The Yello Mouse is my artist signature; I then decided to create a character out of it. The first version of The Yello Mouse was created in late 2019. The plan was to release a free rig for educational purposes alongside with a Youtube channel but I quickly realized my time was better-spent learning/experimenting and creating instead of managing a channel. The first version of the character was simple box modeling. The rig was manually created from the ground up. Thinking about how to ease someone new to 3D into using a basic biped rig, I made toggle attribute for several sections of controls to have their visibility on and off with the thought that one can just focus on the basic first but have the ability to turn on more controls to work with if needed/when ready.
First version of The Yello Mouse Model/Rig
The second version of the character was created in February of 2020. It was my way of pushing myself to learn Zbrush. I created the character in Zbrush and Retopo him in Maya. That was my first time using Maya Retopogy tool. I loved it. I learned to use Substance Painter to do a basic diffuse map on the character. I then decided to use Mgear to rig up the new version of The Yello Mouse instead of manual rigging as my goal for these kinds of learning exercises were all to rapid prototype. I also modeled/ manually rigged up a small motorcyle for the mouse based on the model of my own motorcycle. The creation of the version 2 model, texturing and rig with simple animation to test the rig was done within two weeks. This achieved my goal of rapid prototype on top of learning new tools along with learning how to sculpt and retopo.
Second version of The Yello Mouse Model/Rig