OwO What's this?

What have we here?

So here's the story. During the voting for last month's painting, there was a pretty big stretch of time where it looked like a 3D model of Gale was going to win, or at least tie. I knew if I wanted to get it done on time I had to get an early start on it, so that's what I did. Then the tentacle picture pulled ahead, and looked like it was going to stay there... but I didn't have much else to do what with my other animation right in the middle of rendering, and it felt like kind of a dick move to just not make the model I was half way finished with, so I just sorta kept at it. And in the end, I got it done within the time frame too! It's an encouraging sign that I could finish this one reasonably quickly.

Especially since I spent a few days of that time messing around with new methods of doing fur. One of them didn't work at all- it involved extruding some 2D planes and texturing them like fur and erasing alpha to make the planes look like tufts of fur. Works in games when viewed from a distance, but I couldn't make the fur look 'full' enough that way. Just wasn't looking good.

So I went on to the other thing I wanted to try, which was Blender's Eevee renderer. If he looks a bit different from my other models, that's why. The normal renderer is designed with reaslism in mind and can look very very good, but it's also super slow. Eevee is less reaslistic, uses a lot of tricks to try and emulate the way light behaves so it doesn't look perfect, but it's much faster. This takes about 1:30 to render, where rendering the same model in Cycles would take probably 7-8 minutes. He would look better in cycles, but I'm not sure he look better enough to make that extra time worth it. Take that 6:30 per frame, multiply it by the 1400 frames my last animation was, and that's an additional six -days- of 24/7 rendering... I'm not saying I'll make the switch for sure, but it's definitely worth exploring.

Anyway. He's not fully finished, there are some shape keys to make little details to tweak, but he's reached a good base point to share. I'd love to know what you think so far!