Smilodon Fatalis

The next work in my Dodo bird series is seriously CPU intensive and is taking a really long time. So, I took a break and decided to do some sabertooth art to add to my paleoart series. I liked this artwork so much that I made it my desktop wallpaper.

This is smilodon fatalis, he's the cat you generally think of when you hear about saber-toothed tigers (a misnomer actually). This one is hanging out on a grassy hillside that overlooks the Pleistocene Rockies.

This was actually a rather quick and simple composition. The feline was posed using poser then imported into vue where the rest of the scene was constructed and the final rendering done. Rendering took about 12 hours. The landscape is just three layers, a rocky mountain background using a fractal landscape, a forested mid-ground using vue's blue spruce model, and a grassy foreground using various vue plant models. The big rock is a metablob with a texture that I bought Cornucopia 3d.

The smilodon is the Saber-tooth Reloaded model by AM, purchased at Renderosity.com. AM's model actually includes all that fur as polygons, so this scene was a bit of a memory hog.