Morrigan Model Update (Patreon)

The main project I've been working on has been continuing with the Morrigan model. It's been a while since I've worked on it, and I've learned some stuff along the way to help improve the model. There's also quite a few new characters that I would like to use in Blender and working with Morrigan serves as a good warmup. 

For starters, I fixed up the corrective shapekeys around her neck and shoulders. I figured out how to do this when I worked on the Cassandra model. Next, I transferred body size shapekeys to her outfit, which is something I learned how to do while working on the Jill animation. This means that shapekeys changing her body shape will also change her outfit appropriately. 

I've made some other fixes too. I've improved the weighting of her top and necklace around her neck. I've also improved the weighting of her skirt a little. The weight transfer from her body to the skirt was the most inaccurate part of the clothes because the geometry of the skirt is so different from her legs. I'm not good at weight painting, so it's still not great, but it's better than what it was.

I've also done a minor improvement to her materials. Specifically, I overlooked her necklace before, so I fixed the material to be metallic and it looks much nicer.

Lastly, and this is the biggest hurdle of the project, I'm currently working on shapekeys for her facial expressions and lip sync. I've learned pretty much everything I have to for this part. Basically, I need to start posing out the shapekeys with bones, and then refine them after with sculpt mode. I've got 51 shapekeys planned out, and so far I've posed 21 of them. It's a fairly simple but tedious process.

The main thing is that once the shapekeys are finished, the model is more or less movie worthy. It'll have all the features it needs for lengthy projects. In fact, I think the model would probably be good enough for a public release. I'm excited since that would mean other people can play around with it.

It'll probably take a few more days to finish out the shapekeys. Then, I'll do some posters or an animation or something to put the model through its paces.