It´s quite some time ago since I´ve modeled something organic so I decided to do so. My wife, who owns two hamster, gave somehow the direction to this project ;-)
My main attention was in mastering the Hair&Fur-System in 3ds max, which still can be quite a pain in the *** ;-) But the only real alternative to the build in Hair-System is "HairFarm" from Cyberradiance which at least cost 700$. Far to much for Non-Professionals :-((
^This is the low poly-hamster mesh (1998 Polys)^. Not perfect because there are a few triangles and the edge flow could still be a little smoother for animation, but hey....I´m still learning with every new model and every day ;-)
^Smoothed Version with final Hairstyle^. The final rendered version will contain almost twice as much hairs for a denser an more fluffy look. The problem with the H&F-Modifier is that it crashes 3ds max if the haircount is to high. So I used a second hamster-mesh, collapsed it into 8 smaller meshes which are driven by a skin wrap-modifier and added a seperate H&F-Modifier to each of them. This way the final haircount can be much higher than with a single H&F-Modifier.
But be warned: Skin Wrap in combination with H&F and meshsmooth is tricky to handle with animation!!!
Hamster Bone_System from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.
^Bone-System^
Test and preview of the bone-system using spline-helper. The skin-stretching looks quite nice so far, especially around the neck and chin-area. But the overall envelope-blending is not soft enough yet and may need a little more tweeking. But I´m not sure if I´ll ever animate this hamster, so I´ll leave it like it is for now.
^Draft body and facial animation-test^
I´ve made a little test-animation to make sure that the bone-system, the hair-objects attached with skin wrap and the facial animation-system (morpher) works well together.
Hamster Hair_Test from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.
^Hairflow-test^
Because it takes so much time to render dense hair I just did a quick test with the head if the hair would move and stretch correct with the skin
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This hamster really took me some time because of the buggy hairsystem in max. The styling tools are hard to control and the build in undo-function is quite useless because it just don´t work most of the times. But like always, I´ve learned a lot and it was a lot of fun building this little fellow :-)
