Buffie the Bison stuffie

This is Buffie the bison, created in Blender and rendered in Cycles.

I wanted to do something different to cars for once and I thought that modelling a character or animal might be an interesting challenge and give me motivation to learn some new skills in Blender. I originally wanted to do a really low poly rendition of a bison, similar in style to the muscle car I previously uploaded, but after I used Blender's legacy particle system to add some "hair" meshes I thought that it would be way better to go all out and try to make a photo realistic render of him so I decided to try out the new geometry node based hair system instead as it seems to be way more powerful.

So Buffie is based on a souvenir I bought in Yellowstone National Park and because it has several distinct styles of synthetic hair across the toy I felt like this would be a good test to see if I could match each of those different styles of hair; Coarse wooly hair for his back and shoulders, long smooth hair for his head neck and underbelly, short smooth hair for his face and rear legs and then a sort of velvety very short hair for his hooves, nose and horns. Plus a little bit of long black shiny hair for his tail.

I found working with the Blender grooming and hair controls really enjoyable, the coarse hair on Buffie's back and shoulders was very challenging though, the way it knots and curls around itself was definitely difficult to match to the real toy. In the end though I think the sort of velvety texture for his hooves and nose could be improved the most.