This is an entry for Platt's Quadruped 3D Modeling Challenge. Anything on four legs was eligible, be it real or imaginary. Many entries were fantasy creatures but I chose to make a real life Jackson's Chameleon because A) I would have no trouble finding reference material and B) I've always wanted to make a chameleon. Specifically, I've always wanted to create a completely controllable easy to animate shading network that would let me colorize each body part separately. This worked just about how I'd hoped it would, and you can see it close up in the second flash animation above. However, even though I wanted to make a real animal, I realized that just a plain chameleon might be a little boring, and it might be a lot more fun with a saddle on him. Everyone else agreed and, since it was just lying around my hard drive, I put my Frog Man from the earlier Biped Challenge on the saddle.

I began with low poly meshes made in Maya, detailed them in ZBrush, textured them with Photoshop, and rendered everything with displacements back in Maya again. The controls for the color patterns could use some refinement and he's not exactly rigged and weighted for animation, but I think he turned out pretty nice. Something I might want to keep working on in the future.

By the way, it won second place.

And now the chameleon model is available for sale on Turbo Squid in both Obj and Ztl formats.