I am a 3D artist with a range of interests, and have worked in television animation, vfx, computer based training and the movie industry. I have a passino for new technologies and 3D art.
This project was started with a 3D scanned model from the Vienna Natural History Museum, which was cleaned up, made symmetrical for the purposes of modelling the body, and is shown here with newly sculpted antlers which were referenced from the specimen at UCD in Belfield. The eye has been added for placement.
A quick ecorche model was made to understand the musckle groups and forms before sculpting this model. This is the resulting ZBrush sculpted model, as rendered in Maya with displacement. A lot of this detail will disappear under the fur, but it's important to have it as close as possible.
After the grooming was completed, I overlaid the skeleton to check for volumes as the fur can add a lot and I wanted to check that everything still aligned well.
A pose of the final deer. It's important to remember that this is very closely related to the modern day Fallow deer and is not necessarily the bull like creature often depicted. This was very much a prey animal, with predators such as packs of cave hyenas and large lions. I tried to keep the deer like sensibilities and adopted some of the colouration of Fallow deer of today, but also added the thin black stripes we see on cave art.
This project aims to recreate a specimen of the Megaloceros Giganteus, or Giant Irish Elk as a CG model. The aim is to be as accurate as possible using existing scan data of skeletal remains and then building on that, using cave paintings as reference for colouration, before sculpting, grooming, rigging, lighting and posing a final image.