Today, I set up out the bone structure. This is the stage were I need to think about how the character is going to move. As you should notice, I arranged the spine, tail and nose in straight lines so that the rotations will be completely even throughout them.
The feet are unique on Loxo as I am planning on having a little more control here. I am playing with the squish an stretch of the patty pad on the bottom of the heel.
In the torso, I have added extra controls in the center of the body to control how Loxo would move his legs from side to side or do actions that mimic the splits. The hind legs rotation point is fairly low so I raised this rotation point so that he can potentially have more poses in the hind quarters.
For the ears, I wanted as much control as possible... As you can see, the ear will be controlled through one joint at the meatiest point at the top and then drop down and out from there. This control will mimic secondary action.
At the end of the nose, I added a couple extra joints to control the hand motion that an elephant has with their nose.
In the face, you will notice that the nose drops down from a joint that I will be using to control the nose bounce when he is talking. The lower jaw is controlled by a joint and the eyes are each controlled by joints duplicated for the eyelid movement.
