A true passion project! For this work I set out to reconstruct the infamous extinct Dodo bird through my own (non-scientific) exploration and interpretation of available evidence. I came to rely on a combination of sources, but leaned most heavily on a digital scan of the Thirioux dodo skeleton on display at the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa, photographs of a mummified dodo head in the Oxford collection, and the very few available pieces of artwork of dodos thought to be drawn from life. I also looked at the work of experts like Julian Hume and others in order to tease out fact from fiction. As a lover of the natural world I enjoyed getting lost in the research phase just as much as the artistic process itself in my brief journey to better know this bird.

My recreation process began in researching first-hand accounts of the dodo describing it's physical characteristics as well as the accumulation of hundreds of reference images in PureRef. I started the modeling process in zbrush with a 3d scan of the Thirioux skeleton, which I built around. Once I had a detailed model finalized and painted with polypaint, I moved to Modo for additional modeling, posing, shading, lighting and rendering. I composited the resulting render passes in both Nuke (for the main image), and Fusion (for the wide) with finishing work in photoshop. I plan to render additional poses in the future when time allows.