Progress Report 2/10/2023 (Patreon)

Love is in the air! Quick, hold your breath! Here's what I got done this week:

• Cleaned up weights for all extreme poses: hips, knees, ankles, fingers
• Fixed a bone/control rotation orientation problem with the fingers and toes

I underestimated how much work rigging would be, but I'm nearly done! Sorta! I only have the toes left to "fix", and I use quotation marks because I don't feel like I'm actually fixing them, more like band-aiding them until I get to a more prominent solution (helper bones and/or shape keys). More on that when we get there.

In related news, I'm going to begin work on my first animation as soon as I get the feet fully rigged and looking good (by which I mean begrudgingly acceptable). It's simple enough that it shouldn't require the extra bones or shape keys or anything fancy (hopefully), so I can save those for afterwards. Either way, I'll have something visible to show off again as I make progress! :D

Lastly, I just wanna complain for a moment: navigating the rigging system in Blender sucks. It took me over an hour to fix a bone roll issue on the fingers and toes -- something that should have taken only a few minutes. They were bending the wrong way, so I was trying to get them to bend the right way. The solution ended up being a key button that was hidden in a specific place in the UI on a specific object in a specific mode. This is just one of many hide-and-seek games I played with the interface while rigging. It's been quite frustrating, and I'm already envisioning the rant I'm going to have in my journal. Buuut I'm gonna try not to think about those until after I've finished rigging. I have enough on my plate as it is. @_@

Anyhoo, that's it for now! Hopefully I'll have some progress with the animation by the end of next week, unless my brain explodes from all the information overload. I'm gonna eat the best brain food that I can -- Taco Bell -- and hope it's the former. I'll see you guys again next week!