For the past 2 years, I’ve been on and off working on a Nick Wilde recreation based on the character from Zootopia.
The model itself was made by YiBoZONE (used w/ permission) and my main contribution is the fur, rigging, and textures. One piece of feedback I constantly get is that the fur color is inaccurate to the movie, so that’s been my focus for a while.
However, I just can’t seem to get it right. There’s a lot of factors that determine the final look of the fur such as:
- Skin color (color of the mesh the fur is attached to)
- Fur color
- Fur strand thickness
- Fur density
- Lighting (environment and lamps)
- Color management settings (contrast, etc)
Here’s an album of the various references I use
And here’s a recent render of my Nick
How would you tackle this problem? A lot of my attempts just end up with either really saturated fur, fur that’s too red, or fur that’s too orange.
Some information about my setup:
The colors are controlled by a layer system made up of different masks which allows me to quickly and easily change the color of various parts of the fur (such as the main orange color, pale fur color, dark fur color, tail fur color, nose color etc). Both the fur and the actual Nick mesh use the same system but can have different colors for each layer.
For variation, I use multiple mix nodes that mix a different shade of red (usually just hue and value shifts)
Would appreciate any kind of help!