Facial Hair!

Originally I had planned to use the Hair & Fur Modifier to apply onto Slurggy for facial hair and hairiness in general. However, it seems that this is a very complicated tool to use as I had to sit for hours combing it all in the right direction, and it was VERY slow in loading even each individual hair on my computer, so I decided against using it.

This doesn't mean to say that Slurggy doesn't have facial hair though, as I have simply extruded out polygons and added colour to it using the multi/sub object layers in the material editor to achieve this.

It is a shame that I couldn't use the hair tool in the end, however, I feel that this simpler way of creating cartoon like hair works more effectively - plus it's more efficient and doesn't affect the mouth when it's moving.

Leapard skin & animation testing

I have been experimenting with the clothing that Slurggy will wear and actually applying it to the polygons that have been extruded out, using the UVW Mapping Modifier and images I created myself in Photoshop.

I planned on reversing the typical caveman clothing colours to black with orange spots to make him more unique and different - however it just didn't look right so I changed to Orange with black spots. This worked better in my opinion and people will and should be more aware that it's a caveman slug.

With animating, I have added 6 bones into the body to enable it to move along. Initially, I had tested out animating the slug by using the PathDeform modifier spline, however, this created a lot of problems; such as the body shape being completely out of place and literally screwed up, it would not go back to how it should look for some reason, so I had stuck with bones.

To make Slurggy move along like a slug would, I had limited control of the front part, so focussed on the hip bone (Bone03_Hip). This at least made it look like it was using its muscle to push him along with the back parts of his body.