Cool Kitty WIP breakdown

Hi Readers.

I've completed my latest project! I've called it 'Cool Kitty' it is a stylized portrait of my own pet cat 'Axon' so the coloring's etc match his own.

I mainly started this project to learn more about the creation of hair and fur. Just like my last project this was rendered entirely in Zbrush and all the hair and fur was completed with Fibermesh!

So I haven't posted any WIP shots of this project so I'll string some together now on how the image was created.

WIP #1 - Base Mesh

This is the base mesh as it was stylized I didnt add too much detail here. I also new there was going to be a lot of fur. Looking at this now I think the arms are a little long.

WIP #2 - Posing

Heres where I was playing around with the pose. I wanted something that would express a certain 'feel' I looked at a bunch of images of people winking and cheesy poses. This was the final pose I came up with, but I wasn't sure what he would be leaning on at that point.

WIP #2 - Fibermesh

So the fibermesh ended up being about 5 separate sub-tools of varying length and style. I also used a lot of 3D layers to manage the styling. It was a lot of fun to work through this part. I must say though I found the 3D layers to be a bit buggy when working with fibermesh.

WIP #2 - More Fibermesh

This time more length just playing with it.

WIP #2 - Polypaint

So as with most projects containing something new for me I always find out a better way to do things down the track. If you polypaint the base mesh first the fibermesh will take on the colours underneath!! This would have saved a lot of time for me. But alas I had to paint multiple sub-tools to get the colours I wanted.

WIP #2 - Accessories

This was the process of creating the collar which I created using various 'Insert-multimesh' brushes. You can achieve some really cool results quickly with these brushes. There is a tonne of awesome free ones found here. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?170167-Insert-Multi-Mesh-Repository