Bunnie Rabbot - Sonic Movie Style Fan Art

After being a little bummed and burned out from struggling to make Stardust Speed Demon: The Training of Metal Sonic - my first animated short after it was less well received compared to my static Stardust Savior still-render project, I decided to chill out and relax playing some Lunar New Year discounted games off Steam.
Stardust Speed Demon --> https://youtu.be/v3JOHC_hXjY

I bought Forged in Shadow Torch and that was all she wrote. Immediately inspired by their animalistic characters I wanted to challenge myself to see exactly how hard it would be to develop are more streamlined approach to making anthropomorphic creatures fully rigged an animated for film. The rabbit protagonist in the game F.I.S.T. made me feel like I could try my first attempt on at least a partially fur covered character from the classic ABC Saturday AM Cartoon and Archie Comics Sonic lore era so I tried my luck to make Bunnie Rabbot; pushed forcibly through a CC4/Maya/Substance/iClone/Unreal 5 pipeline. I say forcibly because I am not an animator nor am I a rigger and this character could not even be able to move or animate without hijacking a CC4 avatar as a base. CC4 Avatars come fully equipped with full rigging and animation all the way down to facial rigging with a library of motions in Reallusion software's arsenal on top of AI driven tools to allow for audio/text to speech driven lip syncing. I bought all the programs ages ago to try and figure out more about character art but it all went to waste because I hardly ever used 'em. Now was my chance to get my darned money's worth and really actually use the stuff to see how far I could get. I went in with very low expectations lol.

The Problem: CC4 out of the box has avatars which are intended for human only character use. They have no way for you to natively add additional bones or whole body parts. You can of course bring your own models in but if you did that would would have to have your own facial rigging and done to be able to make use of their expression and morph tools. On top of that if you edit or break in any way the original human mesh once outside the CC4 ecosystem, you will ultimately lose all the rigging and facial animation no matter what. Working without breaking the human mesh was the biggest blocker to the projects success. After stumbling over hurdle after hurdle I was determined to reach my goal without fail and eventually this Sonic Movie Style Bunnie Rabbot character was born.

After narrowing down some lingering design questions on how I should portray her updated modern look I ran a poll over on my Game Jolt page to ask followers many things like should she have stylized bunny feet or should she rock a ponytail?

Taking hair feature inspiration from Steeve MEDAS:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nYyLYE

And finding the right solution for real time hair shading thanks to tools by Guang:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nEWWeX

I was finally able to fill in all the blanks that would allow me to bring this project into its final level of polish. Shots of every ugly phase of development where folks on Game Jolt would ridicule me for how ugly my Frankenbunnie had become are chronologically posted after the polish renders.

For fans of Bunnie please note that all audio and VO sources are taken from the original SatAM cartoon as is with the beautiful Southern voice of the late Christine Cavanaugh whom many of us still miss so dearly. Life is entirely too short, do not waste a single moment of your time in this place. Thanks for reading please enjoy! Share and subscribe to my YouTube if interested! Next I will challenge my self to recreate Shadow in my spare time.