Located on the Front Street Roundabout in Clayton, NC, this metal giraffe is made of repurposed materials, “things with a history”, just like all other works by Jonathan Bowling.
The sculpture is about 15 feet tall, so taking photos required a ladder, a stick, and three attempts to take photos. There was no chance for the fourth one as the sculpture was removed the next day, proving again that photogrammetry is so vital as a way to preserve things.
The giraffe is hollow inside, which gave a lot of challenge topological-wise. Some parts got lost because of the complexity of the object and were remodeled manually. The head had to be aligned and added separately. Each attempt to retopologize in ZBrush took 5-6 hours and produced 200+k faces, so I sacrificed edge flow for a lower polygon count and reduced it even more in Maya.
The model was unwrapped manually as painting had to be added on top of the original reprojected textures in Substance.
And so, Colorful Giraffe can be seen again!
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