looks very interesting)

Thanks! Hopefully I can get it finished and looking closer to how I imagined it

You've done well for taking on so much so quickly. There is so much to take in. The good thing about 3D is there is unlimited opportunity to tweak, adjust and improve a model. It usually takes me about 60 hours to create even a basic figure.

Thanks very much! Your work is fantastic, so it's encouraging to hear such kind words :) There's still a lot I need to fix on this even in this state, mostly around the cheeks, but I'm otherwise pleased with how it's going so far. Already lost track of how long I've spent working on it though. ^^'

You can either use actual hair strands along a path, or try and simulate it with loads of clumping. Other option is along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpuhgbSbXEE

The obvious thing is the square edges where different fur colours meet, where you've obviously selected the face and coloured it...

If you take your mesh, open up UV editing, go into edit and U > smart UV project to turn the whole model into a flat mesh, then in the painting screen, Image > new then Image > Save As, name it and put it in a texture folder for your model.

Then everywhere you want fur, assign it a new texture for now. Then open the Shader Editor, and click Add > texture > image texture. Place it down and link Color to the Base color in the principled BDSF. In the image texture, open and select your new texture. Now in the texture paint window, you should be able to paint directly onto the mesh. Save the image frequently! Using the tools, you should be able to nicely blend together the edges, as it's a far higher resolution than using faces for colours.

Just bear in mind that the painted image texture will go wonky if you stretch faces or add new bits onto the mesh. Each time you modify the mesh, you'll probably have to start with a fresh texture.

Hope this helps.

Oh, now that's an interesting method for the hair. I may have to give that a try and see how it works out.

Yeah, it's very much temporary face colouring at the moment. I hadn't started learning how to do UV texturing yet, but wanted to get some kind of colour on her so I could get some idea of how it would look. Changes are I'm not gonna use a fur shader on her but rather try for a more painted style for the shading. Possibly self lit, but I'm not quite sure yet. I may end up experimenting with the fur though, so this is all still really useful information. Thanks very much!

The painting method I described can either be used just as a simple texture, or if you want to go fancy, when you generate fur, you can set it to render the body texture, so it'll paint the strands with the base textures pattern.

You're making leaps and bounds. Impressive work!

Thank you, hopefully I can keep it up :)

I started to learn to model in Blender in late 2016 but then I started a nearly two year run of 50+-hour work weeks. I had to stop cold. Once it did calm down, I was going to wait until Blender 2.8 came out. I played with it and imported some Sketchup models to play with Blender 2.8.

I never did get back into character modeling. I think I’m just told old to learn it since there’s a lot involved.

This is about as far as I got, https://www.furaffinity.net/view/26671619/ back with Blender 2.79.

I also did try sculpting a character which I got much more done a lot faster, https://www.furaffinity.net/view/30763028/

I am curious, what tutorials did you watch? Chances are I’ve probably seen them but maybe you saw different ones.

I can't quite get the hang of the sculpting tools, personally. I've always been more of a poly modelling kinda guy in the few times I'd done it years and years ago, but I'll probably spend some time watching a bunch of tutorials to try and get my head around it since it'll definitely speed things up in the long run.

And your sculpt was looking good so far. I don't think it's too late to learn it honestly, though yeah it'll take a lot more time to really get it down.

As for tutorials, I got the basics down with the Hard Surface Modelling series found here: https://gumroad.com/l/hardsurfacemodeling

I think I referenced some of the specific body topology from CGCookie on Youtube - mostly for things like the hands, feet, and neck/shoulders.

And most of the rigging was done based on DanPro's tutorials, found here: https://www.youtube.com/user/Dantreige
The face rig was done entirely off his series on the subject. And I'm doing the rest without Rigify because I'm clearly sadistic or stupid, heh.

I think it took me less time to learn the sculpting tools than anything else. I’ve been seeing more and more hard surface modeling tutorials. The things that can be done in blender.

I just need more time to learn it.... and energy! I so want to take my characters 3D. I feel my hand drawn art is just losing its quality.

This was one of the tutorials I started watching before I had to stop because of nearly two years of overtime, https://youtu.be/rlhMyNdRx1Q I liked the technique.

I guess it’s just hard to get back into after all of that overtime. Then there’s the other stuff that has to be done do the model beside rigging.

I know I could take some premade model and modify it but I’d rather make my own.

Ah yeah, I tried following this tutorial. It's great and I'll probably use it in the final version, but I initially got a bit lost trying to actually shape Fran's hair since I couldn't "see" how to make it work in 3D space, hence me adding that proxy version to go off. It's definitely a great tutorial though, and most likely the way I'd want to approach it - I'm mostly curious how other people tend to model it and if there are any particular considerations to keep in mind.

Honestly that face is pretty uncanny...texturing looks a bit plasticy, too.

Yeah, neither is really finished up at the moment. I need to work on getting the shapes of her face looking better, particularly around the eyes, and the texturing is very much temporary so I could have an idea of how it looks with colour.

Well, I wish you the best of luck on that. Converting 2D anime faces to 3D is hard af.

uncanny valley territory, a bit. maybe lose the 'human' jawline?

Hmm, too sharp? Or is it the chin?

Chin/muzzle. It's the way the nose seems to come out to make the nose differently from a human face, but it's only at the top. I suspect it might be a case that your style works well in 2d images, but might need some tweaks to work in a 3d space. I'd pull the lower jaw out a little bit and maybe give a bit of width between the bridge of the nose and the chin. I think that's a shitty way of just describing a bit more like a muzzle, but tweaked to fit into the way you draw already.

Being honest, a lot of characters work well when draw them, but as soon as you try to make them 3d, you realise some parts of the anatomy, usually heads, just doesn't really work if you stay on model. There's usually a bit of compromise. A good example is reptilian or even otters. In regular art, there's butt cheeks and a huge thick tail. Try doing that in 3d, and you end up with either a really thin tail, thin cheeks or a tail that starts halfway up the spine. You have to compromise to get close to what you want!

What others said, the nose part is a bit too human. One thing standing out to me related to this is those lines / creases at the sides of the mouth, I don't think those lines would be there with a muzzle.

my guess... try moving the end of the chin up and forward a bit. maybe?

That's some pixar level work right there

Rigify is pretty good and there are tutorials a plenty and it comes with Blender. Worth the look. I use auto rig pro. It is extremely good at rigging as long you model in A pose, which I always forget. Also, most hair I've seen is planes with transparency on the texture. I would look on some modelling sites to see how they do it. That's what I've done mostly.

Wow nice work so far. :)

Looks like you're using per-face-assigned textures to change the colors.
I think you might get better results by throwing a quick UVmapping on her, creating a texture, and then just painting the different colors you want on the mesh with Blender's texture paint.

As for the hair, any approach you like is good.  cj does awesome polyhair,  zorryn does some really nice particle hair work. There's also the combo approach older 3D game systems used a lot (and still might idk) - poly strips with alpha-channeled hair textures to combine both somewhat.

Wow, 3-D renderings of 2-D characters always look so different to me. Fran looks so weird without hair! But well done, F1!