Watch an animated expression test here: https://twitter.com/notcakeinferno/.....06982400225645 (Animated by  Disregard67)

Meet Chloé, a mighty wish-fulfilling djinn and self-proclaimed queen of the desert!

Chloé once used to be a genie who had been tied to a lamp by a curse. That was at least until one day, where she crossed paths with a prince whom she granted three wishes. Little did the prince know that speaking out the third wish would free her from the lamp and allow her to roam freely, all while retaining her might. Chloé however was relatively modest, only demanding a relatively small section of the prince's kingdom for her own, which has since been titled Chloé's Domain. The anubian goddess has settled there ever since, spending her days around an idyllic oasis with a number of loyal subjects.

Every now and then, travellers enter her domain and often fall victim to her mischief. The common outcome is that they end up as one of her subjects themselves, as Chloé would often enchant them with one of her spells, at least if the usual methods aren't effective enough. Being an actual goddess, the anubian queen has a persistent interest in growing her following after all!

If Chloé actually takes a liking in someone, she'll even try to win them over with conventional methods and occasionally even grant them wishes. Everything to make them stay a little longer...

Originally this started out as a Zoe redesign to bring Zoe’s model up to speed with the times. However, I quickly realized that we went a little too far in the process, making her look so wildly different that a lot of my patrons voiced concerns about the redesign being a little too radical. I noticed that Cid’s initial sculpt made her look a lot more like a jackal from her side profile, and since I’m still getting requests of bringing back the jackal character from one of my earliest animations here, it started making more sense to turn her into a completely new character with a wildly different design.

The base sculpt for the model was done by Acidic and already dates back last year. Back then she was still intended as a Zoe makeover until those plans were changed. He did an incredibly fine job of giving her torso and head proper definition, also entirely modelling her hands and feet into something proper, while also sculpting her amazing teeth that I haven't touched ever since. He's also been responsible for making her bra and loincloth, while also taking care of the retopology and UV processes that I dread so much. I did quite a bit of additional sculpting work afterwards to make her a bit thicker and rework her face and mouth a fair bit.

Once we considered her proportions to be decent looking, I went on with texturing her body, before handing her off to Disregard67, who handled the entire rigging process while I was working on finishing the Bunsen animation. I want to especially thank him for keeping up with my requirements for this rig. He's still been ironing out bugs until this weekend to make this a highly functional rig that goes far beyond what my previous Zoe model could do. Thanks to him, Chloé is incredibly expressive and has extremely detailed controls!

Lastly, I took care of her groom, which became quite the ordeal after realizing that the plugin I’ve been working with (Ornatrix) had some issues that only became apparent when animating the character. This eventually forced me to learn a new grooming tool (Yeti) from scratch, but unlike the previous one, this one actually just worked and didn’t come with a suite of issues and chaotically flickering hair during animation. Chloé’s hair is quite a bit more sophisticated than Zoe’s and already has dynamic properties in this very first version. I also went the extra mile and made pressure maps for her clothes and modelled her fur to get pressed down underneath the clothes and actually wrap around them. Her fur is using a physically-based fur shader that receives properties such as gloss and scattering, something that wasn’t quite possible with Zoe’s fur. Because of this, I also made a wet variant that is a lot glossier than the dry version, while also still working on a variant with sand in it that might appear in a future animation.

I want to thank my patrons for making it possible for all of us to invest all of this time into making such a polished model! I'm hoping that this will be the first step to a small roster of characters, which should make it possible to offer a bit more variety in future animations!

Credits

 Acidic - Sculpting, texturing, shaders, retopology/UV layout
 Disregard67 - Rigging
 CakeInferno - Sculpting, texturing, shaders, grooming


Check out my Patreon to follow my progress and get high quality versions of animations! https://www.patreon.com/CakeInferno