Subarctic Great Horned Owl

In this project, I tried to create a photorealistic and anatomically accurate model of Subarctic Great Horned Owl. All grooming and scattering works of feathers I used Yeti, the owl has real fiber feathers (total count feathers - 6327 and 2188922 fibers) and I didn't use any poly plane feathers. As always, for shading, I used melanin centric Arnold Hair shader with a complex network.
Example shading of the body and the wing:

Average render time: 8k ~32h, 4k (head images) ~14h. Also, I want to say many thanks to my friend Maxim Shamarin for helping in rendering on his workstation.
I chose 5 color correction style and below you can see these images

And some fun stuff- mesh without feathers:

Tutorial: Nontrivial use of the Shader node in Yeti 3

Short tips and tricks video about use Shader node in Yeti3
Method in action

Maya example scene (Maya 2018, Yeti 3.1.X)   

I hope this information will be useful to you

Cheetah Family

My latest work is devoted to these wonderful animals, which soon may be lost.
I tried to achieve photorealistic similarity to real animals in their habitat, and I hope you will like the result.

 HiRes (6k) 

 HiRes (6k) 

All grooming work and grass scattering I did in Yeti 2.2.8.

Yeti tree of adult cheetah

Shading and rendering in Arnold (core 5.x.x) in which I used aiStandartHair and melanin centric texturing:

Fur shader of adult cheetah

crypto_object pass

viewport

Fusion CC tree

More info coming soon...

Statistic:
Total fur density ~19.5M fibers
Total blades of grass - 108453
Ram used during render ~39Gb

Render time- 9h51m on Ringil workstation
Also, you can buy the model of the adult cheetah here   or 

The Baby Cheetah in studio

 few variation CC

HI-res:  

render.ru and posted in Render Magazine 01/2018

CG Society Award




Statistic:
Fur density - 3736698 fibers
Body fur consist of 7 layers and have only 3 fur system
Render time on Ringil workstation res 3032x4096px- 3h56m
Usage memory when rendering 4k res ~ 9Gb
Body mesh: 3udims, 39362poly
Groom textures: 2 additive RGB textures (2k and 8k), 3 luma texture (2*8k, 1*1k)
SSS textures: 5*8k
Fur textures: 4*8k
Soft: Maya 2017, mtoa 2.1.0.1, Yeti 2.2.4