One of the classes I've actually been enjoying this past semester is a video game design course. It had a concentration on the modeling and texturing aspect. The main project for the course was to create and model a character that was under 500 polygons. (Surprisingly hard to keep it under that number although it sounds like a lot.) We also had to texture the model.

I, of course, did a fox character.

I designed him to be really stylized, almost like the zodiac animals in Fruits Basket. I was also originally going to do a really simple texture (and I might still), but the teacher wanted me to do something more complex then that. So I did something inbetween. The outer areas have a lot of realistic detail that I got from photo reference, but then it shifts into a more painterly style and fields of colour. I thought the resulting combination was quite striking. The face is the most detailed area of them all and was constructed from bits and pieces of at least five different photographs. I'm really proud of the results although it isn't perfect and needs more work to be truly useable.

Here he is from an angle that doesn't really show his structure, but that I think is cool. He isn't boned for posing or anything yet, so bear in mind that for now he's spread-eagle.

Kitsu-chan had this to say about my model: Yiff!