A bit of experimentation in using rendering volume fur for Rederick here! Still a bit too shiny from certain angles, but it's much less bright than the previous scrap. That scrap's description also has some details about the volume fur I'm using.

It lacks the facial expression deformation work I normally do this time because the choice to use an invisible surface proxy for the fur definition makes that more complicated and it wasn't really the point of the experiment. Thus, both it and the lighting are quite dull. There are a few issues with it but I'm pretty happy with the outcome of the experiment.

The invisible surface proxy approach has its share of draw backs. First, I have to bind it to the skeleton just like the rest of the model, independently, and need to do so for each independent types of fur. True, I could do them all on a single proxy, but that would have it's own difficulties and I'd have to do a lot of weight painting so that parts like the long fur would only show up on the cheeks. I have to delete polygons from the proxy to remove surface area, only after binding it because if I do it before, then it doesn't deform quite the same as the base model and I end up with spots where the fur kind of hovers. The most annoying draw back would be that if I want it to follow the facial expressions of anything more detailed than opening and closing the mouth, I would have to bind wire deformers to each proxy just as I do with the base model, massively increasing the amount of work I need to do. I'm sure there must be a better way to setup these proxies that does all this stuff for me, but I don't know how to do it just yet.

Oh, and the mental ray renderer crashed several times while rendering the frames for this animation. I can't figure out why it crashes, but it's very consistent and happens on the exact same 4 frames but while rendering different areas. Fortunately, I can restart the rendering process at any frame and all the other frames are intact, so I can just skip over the crashed ones and figure something else for them. I think it must have something to do with trying to render volumes for fibers that are too small or something. It was crashing a lot more when I was trying to do very small lengths on the muzzle.