Meet Nivek.

My name is Jeremiah Castro, I am a student at ITT Technical Institute (hence the username) in Spokane Valley, WA.
I am studying Digital Entertainment and Game design.

Anyways, my class has been working on a video game, since about last September (although there has been major changes that made us start over). This game will be done by September 2007, when we graduate. More info on this game will come later, but right now I wanted to show Nivek Yephrum, the main character in our game, Gulo.
Nivek Yephrum is a Gulo. The Gulo's are a race of creatures that are based on prairie dogs, but are bipedal, and are much more 'human' than animal. More info on the Gulo's will be made available at a later date.

Nivek is an orphan who lost his parents when he was 14. He is currently 18. Since becoming orphaned, he has become quiet and modest. He lives in the village of Kara, and he considers the village people to be his family because they took apart in raising him after his parents died. People generally rely on Nivek to do things for him. If there's a problem in Kara, Nivek is usually there to solve it, although that does not happen often in this 'utopian' society.

Technical details:
I modeled Nivek using 3d studio max 8, which was helpful because of the pelt mapping features.
I made the texture in Photoshop CS with the aid of a lot of stock photography. I love Photoshop and I had a lot of fun making the texture. Nivek has 936 Polys.
My way of modeling was making concept art, scanning it in and placing it in max. I then created a cylinder and made the basic shape of the body. For the head i started with a small plane on the top of his head and extruded the edges (using shift and drag) to follow the general outline of the concept art. Then went back in made the 3d shape look like an animal.
For the arms i just started extruding and making it shaped like an arm. The legs started out by extruding from the hips, then for the feet just extruding from legs.
The texture, as a said was made from a lot of stock photography. His fur is from a picture of a cat, which I made 'seamless', although not tile able. For the back of the head I had to remove the spots and add in a tiger stripe. His face was the hardest part, and took by far the longest. It has the cat fur as a base, but then I found a picture of a tiger that was spectacular, and cut it up and placed over my UVW map to get the right spaces. A lot of blending was done here, I even had to get another picture of a kitty cat because the tiger picture ending right above the eye brows.
The tunic is just a simple burlap sack. I wanted Nivek to have toe nails, so I got human toe nails and colored it differently, which was a hard task getting a decent color.
Nivek's fist was also hard, and of course is just textured in. I took a human fist and blended it onto the fur.
All right I think about covers everything.
Oh be sure to keep a lookout for more information on the game 'Gulo' made by Endeavor, a student group from ITT Technical Institute in Spokane Valley, WA.