Stylized Monkey

This is an animation of Stylized Monkey I created for a client. I am responsible for all aspects of the project except for the concept art behind the project, which the client provided.
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First I created a base lowpoly mesh for the character in blender using the concept art as an outline. I then created a series of curves (Shape Curves) in a defined shape and had their shape define the design for another series of curves (Fur Curves) that would work as the strands of fur throughout the monkey's coat. I placed the fur curves around the lowpoly mesh creating a fur coat for it and converted it to a mesh. This created a really cool looking mesh, but a really high polygonal mesh so I needed to reduce it's poly count, so I brought the high poly mesh and lowpoly mesh into zbrush. I retoplogized the low poly mesh so that it had good topology and reduced the poly count slightly and gave it a set of UVs, then I created a displacement map, projecting the high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh and brought them back into blender.

After I was done with creating the displacement mapping, I brought the model into substance painter and created a texture for the model. The design for this model was intentionally simple so I decided to keep the texture painting simple as well, I wanted the cavities to be darker then the peaks of the fur so I used masking for highlight the cavities and colored them a slightly darker color, this would give the character a little more depth.
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After the modeling and texturing was done, I started work on the rig for the character. I gave it a basic forward kinematics rig for most of the rig except for the arms and legs where I created an IK modifier. I wanted the tail to be stretchy and pliable so I decided to give it Spline IK modifier, which was a mistake, I'm not doing that again if I don't need too, a basic forward kinematic approach would have been far more favorable. When I started on the project, I was told we would need the character to be able to talk and create facial movements, so I made a facial rig for the monkey next. In order to get the face rig working, I used a series of shape keys (Blendshapes in maya) of the character's face in a series of basic poses and used them to drive the controller bones on the face. I created a series of phonetic facial shape keys so his face could also pronounce words too if we need him too.
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After the rig was complete I created the environment he was meant to swing through. I tried to keep the scene relatively stylized like the character was so he would fit into the scene properly. I created a basic shape for each of the models in the scene and used a procedurally created displacement map to add the irregularities to each environmental object. To create the wood texture, I used a realistic procedural wood shader and brought the settings down substantially until the wood looked very stylized and gave a few variations of the texture so every tree looked like its own tree. Lastly, I modeled and textured a series of leaves attached to small branches and used a hair simulation to place them on the trees throughout the scene.
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After I was finished with the environment I needed to light the scene and make sure that it was structured in a way where it could be looped properly. I lit the scene using a sun light as the main source of lighting throughout the scene and a series of other softer spot lights to make sure the character was lit in a way that was favorable. I then created the leaf shadows that follow the character throughout the scene, in order to do that I created plane above the scene and gave it as procedural texture. I then set the plane to only render its shadows, this way it doesn't show up in the final render accidentally and I add a transparency to it so the only shadows being rendered were the ones produced by the procedural texture.
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Lastly I modeled, textured, rigged and animated a series of vines going through the swinging animation, I used a spline IK rig on the vines because I wanted them to stretch and bend more as they went through the animation. Lastly I animated the monkey swinging through the vines and rendered it out.