Donuts and New Hands (Patreon)

Covered a lot of work this weekend. To start off, I implemented donuts. I built the donut as shown below:

I made the golden chocolate because it's Shinobu's favorite second to a French Crueler. However, in the future I want to make Mexican style pastries as the setting of this simulation is in Mexico. The donut was split up into 4 pieces so she can eat the donut and slowly make it disappear. I created body_stand_donut_in which will play whenever she picks up the donut. Video 1 shows the donut animation. One thing that bothers me is the delay between her actions. As in, she waits for the pick up animation too long before firing the donut_in animation. I will think of a solution to address this problem as I want her to immediately play the animation a little sooner.

Also I made a new shapekey for her head, happy_closed_eyelids:

Essentially making her eyelids curve upwards in a happy arc. Before they were way too flat and devoid of emotion:

Headpating and general happy expressions should be much cuter now.

Lastly, I needed to redo the "baked hold forms" system from last blog post that is in charge of the logic behind holding objects realistically. The problem was that Shinobu's hands were not very well made in retrospect, are old, and animating with them is a pain in the ass. So, I remade them. Video 2 shows the new skinnier more feminine hands. I went for more feminine almost gaunt like hands using reference image:

Despite not that much of a visual upgrade, the main reason I wanted to revamp them was because the deformations were REALLY bad. Especially the thumb (my anatomy and skinning was more novice at the time). In particular they were bad because the weight paints were made with subdivision turned on. This is great for achieving smooth paint across vertices but terrible for joints where you need to have more control over edges that are very close to each other. The following shows the nasty old hands:

The next one shows the new hands with subdivision deformations (again):

And this last image shows the new hands with finer topology after subdivision was applied:

It's nice to work with more control without subdivision but its also "dangerous" in the sense that it's very easy to mess up the smoothness and flow of vertices. That's why I usually avoid applying it but I'm seeing potentially really good results in other areas (wrists, kneecaps, etc.).

To improve animating with the new hands, I made sure that they now have proper rolls and rotation locks the following image shows the old hand rig bones without a proper roll being set:

The problem was that not all bones on fingers have the same degrees of freedom. The proximal phalanges bone of your index finger (the first bone that sticks out), has a lot more freedom than the bones that follow. This meant that I could lock the Y and Z rotations permanently in the rig to avoid having me "guess" and end up with wrong slightly mis-rotated finger bones (which happened a lot during animating). Last image shows the new hand rig with locks and proper rolls:

This should help posing her fingers much faster too. The ugly side is that now I have to redo all finger animations....shouldn't be that much though.

Also, I have achieved 15 patrons! Thank you for sticking around my random technical rabble rabble. I am currently thinking of the next demo day. I am thinking 10/10/18. My goal for this date is to fully implement eating donuts, drawing, and some other fun stuff I haven't thought up of yet. Stick around.