Next 30 days ill be bussy with commision of illustrations for “The Jungle book” by Rudyard Kipling. I started with the elephant. This “base” elephant will be used for Hathi, young elephant and others, by proportioning/details. Im aiming towards cartoonish/somewhat realistic style like i did for Dusty .
This is 3 hours of Wings3d doodle.
Looks fine. Try to stick with quads for now, avoiding triangles and polygons with more than 4 vertices.
Hey Alexander, tnx for advice.
Yet, i am doing now really maximum speed modelling (to my abilities), trying to catch the form i am up to, leaving poly optimisation for later.
Catch is that i have really short deadline, for such rich-content book. The end product will be 2d illustration, and ill probably use heavy 2d retouching, so the possible glitches in geometry will not be a problem… Now im reading the book to block out the scenes for my illustrations… but will go with more modeling very soon…
Book has 300 pages :argh:
I read a little then i do 
I did black panthera Bagheera this evening. It took me too much, about 4 hours of wings3d fun.
BTW im doing female Bagheera. Unlike Disney, here in the book Bagheera is considered female character.
There are few crossed edge flows. I dont care too much, ill sweep that later.
This is base for Bandar-Log, Monkey tribe member. They are extremely unstable, malicious but a way funny creatures. Ill do some hairs with blender particle engines for the head and fur, when time comes.
Wings3d about 3.5 hrs of subdivision modeling.
Really great to see some wings 3d work I use it for everything and wish the furum for wings was still open here. Your panther is a great model. Well one thing abotu keeping quads and n gons depends on your final renderer Messiah will not render n gons. There are times triangles are necessary to keep better topology.
Hey, thanks for your comments! There will be sure more animals soon… my taskis to create cover page full color and five black/white ones. I guess ill need at last 10 animal models and some jungle plant elements. Im not yet sure,im still reading the book… and i have full freedom to pick scenes for illustrations!
As for the wings3d, it is also my modeling tool of choice too. Im glad that it keeps to be developed. New versions have great integration of tweak mode with normal mode. Its contextual nature is great for modeling. I am also sad that there is no wings3d here in app forums. As for the quad/triangles, i am looking for the form only, on all cost…
Those models are not itended for animation but for still shots.
They will be lightly and quickly textured using cheap but good texturing software Argile 2, in combination with Gimp. They will be very fastly rigged in Blender, possibly auto rigged with bone heat feature.
You cannot kill all the triangles, some of the tris and polys are surely here to stay if they will not decrease still shot model look. Even then, i will probably decide to retouche some parts in 2d rather than retopo or retexture model. There is no time in the time given for this task…
Im progressing through the book slowly…
I did the Wolf this evening, or main part of it (some details still missing and some tweaks… there is again some more non-canonical polys left in hurry… 
) … Ill spend some more time on this one because there is so much wolves in the book. Ill need to create few variants. This wolf miss fur, he will have more personality when i add fur… and of course mean yellow eyes…
Update: Checking anatomy against one of reference pictures… looks fair needs some little tweaks i guess… Not that i strive for hyper-realism… but wanted to check…
Modeled Baloo, the jungle bear, Mowgli’s teacher, wise interpreter of Jungle law…
I would like, when adding fur, to have a little impression of a indian sloth bear, as in picture bellow, but will consider how much, too many people imagine Baloo as disneys Baloo, i guess…
nice work like the bear. I don’t think blender will make good hair. Particles is not the way to go for hair. But that said nice models and want to see more. Close hair I usually use a bump map for it works ok in a pinch,
Hey Dann-o, thanks for follow!
But, i have great confidence in trying to use Blender for fur. I dont know if you have seen Big Buck Bunny Blender movie. since then Blender fur capabilities have greatly improved.
about that:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-240/new-particle-options-and-guides/
juicy example, and even more on Youtube under “blender fur” keywords…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy0maVzTOhg
looks like I need to learn me some blender took a look at a few of those. I have nto had much luck in my attempts to figure out the blender interface.
I posted a video containing wip of my project state,showing animals being assembled in Blender. I unwrapped Baloo, Bagheera, BandarLog, also Mowgli- i modeled him since my last post-and rigged them all, also i put some basic hairs and textures, realy in early stages
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we6pFjWkA_w
I need to put wolf still, and elephant. Tiger will be done by morphing Panthera duplicate. I miss model of Pyton Kaa still, and some closeup props of the jungle.
Rig is really basic because ill use the models for still shots.
Sorry for rawness of the movie, feel free to skip areas 
.
If you have time give me your feedback. Thanks!
Not only has it been done in Blender, it was done as a completely open source project (like blender itself) and literally all assets they created for the movie plus the scene files n stuff have been made available to the public…If I wasn´t so deeply rooted in 3ds max after having already switched from Cinema 4D before Id move over to blender instantly, it even got it´s own built in game engine, and its free! Like, how cool is that!
I really love your work and think your models are looking great! I can’t wait to see more 
Thanks all for lurking here and posting comments :).
I unwrapped wolf and elephant this evening, and set up basic rig for them… here is a little fun picture
Models are quite nice, maybe the elephant head is a bit too squeezed.
I think that they could use more loops at certain places (eg. hip joints, bear knee joint)
Weight-painting seems to be not optimal (the whole leg bends, instead of just the joint, especially the heel joint on Bagira’s front legs) - maybe switching Quaternion on or off would make it better already.
Could you show a bigger picture of the Mogli you had on youtube?
Ania tnx for your suggestions! Happily models are not mentioned for animation, so eventually ill suceed without too much loops and perfect rig! Ill try the quaternation thing you mentioned. I hope that will do the trick for it self
Ill try to approve visually possible errors as a style components where it will be nice . In fact all the difference in the art is in error made being nice 
Of course where not, ill carve some extra loop or have a stroke or two in weight paint mode!
Your comments will be helpfull now when i am assembling everything in the scene. Ill remember them!
Ill have to do now a Kaa pyton quickly, and Shere Kan morph from Bagheera model. Ill have to quickly assembe the scene for front page for commisioner approvement, and scenes for inner illustrations. Ill have to make great compromises. Deadline ends in 5 days.
I need to post Mogli stuff though ill probably would not be able to change much. Still, ill be able to polish things a bit when it turns to 2d illustrations. And happily inner pages are Black and White.