Striped Hyena

This is my first time experiencing working on a 3D creature with a full pipeline: Modelling, Texturing, Rigging, Hair Grooming, Ziva Simulating, Hair Simulating, Light & Rendering, Compositing. (everything except for Animation). I spent almost one year to finish this work and It's just amazing to look at the result after the nights and days of working, trouble-shooting, learning, mental breaking, or even those time where I start to questio life :,)

After 365 days of sweat and tears, I've condensed my life's work into a 60-second clip. Now I proudly presents the culmination of countless hours of hard work, determination, and dedication, resulting in a small yet powerful achievement that encapsulates the growth, learning, and change that occurred during the journey.

In the beginning of life, there is always reference... During the early stage, I gathered a lot of references of Hyena to study their look. I also did some research about this animal and I found out that there are actually many types of Hyena. I knew I had to narrow it down to focus on one species, which as you can see I did the Striped Hyena. It quickly draws attention to me once I saw it and I knew this is what I'm gonna do. It's just so unique about this one compare to the other hyenas, it has cooler hair, has Stripes ! and just basically overall the coolest. 

The first thing to be formed out of thin air is the skeleton. As you can see it is quite scary to see countless of different bones in the whole skeleton knowing that you had to sculpt them all out. And yes, that is me at first, but as I begin to sculpt everything patiently, I notice it is not that complicated as it seem, it's just maybe a lot of tedious work. 

Next, you might wonder shouldn't it be the muscle first, then the skin. Well, I kinda do it in a reverse-engineer way to save more time. Because if I can get the base shape done first, I can quickly start rigging, and my animator can animate it as soon as possible, while waiting for the animation, I can use the time to sculpt back the muscles. And meanwhile, I also got a base shape ready for grooming already. So it's faster in many ways.

Sculpting the skin is a lot easier, but I found out I tend to naturally over-sculpt the muscles, so the challenging part for me is actually how to balance it out with the fats. I need to imagine it has fats plus muscles on it, so some parts I really need to get very imaginative with how it looks. Another challenging one is the face, it really depend on the facial feature whether or not you can recognize this animal, so it is important for me to sculpt it very carefully and I have to constantly look at reference to match it.

After finalizing the skin, I can finally start painting the texture on it. I know that in the end it's gonna end up covered by all the hair and stuff, so this texture painting is just a rough guide for me to have a better visual on how it will look.

Okay, here comes the part when I constantly question about life. It's my first time doing rigging and I almost went crazy. Most of the time is just trouble shooting problems or error, everything is so TECHNICAL ! I used up all my brain cells on this one, I'm glad it is successful at the end.

Thanks to my dear animator friend Tan Kuok Yao, he made an awesome walk cycle of the Hyena. I showed him some hyena walking videos, and he quickly did a first draft, it was already looking good, and he spent few more weeks to do some tweaking until we got this perfect animation. 

And as all the animation is working on the other side, I sculpted the muscles out. Now this is even harder than skeleton. Muscles shape are too organic and require a lot of imagining in a lot of area, especially when there are certain parts where cannot be seen in the reference. Since there are no specific Hyena muscle source to be found online, so I mostly based on a dog's anatomy because they are really similar.

When the muscles are done and the animation also done, we can begin to do the simulation phase. And in this case, I'm using Ziva to simulate. With the skeleton animation as base, I can use Ziva to attach each muscles to the bones and I can control the physics property of the muscle and the attachment between bones and muscles. For example do you want them to slide with each other or stick on each other. 

After simulating the muscles, then is the fats, and so on for the skin. The process is all the same with using Ziva. With all the simulations of muscles and fats, it already acts as a base for the simulation of the outer skin. To get a realistic simulation of the skin, it all depend on the property of the muscles and fats, because it's actually them who is driving the skin, like the jiggle or bounce kind of effect.

And of course lots of blend shape to be done merging this simulated result with the original animation. Because there are still parts where I need it to remain the original animation like the legs, heads and tail. So I need to blendshape to find the most balance result.

Grooming, the last phase and also one of the ones I had a lot of trouble with. I'm using Yeti for grooming, and most of the time I'm also trying to find solution to fix things. Sometimes when the hair is not behaving the way you want, and you gonna trial and error to check in the renderer that takes like so long to preview, I get kinda tired sometimes, but I know I have to finish it, I've come this far...

Finally texturing and hair simulating wasn't that bad, so I quickly got the look I want, and the simulation thank god work smoothly without too much problem, cause normally simulation has the most problems. But yea, it is officially done and I'll just have to light it well and do the rendering. 

Finally, you've reached the end after all that documentary xD. Just wanna say throughout this whole project, many things are kinda like the first time I'm doing it, so I really learned a lot... but struggling my way out.

Congratulations, you reached the end of the line. I just wanna thank you for taking the time to view my artwork. Your support means a lot to me!