Chloe - Rigging & Fur WIP

As of yesterday, Chloe's rig has been completed! Big kudos to Disregard67 for taking her on and bearing with me and my lengthy lists of revisions!

Her rig is far more complex than Zoe's, while still remaining easy to use. The latter was especially important to me after animating the extremely complex Bunsen model that easily took more than twice as long to animate than Zoe. Despite the easy to use nature of the rig, it still has controllers where it matters the most, including controls for lip sections, eyes, cheeks, nose, ears, and of course, detailed mouth controls, which are going to be crucial. Disregard already had a blast doing some test animations that show her general body movement and expression range!

Something that I'm quite satisfied with is the hand rigging, as Zoe's fingers were exceptionally hard to work with due to a topology so bad that even the best weight painting couldn't save it. I'm expecting to perhaps use her feet a bit more in future animations as well, especially after Acidic did such a great job remodeling them from the old Zoe rig, which had something that could best be described as bunny feet, hah!

Disregard was also so kind to include a few controllers that are a bit more nom-specific, such as a controller that brings out her tummy. Definitely good to have these features included right from the start, rather than them being an afterthought.

Disregard is also working on a dance animation since the lure of animating her to the Ankha dance was likely too hard to resist! I'm hoping that I can do a proper render of these at some point of the future, as they're pretty good material to have her fur tested once it's done.

Speaking of which, I've started working on Chloe's fur earlier this month, which is entirely being done in the latest version of Ornatrix, a fur middleware solution for Maya. I've had my fair share of experience with the software for a year or two already, which was direly needed, as the software is a lot more complex than the more simplistic plugin I used for Zoe. You already saw some Ornatrix fur in action on Zoe's rig, mostly in the big tummy 2 & 3 mini animations, though it has some issues with the old model due to its topology, causing her fur to flicker at some of her parts. I'm however expecting to have none of these issues with Chloe, as her model is perfectly clean!

Unlike Zoe's fur, Chloe's is supposed to be a lot shinier and glossy, not only due to her species, but also to underline her royal heritage a bit more. Her hair is using Redshift's new-ish physical hair shader, which takes actual gloss and translucency into account. I think the result speaks for itself, even just on her face alone. Note that I've only started creating her fur a few days ago, so right now only her head has fur attached. I'm still tweaking things here and there and will also have to add eyelashes to her later, something that we removed earlier since her previous polygon eyelashes really clashed with other elements.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the results so far whatsoever. Making her fur takes admittedly a lot more time than Zoe's, but the good news here is that it won't fall short in complexity and even surpass it. It's going to have proper direction, clumps, and flyaways as well!

Since Chloe's fur is supposed to be more silky and glossy, I couldn't go nuts with the clumping and flyaways, but I think once I'm redoing Zoe's fur, I can use these features a bit more prominently since her fur is supposed to be a bit more rough and diffuse.

I'm hoping to have Chloe's entire fur done within the next two weeks! There's still some tweaking to be done on her face, but I'm certain that once I'm past that, doing the rest of her body should be a lot quicker, as it won't require so much detail-tweaking as her face did.

Note that I still have a mini animation coming up before the end of the month, which will be a revised animation of the internal stomach model! Please forgive me, as it was admittedly something I threw together quite quickly, but I do need the time to focus on Chloe and getting her production ready for next month, in which I'm hoping to start working on the first animation with her!

Anywho, sorry for the long post! Hope you're having a super fancy weekend! :D