Fenrir

Fenrir

Wildcard! Haven't created an animal before, barely even drawn em. I figured he was either going to take longer than the others, or a lot less due having never done it before I had no idea how difficult it'd be; on top of that I needed to learn canine anatomy. 

The real nail in the coffin here was that I only had one week left to make him in and at one point I was 100% sold on forgetting about this guy and just brushing up the other two. Fortunately I decided to give myself a chance on this and after completing the sculpt on the first day I was confident I could get it done; which I did! Yeah!

Was tough and required me to work about 80+ hours. Worth.

Process

Due to my lack of confidence with animals and a general lack of know-how I thought it best to start completely in Zbrush, no base mesh. Reason for this is so I could pull out forms easier, which Zbrush is a lot better for than Max. So:

-Zbrush for sculpting

-3DSMax to finish up gemoetry (fur on back, claws and sharpteeth)

-3DSMax for retop

-3DCoat for Unwrap

-3Dcoat for Texturing Diffuse

-Photoshop for tweaking bakes from Xnormal and creating specular.

-Rigged in 3DSMax

-Rendered in Marmoset

3DCoat

http://3d-coat.com/

After finishing up Odin's textures on a friends 3DCoat I really wanted to adopt it into my workflow. Apparently it can do a hell of a lot more than just painting directly onto the model (Max's ViewportCanvas pales in comparison) like sculpting, modelling, re-topping and some such. I have no doubt that on those particular things it's probably not as good as such established programs as Max and Zbrush however I found out about unwrapping while looking up how to paint and I have to say it's very good. On top of that because you're painting directly onto the model, seams aren't a big problem. Of course you shouldn't have tons of seams and you still need a concise unwrap yet with that said it really takes the pain of of trying to line textures up properly in Photoshop.

3DCoat is by no means a replacement, but something to be supplemented into your workflow. I couldn't recommend it more.

Hindsight

As I mentioned earlier, the fur took a lot longer than I anticipated. Obviously, painting fur clump by clump is pretty time-consuming and not to mention insanity-inducing. 

Other than that my only regret with this character is that I didn't leave myself enough time to really polish it and try out some other avenues. I was really flying by the seat of my pants on this one; calling steps done and moving on without pause. I just didn't have the time left-oover to try iterating.

How I feel
Love it. So happy. I'm not the greatest visual design artist so when I finally got the hang of fur AND good hue variation it really meant a lot. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't anxious about not getting this done.

Where to go now?
Post coming soon