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Well, after I finished (more or less, I've got an animation planned) the firefly, I thought of something else to model using sub-modeling. I've always loved lizards so I went out to the net to hunt down some reference pictures, there I stumbled with several leopard geckos and I thought they would be a good subject. The low poly base mesh turn out fine, but adding those bumpy scales with that technique turned out a little bit faked, so I put it on sculptris and added the extra details and took some stiffness out of it. Also in sculptris hand painted the color, normal, and masks maps. Then I used the lowpoly one as base for uv-ing and morphing. Did a custom rig, and played a lot with the materials in Octane to get a kind of SSS look mixing specular and diffuse materials thru some hand painted masks. When I got all balanced I felt it needed some enviroment, so I modeled a quick rock using a photo reference from cgtextures and added a couple leaves and some grass clips in the background.
I've still got to balance the weights of the envelopes and do some custom skin morphs cause you can see some tearing in the hq mesh, that and doing a short animation will be on hold for 3 weeks cause I've got a job that's going to suck the life out of me, but sometimes having fun has to wait
All rendered on 2.47 and 2.48b in PT for 500 to 3000 samples with an HDRI enviroment, cooking for an hour or less, except for one in PMC with 3000 samples and about 1h30min, with an HDRI enviroment and a spotlight.
Some minor color correction, and logo added, besides that no retouching, straight from the oven
Watch out and don't step on it.

Ah, another fresh variation from the usual lame archviz / studio car render stuff...

It's looking very good, it just need some polishing (texture tearing, those leopard spots are somewhat too obvious basic brush strokes (especially on th tail), the water "pond" is a bit unnatural - too perfect...). Nice job with the lizard's skin material!

thanks, yeap it needs a few hours yet, I have to manually fix the skin morphs to solve those tearings, they don't show up on the low res model, but they do in this one. Also the leaves look too flat and the water, as you said, too geometrical. But what really annoys me is that I won't be able to work on it till next month, and that makes me a little anxious I hate leaving something not quite finished. And when it's finally done I'll try to do a small animation of it running around and drinking water. (althou that's for the long run)

Nice Kubo,
we want more organic stuff
It seems that it is time for a new challenge
Cheers
Refracty

yeap, there could be a new category, Octane A-live models, lol. I have to say that even thou there is not real SSS for now it can be faked combining specular plus diffuse, using coarse specular and low IOR values, here is my setup for the gecko skin, and it can still be improved.

Brilliant, thanks for sharing Kubo.