SF ZOO Animal Learning Plaza

[ReyH]

I am the Design Director and a Senior 3D modeler at Scientific Art Studio and wanted to share with you a cool project our team has been working on for the San Francisco Zoo.
The SF Zoo “Animal Learning Plaza” was a design/build sculpture garden project in which we used traditional and digital sculpting methods.
Zbrush was used for creating all of our digital sculptures which were then 3d printed or cut on a CNC machine.
Those patterns were then molded and cast in bronze, resin, or concrete.

Rey Hernandez
http://scientificartstudio.com/
http://www.coroflot.com/ReyH

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[ReyH]

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[bitans]

Hi, I’m Tan Bi a Senior 3D modeler of the “Sculpture Learning Plaza” project. Here are some additional images of the models I worked on.

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[bitans]

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[MentalFrog]

That looks like a really fun project to work on!

Wonderful models and detail. So cool to see Zbrush used but also to see them come to life at such a large size compared to most 3d printing projects.

small_orange_diamond

[cdizzle]

Yes, these are truly wonderful. It is so nice to see our favorite tool used for educational and scientific purposes.

Would you mind sharing your techniques for the scale details on the panther chameleon, crocodile and marine iguana?

Really lovely work all around. Cheers!

[SoDakZBrusher]

Splendid work. I would also like to see/hear how you did your scale texturing. It is some of the cleanest I have ever seen on ZBC.

Keep up the great work!

[DennisBatol]

So mind-blowing! Thank you for sharing! You are an inspiration, sir!

[SuperHer0]

These are superb stuff! Brilliant use of 3D. The amount of detail went into each is admirable.

[asecbrush]

Amazing works !

[bitans]

Thanks to Zbrushcentral for the top row. It was a great pleasure to work on this project. A group of amazing artists put this together. I hope some day you guys will go to the SF Zoo see this in person.

I learned sculpting scales from Paul Liaw. He taught me scales floating on top of a wrinkle pattern. For the chameleon, I used spotlight as guide pattern to determine wrinkle direction and scale size. But each scale was hand sculpted. I was so lucky, the 4R7 released during I sculpted this. I was able to subdivide the model to 50 Million polys. It did take a long time, but I like the result very much.

The marine iguana’s body has relativity uniform scale. I decided to finish the head and body in different ways.

For the Crocodile, I did study the scale pattern very hard. I had more than enough reference images around me all the time. Sometimes I had to draw guidelines in different color to figure out the wrinkle direction.

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[Masart]

Wonderful, Thanks for sharing!

[Takai]

I can only imagine how fun that project (and hopefully future projects!) must be!

There is so much function and form to nature, and your attention to detail and realism is masterful.
I would be so cool to decorate a home or yard with these exotic animal sculptures!

This thread and your works are as amazing as nature itself. small_orange_diamond

Quick question if you have the moment: How important do you think a background in traditional sculpture is to creating works such as these?

[LynneMitchell]

This is so worthy of a tv show to record the whole process and development to final product. The results are just so stunning!

[Intervain]

fantastic and great to see a practical application of Zbrush