Heyaaaa floofs! <3
I hope all of you are doing well!! Been a hecky busy month for me, but I'm hanging in there!! ^w^

Here's a short little idle loop I created for animation practice, and to play around with some cute and silly fox emotions. Such a goofy, spazzy floofer. :}}


I'm also using this animation to promote a black friday discount thing on Twitter/X! :O

This weekend I'm planning to upgrade this low-rez video game fox to a lovely cinematic one by the artist VFX Grace. The new fox has a professional animation rig, lots of moving body parts, and detailed fur! :O


If you want to help me upgrade, go Like this tweet on Twitter/X before Nov 24th!

https://twitter.com/VixelFox/status/1727184047770669104

If I reach 51 likes, each like will give about 50 cents discount toward the upgraded fox!
Stretch goal is 181 likes! Lets gooooooo <3 And thanks for your help. ^w^


Here's a sneak peek at the new model. I CAN'T WAIT to animate stuff with it! :O

https://www.vfxgrace.com/product/red-fox-animation-vfx-grace/ 

Boop you soon! <3

Finally returning to the draw prompts to finish up those pics! :U

In my first draft of this art, I focused mostly on capturing the basic idea of a pouty fox kit and a hoard of stolen cookies. There wasn't a lot of context in the scribble. For example, WHY is she grumpily returning the cookies? Are they spoiled? Is she bored and wants to steal them again? <w<

The concept of having to return stolen cookies is rather abstract, indeed -- making it a great art study. Revisiting the piece, this time I tried to tell the story with more depth and intent!

I made the environment more like a den or cave than a castle dungeon. The smol foxxo didn't necessarily dig this herself, (actually she probably stole the cave too...) but it's a handy place to store a lifetime supply of cookies. An earthen den feels more likely to be inhabited by a cookie-thieving fox.

By making the foxxo smol and the den vast, it helps sell the idea of an excessive number of cookies. The cave tunneling into the background helps add some wonder and mystery. How many rooms of cookies ARE there? The cookies, boxes and cart tracks get smaller as they fade into the distance. So do the lines used to draw them.

Compositionally, the cookie piles generally slope down, pointing at the smol foxxo. The piles themselves are massive, so the full weight of the smol foxxo's crimes is bearing down on her. I used the negative space of the ground around her as a rest area to help frame her as important, and to trap her in her circumstance. The basket of cookies is a particularly dense pattern, helping attract your eye. The somewhat regular patterning of the cookie piles mixed with cookie boxes at odd angles adds visual interest while keeping the eye moving. I'm intending that your eye should move between the deep part of the cave, the sign board, and grumpy smol foxxo in a little triangle.

To add more depth, I included cues that show a passage of time. The smol foxxo is loading a mine cart at present, while a full cart is shown further up the tracks, implying she already loaded that one in the past. The full cart is spilling cookies, adding a sense of motion. The signboard and quantity of cookies implies the smol foxxo will still be busy loading cookies far in the future. The todo list says something about Vixel's plans for the even more distant future... <.<

Other storytelling tidbits include the boxes of cookies, nibbled and munched cookies, and the train signal pointing toward the exit to help define where the mine carts are going. The sign posts are pointed like spears to imply the Official Decree will be enforced, and the sign is bigger than the smol foxxo, implying it's stronger. But don't underestimate her - she stole ALL these cookies once, surely she can steal them again! >:E

Here's also a version with more cookies, some brights and darks, and a cavey blue color filter. The lighting got a little muddy, but it still adds some atmosphere. I'd like to clean it up later so it's not so splotchy, but first I want to wrap up the other draw prompt pieces!

3d clothing proved to be surprisingly tricky in that fox treadmill animation from my previous post! :O

The biggest issue was something known as "Poke Through". This is where 3d clothes don't perfectly fit and the character model becomes visible underneath.

Pokethrough usually shows up when the character starts moving and the clothes try to follow and deform to the motion. It's a common problem for game engines or 3d tools like Daz Studio that try to support an interchangeable wardrobe that fits a base character.

Why does it happen?

Clothes are weight-painted to deform exactly the same amounts as the character. The exact same character rig moves the clothes the same distances as the character. But somehow, pokethrough still happens! :O

Take a look at how much geometry there is for the clothing, compared to the character. (The clothing is much more dense.)

Turns out, the deformation math produces a different outcome for the character and her clothing, since all the vertexes start in different places. There's no way to weight paint it to work for all poses. Sometimes it'll overshoot, sometimes it'll undershoot.


How can we fix it?

My first idea was to fix it with masks. I can select a group of vertices and add a Mask modifier to show or hide them depending on if they're covered with clothing. This leaves a physical hole in the character model - there's *no* geometry visible underneath clothes.

This approach improves pokethrough for some poses, but not *all* poses. When the character moves, you can sometimes see right through her! Or else, pokethrough still happens at the edge of the mask where character and clothing geometry intersect.

A better way to fix it is to use the sculpt tool to inflate the clothing slightly. Then it's technically lifted off her body, but it's hard to tell when zoomed out. I step through the animation frame-by-frame, and fix pokethrough on each frame.

Inflating the clothes is delicate, because it can introduce strange wrinkles or bulges, or make clothes appear to be floating around the character. Inflating too much quickly makes gym shorts look like a diaper, for instance. >w>

I haven't found a quick fix that works for extreme close ups. I figure I'll have to manually align the clothing verts to the character verts so their positions are precisely the same, and then inflate the middle areas of the clothing to move them off the body. I'll cross that bridge when I get there! ^.^

Heya floofs! Here's one more update this month - an animation I made for learning using the Reyna base + sculpts + generated animation rig from previous posts.

Also see the attached mp4 for a longer sequence with camera movement.

This project brought together a bunch of different topics I've been learning the last few months. There's lots of room to improve, but it served its purpose for learning!

There's some weirdness with her model in a few spots. Later I might revisit this to fix those areas, add fur and textures, and render in Cycles for true PBR lighting (this is Blender's Eevee renderer, which is basically realtime video game lighting).

I'll dive into some behind-the-scenes in future posts. See you in May! <3

Over the holidays I started exploring a new technique using 3d models as a foundation for my 2d art! :O

Made a few images of this cute yeen boy for a Christmas art exchange on one of the fursites!

Many sculptors and architects start with a simple model, known as a "maquette", as a foundation for exploring and visualizing a design.

I copied this idea and made a virtual 3d maquette of this hyena character using Blender and Daz Studio!

First I used morph dials in Daz to shape the approximate body proportions. (Default human male shown for comparison.)

Then I exported the model into Blender, and did a custom sculpting pass, refining and stylizing the body.

Next I imported the model back into Daz Studio in a special way to preserve the rigging. This way, I could freely pose the body and attach clothing!

I composed some cute poses and mixed in a few props in Daz.

Then in Photoshop I did a rough rotoscope (loose trace) of each scene, choosing which shapes to keep, discard, emphasize.

Finally, I played with proportions in 2d, did detail stylizations like fur floof and painted in a few more props.

This '3d maquette' approach works great for nailing down tricky stuff like perspective, anatomy, and clothing. It's right in the middle of my other techniques for workflow efficiency and quality of results. Not as organic as sketching from imagination, and not as clunky as trying to cherrypick details from photo reference. If used to establish the base foundation for a pic, I'm can change whatever details and stylize to my heart's content once I have the rotoscope ready in Clip Studio or Photoshop.

Used this same technique on the pawplay artwork earlier this month, too! :O So it's feasible for ferals as well!

Still playing around with the workflow. Excited to see where this goes! :}}