Orca Physics WIP (Patreon)

See the vid attached to this post if you want to see the orca's junk flopping down.

This week I've been working on weight painting and rigging the orca model. It's been slow because I've needed to relearn or remember how to do a bunch of stuff. I think I'm just about done with the rigging though.

One of the things I wanted to try with this model was using more procedural physics to animate things like the junk or tail. (Unlike Pulsar's model where I animate every piece of it by hand.) I think it could potentially work pretty well, although I won't know for sure until I start trying to animate with it.

This particular implementation is with wiggle bones in blender (using the free yet surprisingly good Wiggle v2.0 addon). It works well enough, but with some limitations. For instance they don't support self-collision, so you can see the balls clipping into the thighs there.

I'd like to try this same thing but using soft body physics instead, which is a lot more accurate and flexible. It's a totally new system though so it's going to take a bit of time to figure out. It'll make for much nicer, bouncier models in the future though.