Before touching any 3D software, I drew and painted the concept sketch in Photoshop to lock down Joey’s silhouette, proportions and personality. Getting the pose and expression right on paper came first. That made every later modeling decision easier to judge against a clear target.

I blocked out the base form in Maya, then moved into ZBrush to sculpt the final shapes, keeping the same rounded, expressive language as the original Zootopia characters. Checking the model in both wireframe and smooth shading from all three angles helped me catch silhouette issues early. Fixing them got much harder once the fur was in place.

I painted all the surface detail directly in ZBrush. Fur grooming in XGen came next, layered on top of the finished texture work. Getting the fur to read as soft and stylized rather than photorealistic took real iteration. A strand pattern that looks natural can easily fight against Zootopia’s rounded, toy like shapes.