Character Reveal: The Fox! (Patreon)

So! Three months after announcing that I'd have a new character to show soon, here we are, lol. It's a fox! Disney's foxes are what got me interested in this kind of stuff way back when, and it would be remiss of me if I never made one.

Production on this model actually began back in late July of last year, and back then it didn't look so good. 

But I persisted with it, and eventually got it to a point where I was happy with it.

However, it took a lot of tweaking to get it there, and a lot of back and forth, comparing my model against reference photos and trying to fix it to the best of my ability. Once it was at that point, I then got to work on the rig.

For this one, I wanted to do several things differently from my old hyena rig.

The old rig was extremely simple in its design, and I've modified it a bit over the years -- but the base armature still remains. The biggest difference is that the hyena rig made no separation between deformation and animation bones, and everything ended up all in one layer.

Big mess of an armature.

In the new fox armature, however, the armature is split up into several layers.

Firstly, there's the deformation layer. This is the only layer that the hyena rig had; this is the layer that's solely meant to exist for the bone's weight painting and nothing else.

Secondly, there's the "mechanical" layer. These bones exist to be controlled by specific control bones, such as for inverse kinematics on the feet and tracking on the head. The deformation bones copy all the transformations of these mechanical bones. By separating mechanical and deform, I can keep all of the complicated IK and bone modifier stuff relegated to the MKH bones.

Thirdly, there's the actual control bones themselves. These are things like IK controllers, pole targets, damped track targets -- and in some cases, they're also MKH bones that I've copied in order to rotate certain areas of the legs and paws.

By keeping the bones in different layers, the armature is a lot cleaner to look at and easier to work with.

The way I've set up the IK in this model is also different to the hyena. In this rig, I've put the controller on the metacarpals area instead of directly on the paw.

The reason for this is, when you put the IK controller on the paw, it causes this messed up bending when you try and lift the paw.

I would always have to counter-animate this by rotating the bones above it. Real hassle.

So, with the controller above the paw, the bones below it hold their natural position:

I could also have fixed this by adding a driver to rotate the bones above depending on the position of the paw, but I figured doing it like this gives me more control.

Another big change is the way the face and eyes work. On the hyena, all facial expressions were set up via "shape keys", basically edited versions of the model that you can blend between, using bones with drivers to control it. The big problem with shape keys, however, is that they rely on a base, unedited version of the mesh.

So if you change the mesh at all, then it causes the shape keys to completely break, and you have to redo them from scratch. 

It's also a pain, because you have to set a shape key up for every single expression for each part of the face, and you have to mirror them across, which isn't always reliable. So you need keys for a frown, smile, lips back, lips forward, eyes open, closed, eyebrows raised, eyebrows down, cheeks up, mouth open, and so on and so forth.

Some of the shape-keys used on the hyena.

This can very quickly become tedious, and so with my new model I didn't want to utilise shape keys at all. My solution for this was to use a system of bendy bones, all connected to each-other to somewhat simulate the muscles.

When I move the corner of the lips, the other bones follow.

You can see from the picture above that the lips and parts of the face are just all rigged up using bendy bones.

For the eyes, I used a "fan" of deformation bones which track to an eyelid control bone which moves all of them in tandem. This fan allows the eyelid to rotate in a spherical fashion, and makes the eyelid close over the eyeball without clipping through and needing a shape-key to fix it. 

And then after all of that effort? I decided that it was off and didn't look enough like a fox. So I went and spent like another month or two changing it and making changes in sculpt mode, rofl. And by me doing that, I had to move around all of the bones again and realign them to the new model. :|

Also, by me modifying it, I had to completely redo the fur again. 

For this model, I also put in a good deal of effort to try and get his "bits" looking good, and the sheathe has an interior that the member can retract into.

The backside also utilises a system of bendy bones, with a master control bone in the middle that I can use to move them all simultaneously. I wanted to do some kind of a softbody or a cloth simulation on that area so I wouldn't have to animate it, but I couldn't get it working. However, I'm thinking it might be possible to automate some of the animation via drivers -- so we'll see, lol.

Now, I did mention that there was a hyena model in progress, and that is also true! He's not quite ready to show yet, but he's close. Mainly I need to finalize the texture and do the fur. And once this fox's armature is complete, I intend to adapt it to the hyena since it would be too much work to create it again from scratch.

I've also been working on a zebra model. And well, you probably know where that's going, lol. I wanted to show some pictures of these guys in their current WIP state, but I figured I'd hold off on that until I have them a bit more finished. 

I also hope that, once the fox model is done, it will open the door for me to create a few different canines as well.

But for now, the main focus is on finishing this fox and then making some animations with him. Then, I can start finishing up some of the other models.

That's pretty much it for now!

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your ongoing support which makes this stuff possible. ^^