WIP #39: Something completely different (Patreon)

Hey Y’all, today I’ve got something very exiting to share with you! In my spare time I've been working on my next set of models, and now they're ready to show a first peek!

Now, of course so far I’ve been pretty much exclusively doing pony art, so I understand that some of you might have some questions. First and most importantly - this doesn’t mean I’m moving away from MLP work. The mares of the show have always been some of my favourite characters and I don’t see myself running out of ideas to explore with them or losing interest in them any time soon! Naturally though, I’ve never been exclusively interested in MLP, and since I started doing this I’ve wanted to also explore other subjects for fanart, and eventually original content. What does this mean for the balance between pony and non-pony themed work here? Well, I am going to be making panty and stocking animations, but I might only do so in my free time, depending on the results of the poll! So make sure to go over and let me know how you feel about this change. Even better, leave a comment or send me a message!

Another group of you may also be asking Melvin, why didn’t you do this earlier? Well, so far I’ve been using and refining a workflow of base meshes and rigging centered around anthro pony morphology. Since I spend so much of my time animating new scenes, and expanding those assets to cover other morphologies is a pretty labor-intensive undertaking, it’s easy to get sort of “process trapped” in only working with one set of characters. It’s a similar process by which a lot of nsfw 3d animators only work with overwatch characters, for example.

So how about these models, eh? Thankfully, a lot of the refinements I’ve made to the bodies of my pony models have transferred over just fine to the human bodies, but of course the head had to be re-rigged and the feet are entirely new. These gals now have fully articulated feet with (probably overkill) trimmings like IK toes, and metatarsal bones! I’ve also taken this opportunity to make some topological improvements, especially in the anus. The angels and demons are gonna have properly detailed buttholes!

The biggest challenge specifically with panty and stocking characters is the hair. They don’t have tails (most of the time), which is a bit of a relief, but they make up for it with much longer, more complex and geometric hairstyles. The absolute queen of difficult-to-rig hair is Stocking. Look at this.

I could have phoned it in and done a simpler system, but I’m getting really tired of the hair in my work being kinda janky. Stocking’s hair is so iconic, and I wanted to at least come closer to doing it justice in future animations. More details on that below

Of course, there's much work left to do! The models for Scanty and Kneesocks are also coming, although they're in less completed states:

Additionally to that, I'm going to be making models for brief and garterbelt, as well as the weapons, and of course there are many sexy, iconic outfits in the first season of the show that I'll be exploring!

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For those interested in the hair adventure:

So what’s the thought process here? Well, the big problem with poly hair setups is the deformation mode - using either curves or armature deform doesn’t really produce accurate behavior because both ultimately bend the mesh. If you abstract real (or simulated) hair as a series of geometric shapes, the correct deformation mode is actually shearing (or skewing). The problem, though, is that most 3d packages actually try quite hard to avoid shearing deformations as they’re usually considered “undesirable”. The solution? Densely covering the mesh in bone chains so that they can kind of simulate that shearing behavior, through a lot of copy rotation constraints, and then using a many-layered control setup that uses a bunch of tracking constraints to wrangle the whole thing into being practically animate-able and broadly behaving itself. The jury’s out on if it needs spline IK or not - that’s the technically correct but heavier solution, but for now I’m experimenting.

Pretty soon I’m going to go in and rework the hair rigging on a lot of my pony characters - Rarity and Fluttershy are especially in need of an upgrade.