Here's a thing, retopologized (plus turntable animation) (Patreon)
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Still working away at this thing! Whenever I was waiting for something to render or bake on the previous animation, I would hop on over to this guy and fiddle with him a bit. As a referesher, this model is me experimenting with different ways of doing fur, as I want to see if I can come up with something I like more than particle-based fur.
I know it doesn't look like much has changed, but visually not much has, but he's actually ready to be rigged and set up for animation now. For those not familiar with the subject, "retopologizing" is the process of taking a sculpt of a model and simplifying the mesh so that it's more usable. Sculpting is basically the 3D version of drawing, and while it's very useful for planning a model as you can very quickly get something character-shaped, the mesh it generates (left) is basically useless for anything other than looking at. Those grey patches are hundreds of thousands of little points, each one the computer has to calculate. Not only would that be horribly inefficient, but almost impossible to work with for the rigger/animator as well. So to prepare for those tasks, you have to "retopologize" the model, fix up the layout of those points to make it usable.
Retopologizing this guy was the toughest modelling challenge I think I've done so far. Trying to keep the details in the fluffy bits without the amount of points getting out of hand was tricky and very time consuming. But it's done! Hopefully it'll animate half ways decently. We'll see once I get him rigged.
I had to straighten out his legs a little bit to fill in some of the details there, so he's lost a bit of his beasty hunch thing, but he'll get that back through posing once he's rigged. Not a big issue.
Anyway, that's all for now... some of you mentioned that you like seeing my behind the scenes stuff, so here's a little of that for ya. I've included a turntable animation attached to this post so you can check him out from all angles. He hasn't been coloured or textured at all, everything is just alpha-stage right now, but it looks better than the base white at least. Also, I'm experimenting with giving him an outline to give it a bit of an 'arty' look, don't know if I'll stick with it but it does kinda look neat I think!