Maya+Animation+Render

It's been a long day, but i got alot done!
Haven't use Maya for about a year, unbelievable. But it's great to see that i pick it up generally.
Here are the results from today. Basically everything for the 3d cow character.

Rigging
coz we had problem of animating the cow body seperately with the old rig, i rigged it again following the simple-rules idea from Lui.
Added my favourite controllers just for making the animating job easier.

Spin IK on the tail, another my favourite tool.

Animating
Had a few goes on the walk cycle, focusing on the rigid mindless movements.
Played around with different versions.
The idea was combining the animation channels of different body parts from different maya files into one final version. So Trax Editor is the ideal tool!
By the assistant of Maya Help, here is the learning notes:

• select the object
• open windows/Animation Editors/Trax Editor
• in Trax, Create/Character Set from the selected object(s) or part(s)
• Create/Clips, List/Load Clips to view and unlinear edit
• in Trax, File/Export Clips, save
• Open the combination file
• select and create Charater Set in Trax Editor
• Trax/File/import Clips to Character
  

Benefit of Trax:
transfer whole set of animation of objects among files.
unlinear Editing
Done point of my way:
can only access Graph Editor of the set object via Trax Editor.
inconvinient to change the timing once clips are imported.
encounter problem when trying to infinity loop the animation.

Two versions of legs

Render (Thanks Matt Beale and Lui for helps)
I want to get a hand drawn look. so tried Maya Vector render, with different colour settings. But i need to work with high poly mesh to get the outline. So tried Toon Shade. much quicker render.
Also changed the basic Lambert setting to get the flat shade.
Changed render background to white for future colouring.

Colouring
samples of some touches in Painter