I've been working on polishing the Tiger. Using painted vertices for the stripes works well, it took a bit of fooling around with the settings in the render tree for the Mix2Colors node .. The stripes still have a strange green glow around them. I suspect that it doesn't have to do with the mix node at all, but instead its the alpha channel that was generated when I painted the vertices that isn't correct ... I'll have to go back and check that. I also have to add the "real" stripe on the tiger's head ...

I had a problem with the orientation of the eyes (and all objects that are constrained to clusters on the body), when rotating the entire tiger ... his first position is on the floor asleep and as soon as I rotated his body, his eyes lost the correct orientation. Fixed that by making them the child of the subdivision surface. Had the same problem with the nose, belly (yellow spot) and eyebrows. All were easy to fix except for the silly eyebrows which just wouldn't pay attention to anything I did ... HA! I fooled them by making them children of the eyeballs, which doesn't make sense to me but it worked !