As requested, an animation update with detail! (Patreon)

So I've been kinda getting away with some cheapskate "I've been busy with animation" remarks as a general excuse for delays. And while it's true that I have indeed been busy with animation, it's kinda hard to believe that if I have nothing to show that I've been working on.

What I'm going to talk about in this post are the problems we've had in getting a fully functional rig up and running. I say "we" because in this whole process I'm getting a lot of great help from my A3D colleague Cosmo, who's working on fluid sim as well that I hope we can show off soon.

Anyway, let's dive into it! This is going to be a very technical post but hey... you guys asked for it :D

The image above is the first functional Maya rig that we managed to get running in early January. As you can see, the cock is a different colour from the rest of the body, which is due to the absence of shader information on it. This cock/pussy was a mesh that Cosmo created from scratch, and that we would've worked on and developed further as the weeks progressed. For all intents and purposes, I intended to animate with this and as you can see I had already put Mari in a nice pose to get a handle on how that works.

But then, a better opportunity presented itself. A far more complete solution became available, that would drastically reduce the amount of work we'd have to do. Or so I assumed. I ended up giving Mari her new cock that you've seen in the posts I made throughout this month, and that was the cock I intended to export out. Before I did, I finetuned it in Daz to get the look right, which in hindsight wasn't smart. I assumed there'd be no problems, but... yeah. There were.

The new cock was properly shaded and mapped, and attached to the body perfectly. But there were some problems. First, the glans was in a very weird position compared to where it was in Daz studio. Like, a half inch higher than it should be. Upon closer inspection, this turned out to be a weightmapping problem. For whatever reason, mostly to do with the glans being the final joint in the cock's joint hierarchy, the weight mapping on it was at 50% instead of 100%. Weight mapping determines how much of a mesh's geometry moves along with translation and rotation values.

If the entire cock's joint hierarchy is properly weightmapped, but the glans is not, you get something that looks like this:

Thankfully Cosmo and I figured this one out pretty quickly, but since there were multiple iterations of this export, I ended up having to fix this multiple times. For an expert rigger and animator, this is a super easy fix. I'm not an expert. So a lot of this is trying to figure things out as we go along.

The next problem that we ran into was even weirder:

Highlighted is the entire groin area. This is what it looked like when we moved Mari's hip controller forward. As you can see, the balls and the pussy and her entire vaginal cavity stayed behind. The glans also didn't play along. At first we thought that this was just a weight mapping issue, but it didn't turn out to be that simple.

We conceded during our live skype session that this one might be above our paygrade, but I ended up sending the scene to Cosmo anyway so that he could continue experimenting. As he eventually figured out, this was a skinning issue. Because the vagina/testicles area is technically a geograft onto a geograft (the cock is what you graft onto the body, and then the pussy/balls are what you graft onto the cock), the export script didn't include any skinning information for it.

Skinning is what determines whether geometry is bound to joint rotation at all. The aforementioned weight mapping is only the process to finetune it. Without skinning information, there is nothing to weightmap.

This problem escalated slightly when we found out that I can't resolve the skinning issue in Maya on my PC, because I get an error. Cosmo however has no problem doing it on his. Same scene, same function used. I get an error, he does not. We thought maybe that was a caching issue but we never ended up resolving this. Super weird, but welcome to 3D work.

Eventually, we got the whole thing working.

This is the final version of the rig, that's ready for use and animation. All the red circles you see are control handles that allow me to manipulate the pose. As you can see, we also added a whole bunch around the cock. If you scroll up you can see that originally the export script didn't include any, because that script isn't made to take cocks and other geografts into account.

I haven't been animating yet because I'm now meeting rendering obligations in Daz studio. If I have time to work between renders, I definitely will, but this ultimately it's mostly a matter of doing one thing or the other. I can't pose and work in two programs at the same time, after all. Even if I do have two PC's. When I'm rendering in Daz, I can turn to my other workstation and proceed in Maya there.

So that's what I've been up to. I'm making no secret of it: this level of 3D work isn't my forte, yet. It's simply a big leap from Daz, and it's a big part of what held me back all these years. Thankfully with the help of several people there's progress, and all the technical hurdles that held me back from even getting started with setting up a simple loop, have now been taken.

February should be a month in which I can have a viewport animation to show of a simple selfsuck or jerkoff loop. Once I have that going, things will move forward in a hurry because I can then just make a bunch.

If you've read all this, thank you :D You're a very supportive fan haha.