Hello everyone!
I am finally back from my hiatus and wanted to show you guys a bit of the latest model and character that I am working, this will be covered next month in the new tutorial series and updates.
I am testing h19 with the new grooming tools and optimizing my own shelf too.
I have several concepts that I made and want to start from. Each variation has a different personality but I want to cover everything just with fur and the minimal requirements for everything else.

Currently we will be working on the first of them, the only one with a furry hat.
The model is quite simple, and I plan to reuse every body and hand model on each of them.

The next step comes with the fur, that I am testing different techniques as vector grooming, gradient fields and the new guide groom tool. This is the result of the first iteration.

As it happens normally, the width is always off in the first render and a lot of things are out of place, so I am focusing on fixing those parts to have a better result and to add more fluffyness everywhere
This will be the second render after I adjusted the width, and added a parting with several small changes to the groom.

We then started rendering with ACES to have a better colour Gamut, here my notes appeared and I new several things that needed to be fixed.
The flow of the hat is pretty odd, and the goal is to make it go upwards, the model has too many bumps, which means a good change will be to soften it up. The strays are too random and are not helping the model and finally the ball is not fluffy enough, I wanted to have a different look per piece on this character.

And here its the latest version of the groom with all the changes applied, I am quite happy with the result of the fluffy ball and the new flow.


And today, it was time to start with the basic lookdev of the grooms, I also started doing the body knit.
We are currently using only procedural materials to generate the colours that will improve a lot once we start using textures.




One of the hardest parts to make was the knit, but I am still not satisfied with the result in close ups, I broke the shape too much.
But the level of detail is beautiful once you go in


This whole process will be recorded for the second character of the set. And will be part of the tutorial series!
Enjoy!