Start by sketching a simple skeleton in your head—just the bones and joints, nothing fancy. That gives you a clean rig that’s cheap to evaluate in the shader. Then layer on a few “muscle bands” that define the bulk, not every sine‑wave detail. Think of those as the big shapes that drive the look, not the fine pores. Finally, sprinkle procedural variations on top: a noise mask for scales, a tiny random offset for the eyes, a dash of color bloom. Keep the math low‑frequency; the high‑frequency stuff can stay in a texture or a vertex displacement map. When the core is fast and the fluff is pre‑baked, you get that hand‑crafted feel without slowing the frame rate.

Sounds solid, thanks for the heads‑up. I’ll lock the seed into the noise shader and keep the skeleton to a bare bones set so swapping them is a breeze. When I hit those stalls, I’ll let you walk me through the pruning tricks—just hit me with the basics first.