Damn! nice work brigg!

Have some questions:

did you do blend shapes for him?
if so, how to manage the length of the muzzle?

is the mouth inside modeled? and if so, is it connected to the base? I usually separate, wondering how easy/hard it is combined

are the eyes on aim constraints? cause if so, how can you get one eye to stop at a certain point and leave the other one going? so that if the camera is far to one side, the opposite eye doesn't disappear

I'm assuming its Poly and not Nurbs?

are you using Maya or mental ray? im trying to experiment with Maya's global illumination and ambient occlusion

and lastly, you seem to use Maya fur, yes? how does that animate, if you know?

thanks. XD very nice though!

oops. check below.

ok, answers:

Not yet. the head needs to be connected to the body, so making blendshapes now would be pointless.
I'm not sure what you mean by managing the length of the muzzle.

the inside of the mouth is fully modelled to about halfway down the neck. For human characters you can make them seperate, but when you have a muzzle to animated, making the inside geometry deform evenly with the lower jaw can be a bitch if it isn't connected. the gums and teeth are separate though.

These eyes aren't constrained yet, But theres an easy solution to your problem. instead of having the eyes both constrained to one object or locater, have each eye constrained to its own object, and space the objects out so that they are even with the eyes. then parent those two objects to another one so you can move them both at once. that will keep the eyes rotated right.

yes, its all polygons.

this is just maya with few spotlights, and about 12 shadow map casting directional lights for soft shadows.

I dont use maya fur at all, since it doesnt work very well with Polygons. I use Shave and a haircut, and it animates very well, But takes a little bit of setup.

oh, that looks either expensive or hard to find. hmm.

well, i normally eye constraint that way, yes, just seems with wide-eyed animals, it will happen if their iris is too close to the inside of the eye. i suppose you wouldnt want that in the first place though.

so do you have a parent constraint for the teeth to match the mouth for jaw opening? or have you not bothered that yet since it's pretty much blend shapes anyway. or do you do the jaw movements with joints instead?

It depends what kind of character. If its a human, I usually use blendshapes alone for mouth movements. I have a joint always bound to the jaw but I never really use it.

For characters with muzzles, I have the lip movements done with blendshapes, and the jaw movements done with a joint, and I have the teeth bound to the same joint for the jaw.

But of course, I havent done any of that yet, because the character isnt even finished being modelled yet, let alone textured or rigged.