Femke Schaars, then a student at the Buas in Breda, reached out to me for help on her graduation project.

The project was intended to focus on fur simulation and stylisation. She designed and modelled it all based on her own dog Flip.

The project looked very promising already at the time she contacted me I agreed to help her out, that way she could test out her fur symulations in movement as well, making it a better showcase.

I really liked the quality of the concept as well as how clean the model is. The actual biggest challenge in this rig was the shader for the eyes. It needed a way to manipulate the iris and pupil scale on the eyes, so I offered to play around with the shaders to come up with a simple solution. in this case the chosen solution was to drive a Shader Ramp with the values for the iris and the pupil scale. The colors that where used as an output where then used as masks for textures:

This way we could prevent the iris texture to look stretched, no matter how much of the surface it would take up.

The project really came to life with the animations provided by Ronja Jansen