I've been doing some character modelling last week and thought I'll give a rundown here.
There was actually two unfinished projects leading to this one, where I decided to copy stuff from those and see what they do for the purple cat.
The first bit, let's talk about the overall body shape... This one started as a base for a new character that I then adjusted for a base for a "RbrDeer" model. It was a bit more toony with less definition than usual.
But as I was working on that one, I started thinking if this would work on the kitty as well, and I think it did pretty well.
He inadvertently inherited some "baggage" from the OC model. I'll have to see if I need to do something about it!
The other bit is the various fur tufts on and around his face. I was so happy with it that it kind of became the guiding element for his head.
This bit came about from another model that was missing hair and I started creating different Geometry Nodes tool for modelling them. But as I got distracted, I started looking at the purple kitty again, and continued the work there.
It essentially uses weight painting to define the areas to generate the tufts on. It regenerates the faces with a "dumb voronoi" to make the base of the tufts grow in a random shape.
Then, given an object with curves, it matches those curves to faces, and they control the length and shape of the individual tufts.
It got quite robust at this point, and I'll continue tweaking it as I go. I haven't touched it with texturing yet, so I expect that bit to take some testing. I plan to put the thing here after I'm happy with it and have some samples.
But that's the gist of things. I wouldn't expect this to be done before summer, though, going at the pace I have.
You can follow the day-to-day progress on Mastodon, but I'll try to summarize things here when there's no other posts going out.