K, well this a squirrel modeled in maya for a short i'm working on for my portfolio called "Crouching Squirrel Hidden Nut". Basically it starts out where two regular squirrels, red and grey, see a nut. The squirrels then procede to fight over the nut, I'm using taekwando mostly because its the only martial art i know. However there is an issue making squirrels do arial kicks...pffft squirrels just don't lift their legs that high, i'll work that out eventually. Thats whats up with the squirrel in the middle doing the wierd pose. I wanted to see how high I could get his leg to go without deforming him. Anyway the squirrels are supposed to sword fight with twigs they bust of the trees and those wierd helecopter things are daggers...except I'm thinking about saving that for a possible sequel "House of Flying Nuts" featuring the red and grey squirrles taking on a kitty cat who is crouching in the grass ready to pounce at the end of "Crouching Squirrel Hidden Nut".
Hmm. I know this all sounds really strange like where did this come from. There is a logical explenation for this idea. Well kinda. It had to do with this massive red squirrel, I mean bigger than any grey squirrel i have ever seen which is just crazy. I mean this squirrel actually bowed down huge tree branches he was so big. I deemed him the ninja squirrel...the idea sorta progressed from there. There is more to this story but this is getting really long.
I've been working in max for over 5 years and just picked up maya about 5 months ago. I really love working with the dynamic stuff in maya, basically because you just can't do that in max as easily or without plugins or it just does't work. I worked really hard getting the uvs to look like they do, I used the pelting plugin. I loved this thing when they developed it for max. Honestly this is the first time i have ever made one entire uv layout for a model, i was suprised that it wasn't that hard, I hope I did it right. For the first time ever using the fur I was really confused why I had a bald spot on his head...I finally noticed that the uvs where smaller there...!!! I figure his fur will fix itself a bit when i finish the hair system. Although i noticed something odd about this...his tail is a different fur system than his body, when I added a hair system to control it the hair would split. Like if you were to take his tail bones and rotate them...no clue what was up with that. Otherwise i would have liked to make his fur thicker than it is but I can't on the puter i'm using it goes boom. Hence the kinda spiky fur I had to make it thicker at the base to cover most of his body.
I used mental ray to render and sss on his body. No shadows are on at the moment not until I get a new graphics card on my big pc.
Anyway I would love some advice or critiques on the model, his fur or the story.
