Sunday Progress Report (Patreon)

Stuff done this week (when not distracted by the news filled with things I'd class as too far fetched if it happened in a movie):

Staying In Eating Out pt3, Cam 3 that I showed off last week has been rendered, I've included some stills from camera 4. start of cam 4 has been refined and I've started blocking out the really juicy bit now 

After watching a certain movie I decided to try my hand at the translucent iridescent shader and applied it to one of my older pieces. This renders so much quicker than fur so if anyone likes the aesthetic I might look to re render some older animations with this, (maybe do the full otter and the tiger foot rubs with the new updated models in this style) or single posed pieces.  

The Tiger rebuild is coming along nicely, the main reason is to get the new faster rig going along with some better joint deformation (huge text block about that below) I've also redone some of the sculpt so the paws look nicer (see attachments), I discovered a bonus to the new faster rigging setup, roughly speaking as long as the head topology stays untouched I can mess with the body topology (body sculpt), UVs(the thing that allows textures to work) and not have to redo any rigging on the head (the most in depth and time consuming step that previously required everything else to be perfect otherwise the entire lot would need to be redone). 

Note the following chunk of text is a lot of technical waffle feel free to skip this section. ^_^

I've been trying out ways to stop joints collapsing (where the model folds in on itself) main offenders are knees and elbows There are several ways to handle this and in the past I was using blend shapes (a copy of the model posed then sculpted, and this sculpt gets 'blended' in as the elbow or knee moves into that pose) and this provided ok deformation but was not ideal as any adjustment required going back to sculpting and if there were 2/3 intermediate blend shapes (sculpts at different angles) for each joint this could take a while. Now I'm using 'helper joints' that give better deformation (these average movement of the surrounding joints and act as little anchors to make sure nothing collapses) they allow for some skin sliding effects and most importantly can be quickly tweaked and modified to change the overall look. once I have these dialed in I can then add a little bit of faux muscle sim (slow) to stop mesh interpenetration (kinky) and bake those deformations out as blendshapes (fast) and remove the sim, which emulates what I was doing by hand, a lot faster. All in all this will lead to better looking characters quicker. Everything described above is having scripts created to automate as much of the process as possible. I've included a short playblast that shows what sort of difference this makes (sorry for the flipped camera but I only realized half way through it might be a good idea to document this so I just made a quick demo before setting up the other side) 

What I'm up to this week, Staying In Eating Out cam 4 (might split the start of this to it's own camera cut so I can add dynamics to what's there, lock it off and get it rendered) The Executive Producers have chosen for me to continue the tiger rebuild as the side activity for this week.