All right! So this is the first render of my character Jek Tharsen, who I've been wanting to make some sci-fi animations with for while. It's taken about eight months of gradual work to get this character to where she is now, and for a long time I procrastinated and had other pursuits that kept me from coming back to this.

I've had the idea for this character for ages. She originally began as one of my characters in the game Space Station 13, where she was just a regular anthro fox with orange fur and a lot of hairspray, lol. Then, I began to conceptualize her as a protagonist in a Zelda-clone, where you'd run around fighting baddies and solving puzzles; basically Krystal from Dinosaur Planet before Dinosaur Planet became Star Fox Adventures and Krystal got sidelined to being a damsel in distress. And of course, if she was based on Krystal, she had to have colourful fur!

Somewhere around that time, I remembered that a long time ago (circa 2008), I was writing a Star Fox fanfiction that was based on Alien/Event Horizon/Doom, where the team of mercenaries was sent to investigate a derelict, alien star-ship near the outermost reaches of the Lylat system. Long story short, they get stranded on the ship and everything quickly goes to hell; which I know isn't really that original of an idea, but I was very enamoured with it at the time, lol. I had gotten nine chapters into that story, but sometime in 2009 I decided I didn't like it for one reason or another and I deleted it from fanfiction.net. I've always wanted to go back and read what I had written, but the passing of time and the changing of computers/hard drives has essentially erased that fanfiction from existence.

So, I've settled on Jek being a kind of mash-up of characters like Ellen Ripley from Alien, Krystal, and Fox McCloud. I still don't fully know what I want her general story to be, but I'm gradually fleshing that out as I go along.

At the moment, Jek is fully rigged with a combination of regular bones and Blender's "bendy bones" system, which allows bones to naturally bend along a curve, useful for things like spines. I also utilised them on the face, to allow for more natural expressions. It also helps me to get away from my old system of using "shape keys", which works okay but requires a lot of setting up drivers and such.

Her clothes are a bit of a problem, as I made them over the character rather than from the character, so they don't move perfectly with the body underneath which causes things like parts of the body clipping through the clothes to happen. So, I'll probably end up redoing them -- but for the purpose of a still render like this, the problem isn't too egregious.

That said, I really enjoy what I've made so far. I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to put together some test animations, and then from there maybe making some kind of a short -- but that's an IMMENSE amount of effort, haha. But anything I make will be posted here, so I'll keep you in the loop. :)

This is Makazi, signing off.