maya, I reworked the original topology, and created several levels of detail. By insuring the areas of the model with the most detail had the right amount of supporting geometry, I was able to increase the models fidelity and accurcy, adding more realism to the sculpt, and the rigs deformations.

SCULPT | ZBRUSH

In Zbrush, I re-sculpted the features to include the subtle anatomical structures, and completely re-sculpted the scale patterning to better reflect the animals re-life counterpart. I then exported displacement maps, and a decimated version of the hires sculpt to use in substance for baking maps to use in texturing.

Polycount
LOD 0 : 308,000 tris| LOD 1 : 97,000 tris | LOD 2 : 27,000 tris

TEXTURE | Substance

With the new geometry came a new UV layout. I split the UVs into four UDIMs, which allowed me to paint textures that increased the original resolution of 4k for the body to much larger 32k. All textures were hand painted, utilizing masks baked from the hires to increase detail and realism. No projected textures were used.

RIG | RAPID RIG MODULAR - SHAPES

Rapid Rig Modular was used to build the control rig, and Shapes was used to create and integrate blendshapes into the rig. These plugins worked together seamlessly, allowing me to add life giving effects to the rig such as breath and muscle deformations, skin sliding, and corrective shapes.

The Final Result

I am very proud of what I was able to accomplish with this asset. My knowledge of the entire asset pipeline has greatly expanded since my first attempt at this project, and finishing it to the level I have has definitely change how I will approach other creature projects in the future.