hey sirquadalot, as scott mentioned, i used matchmover to track the shot.i painted about 485 ft worth of green markers that were placed 15ft apart. the match istelf was pretty easy, just tedious.
Our animator, Josh just sent me this link of render he did in Lightwave:
-jon
excellent !!! I love the details !!
great work, man 
Thankās Iām a Boujou/Maya Live guy. Not bad at all.
Great work Scott and Scottās team
love the animation
I agree with the previous Cr regarding the ear
also the mouth looks wierd specially the connection between the mouth and the face
white rhinos have every distinguished head, that will different them from black rhinos
I done my rhino head as a test , but if u need help with the SSS shader let me know
best of luck
NIce Rino.
Your āCerebrus Maquetteā is flawless.
Dogās muscular fibers are cool.
I like your DEMOreel, nice wire_elephant and wonderful Clay Sculptures.
Cool video!!! 
ashaiad: Thanks for the crit I appreciate all the imput I am getting on what looks off since it isnt always easy to spot in your own work.
I kinda blended a black rhino and an Indian one as I worked. Which explains the reason the nostrils do not descend into the upper lip as on the white rhino.
Thanks again for your eyes, these crits are helping this project get better.
Gorilla and Pat: Thanks for your kind words. That cerebrus maquette was a blast to do. I had a lot of fun figuring out how to deal with 4 sternomastoids on a dog. We are also going to use the same dynamic rig from the elephant on this rhino.
Updated the first page with some color progressions. Any input would be great!
Scott
Nice, but make the features rough enough that the animation still features detail while being rendered in broadcast quality. I spend some time today animating my math sphereās which I discovered recently and to my dismay it looks terrible as itās to detailed. I re-did stuff coarser and it looks much better in the animation but its crapola as a stillā¦
As my neighbor always says: Nobody will see āthatā out of the window of a fast moving busā¦
Cheers
LemonNado
PS: How do you align the animated rhino with the āmovingā scene. A swift kick in the right direction would be greatly apreciated. Youāre not mixing that manually frame by frame are you???
Thanks for the input Lemonado,
Right now I am trying to set up quick and dirty FG renders in Mental ray as the lighting model we are using will vasty affect the look of the textureā¦ On my elephant I found it helped, but I need to see hwat it does tho this texture too. I hadnt even tought about what motion blur and animation would do to it : )
We matched the rhino to the live action with a package called MatchMove. Jon Campbell tracked those green points on the side of the road to make a 3D camera that matched the real one. we then used that camera in Maya and the resulting grounplace generated by the matchpoints.
Scott
Animator for the project hereā¦glad you all like:)
Lemanndo, that would have been sheer insanity man. Like scott said, we ended upwith a nice maya scene with the road in it. I simply animated the rhino running on that. The cam was jumping all over the place, it was humerous to watch in the playblasts:). To keep my sanity, I created my own cam that didnāt move so much so I really see the animation.
Scott, color maps are looking sweet man. I canāt wait to see this done. We gonna make the VFX show?
Yeah we will make the show. I slept a couple days ago so its all good : P
Here is a variant on the head. Im having a horrible time getting these not to look ādeadā ao I am adding a lot of tempature variantion. Hopefully it helps.
do an ibl fg, pass hdri if you can. with very low intensity you can get some nice colored bounce light. then add it in the comp. your shadows dont have any color to then. thats part of the reason the render might seem dead. and play with the saturation of your maps in ps. looks good overall tho.
Itās really nice 
Elendil: Thanks : )
brook: Good call! I hadnt thought about th fact the shadows were dead I was so involved in the color maps themselves. This is kind of like working blind since the final render is with an HDR image I dont have at the moment : / crazy I know but I hope the discrepancy isnt too much.
Thanks for the input, its invaluable right now!
Scott
Well I think this is final. Whewā¦
All maps created in Zbrush. Now its off to the renderfarm for a few hours : )
great the last render !!
love the angry pose
Just amazing what you guys did. Really, really good.
One question (just curious):
Why did you guys choose MoveMatcher for tracking? You used Maya for the animation, why didnāt you use Maya Live for that? (or the other prog that I would know is Boujou)
Check out Syntheyes!
Lemo
Woah, old thread resurrected! lol
I used Matchmover because I am didnt know how to use Maya Live and I have not heard very many success stories with Live. Mostly it was I already knew Matchmover (and it was part of the pipeline) and I was able to track the shot sucesfully and quickly with it.
-jon