(New) Hyena Reveal! (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I've been talking about it for a LONG time, and now we're finally at a point where it can be unveiled: My new hyena character!

There's a lot to talk about with this guy, and I'm not even sure where to begin. First off, it's been forever, haha. The info on the .blend file seems to indicate that I've been working on him since January of this year. However, I feel like that has to be wrong, since I began work on this guy before I ever began creating my fox character. You'll even notice that this hyena's paws are the same as the fox's, but in reality it's the other way around: I borrowed the WIP hyena's paws when I was creating the fox.

So, ultimately I'm not sure how much time I've spent on this guy, lol. But it's been a lot.

With that out of the way, let's talk a little bit more about his creation.

As you've seen, I've been working with my old hyena model for a very long time; over three years, now! During that time, I'd been doing learning and some practicing, watching tutorials, trying to personally trying to improve my Blender skills. But the more I learned, the more I got frustrated with my old character. 

The modeling was rough in several places, most notably the paws, and the usage of shape keys made it extremely difficult to modify the character without accidentally breaking something. I've been trying to fix him gradually over the years, but eventually it became too much work, and I decided it'd be better to just create a new character from scratch.

I made this character in much the same way as I always make my characters: by "box modeling" over reference images and checking it from every angle. But this time I had some more knowledge of topology under my belt, as well as edge flow and retopology, which made the process much easier and less of a guessing game.

One huge difference is that the fur texture isn't just applied straight to his base mesh; instead, the fur texture is ONLY on the hair particles, with a brown "skin" material which can be seen underneath the fur and in short fur areas such as the muzzle. This approach lent a ton of realism to the character, and I'm really happy with it.

There was a lot more I had learned with rigging as well, such as having bones with different functionality on different layers, having IK/FK switches, custom bone shapes for ease of animation, and one huge under the hood change: Soft IK.

Soft IK is a system that basically makes it so that IK joints don't "pop" when they move too far from their root position. So, I don't have to spend as much time while animating fixing those kinds of issues.

For the face, I rigged it using a similar system as my fox character, using a series of bones over the lips, cheeks, and eyes to sort of simulate muscle. But for this character, I didn't use Blender's "bendy bones", which I did for the fox. In fact, I didn't use bendy bones in this character at all.

For chains like the tail and, er...other bendy parts, I used a series of bones that copy each-other's rotation. This is the same system as the bones on my original hyena. On the fox I did an IK system for the tail, but this way I feel is much easier.

When it came to rigging his backside, it's weighted with some bones placed in a circle around the hole, and a center bone which controls the concentric bones' Y positions using a driver. This allows me to simply scale up the center bone, and all the bones around the edge follow, just like a hole opening up.

I think that's everything for the most part. There's a lot of smaller stuff I could talk about, like how I painted a subtle tint of orange down his head and upper back, to give him a bit more of an orange hyena-like mane. Or how his hair sims were completely broken and I had to roll Blender back a couple of versions. But if I talked about absolutely everything, this post would never end, rofl.

So for the time being, enjoy the renders! And I'm really looking forward to doing a debut animation with him, so stay tuned for that. :D

Thanks for reading!