Ultra-Realistic Bear Animation Made With Maya & ZBrush

Today, let's have a look at a highly-realistic bear animation created not by one, not two, but three different artists, each responsible for a certain field they are an expert in.

Based on a real-life recording of a bear attacking its own reflection, the animation was set up in ZBrush and Maya and authored by Nicolas Morel, a Senior Creature Artist at Luma, Madhav Shyam, a Creature Supervisor at Ghost VFX, and Mahmoud Salamin, a 3D Animator at Luma, with Nicolas having been responsible for modeling the creature, Madhav for rigging, and Mahmoud for animation. Additionally, the team utilized Hans Reinhardt's Mountain Forest Pack to make the forest environment.

Moreover, the bear's skin model and rig are available for download and can be purchased as a pack here. The pack includes:

• Skin with inner mouth and tongue. Face ready for blendshapes.
• Teeth, nails, eyes.
• -5 UDIMs (3 skin; 1nails; 1 teeth).
• 4K textures. Including Displace, Diffuse, Bump, and Roughness.
• Shading network for Maya 2018 and Arnold.
• A .ztl file with all parts and a .ma file (Zbrush 2020 and above).
• Low poly skin – 100.000 quads.
• Baked animation cache for the walk and run cycle to test your groom or renders.

Notably, this is not the first time Nicolas and Madhav awe us with their outstanding artwork. The former previously shared a cute and realistic-looking animation of a Cockatoo parrot and spoke to us about his Sailor portrait made using ZBrush, Mari, Maya, and maps from Texturing XYZ, and the latter demonstrated how MetaHuman Animator could be used to create lifelike face animations and showed a great facial motion capture test done with a model of ThunderCats' character Panthro.