Don't worry much about the pose, Ulco. I will rig and pose at the very end of the process. It necessarily has to be done at the end since I will use the same base shell I posted above for the other versions of the model. Its just easier to keep everything straight forward and clear for me.
The low polly you see above should make animating/posing the models nice and clean. Not sure about the high polly yet.
Before I move forward, I just need to build the inside of the deer; mouth, teeth, gums, so on. And do a little work on the muscle structure, and the tail as it is very ugly right now. Also the beard, have to decide if that will be fur/hair or sculpt, or simple polygons and texture.
The only problems I am having is the fur. Its not that I cant find out how to do fur. But that a version will have fur in Maya, but not the sculpt. So maybe I should sculpt the deer as if it had beed shaved or even skinned. And then add fur to that in Maya. Or attempt to sculpt the fur in mudbox. But I have not seen to many sculpts with fur from any software that look like photos.
For photoreal deer that will be a good distance from the camera, its no problem. But I want at least one model that can be in the camera's face and fool a untrained eye; Granted, a lot of that will be on the TG2 render though.
Also, I have a good amount of questions about how to do this in terms of importing into TG2. Again, the background deer are no problem. But up close, do to the issues with displacement, a very large file will be necessary (I think). Luckily, TG2 can deal with big object files with many many faces, very well! Vue sure cant from what I have read.
Still, I think all of the issues I am learning about from doing this project with you, I think will be solved when full FBX object support is up and running (as I understand it anyway).
Can lightwave read FBX?