Lastly, I should mention that the drawing's artist gave permission to do this. 👍

Here's showing the steps: I made a simplified drawover of the subject that reduces the things that might confuse the AI, then I cleanup, make additions, and paint the generated mesh. The third image is the raw generated mesh, which if you look closely has very scuffed neck floof.

2D-to-3D AI mesh generator. The one I’ve been using to make mesh blockouts based on drawings is Rodin.

I feel it took much less time and is more stylistically accurate to the original model than if I did the fluff from scratch (same with the rest of the model). I would have done it manually though if the character was intended to be animated.

So being completely honest, I started with a 2D-to-3D generated mesh based on the drawing, which gave a surprisingly good start on the neck floof, but it was still very scuffed and I spent hours adding mesh tubes, pulling, smoothing, creasing, etc until I got what looked nice with no visible errors.