Progress Report 2/3/2023 (Patreon)

Behold! It's Friday! Here's what I got done this week:

• Updated the numbering of my 3D journals; the next part is now Part 16 rather than Part 17
• Finished and published 3D Adventures Part 16
• Finished the setup for 3D Adventures Parts 17, 18, 19, and half of 20
• Finished the first pass of weight painting (auto-weight cleanup)
• Adjusted weights for all extreme poses: neck, lower back, shoulders, elbows, and wrists

So first thing's first: the reason I changed the numbering of the 3D journals is because Part 14 (or what used to be Part 14 -- "Style Trial") didn't really cover any actual 3D work -- it was just me deciding on an art style. Thus, I renumbered it to 13.5 and renumbered the ones ahead of it accordingly. It's a subtle way of saying "This part is skippable".

Nobody probably would have even noticed, but I figured I'd cover my bases.

In more interesting news, weight painting is going... ugh, well, it's going. I won't lie, it's a bit of a slog. I finished the first pass, which was running through each bone in the armature (the model's skeleton) and making sure they covered the areas they should. We don't want the knee controlling the chin or anything, you know?

That was the easy part. With that done, I've moved on to the second pass for weight painting: deformation cleanup. Take the neck, for example. I posed the neck in every extreme angle humanly possible: bent forwards, bent backwards, bent sideways, and twisted. With each extreme pose, I run through and make corrections to the weights, balancing between nearby bones until the pose looks good. For example, if the neck is bent sideways but looks way too sharp at the bend, I would need to blend the middle of the neck so that the head bone and the neck bone has equal weighting, thus creating a smooth bend.

Now, apply this entire process to every single extreme pose... for every. single. joint.

Some joints are easier than others. And then some joints are stupid and dumb. The shoulder is the stupidest and dumbest of them all. Do you know how many ways that thing can bend?! It's a ball-and-socket joint! That's 180 degrees of P A I N...

(Technically 20,626.5 degrees since it's about half a sphere, but shush.)

The good news is that I'm at a point where I'm fairly comfortable with the rigging process. It's just really tedious -- and that's coming from me, a perfectionist who normally eats tedium for breakfast!

Anyhoo, I'm gonna go eat Tedium Bell- er... Taco Bell before I work on the remaining... one, two... Ugh, six joints. And that's counting all the fingers and toes as one.

...

I'm gonna need a bigger Taco Bell. I'll see you guys again next week!