Dragonkin (and more), part 2.5 (Patreon)

Last time I told that I'm going to work on animations, but it turned out not to be the case. I realized that if I started animating a character like ordinary people would - I'd be shooting myself in the foot in the future. I instead dedicated myself to finding a way to animate them smarter, creating animations that can be re-used across as many different characters as possible. 

This is a report on my progress!

As you know from the previous post, I already had the Dragonkin model completed, with the new flashy artstyle and some bold ideas. I, however, had to re-work him and drastically change his skeleton to accommodate for the new features (that I'm going to describe in this post) and added functionality of swapping bodyparts, making both player customization and fast creation of many different NPCs possible again.

Compared with my previous attempts at similar customization systems, this one is significantly simpler and more realistic for one person to work with. I'd say this actually much more realistic than without it - as it's all about increasing my speed. New a new creature? Instead of modeling, rigging, and animating them, I will just need to make a new head and some body decorations - done!

I also streamlined the process of modeling itself: together with Hopfel we even wrote some Blender plugins to automate tedious parts of my modeling workflow, saving days of work time required to make new stuff for the system!

I pushed really hard (had almost no breaks) to finish all of this before Halloween and take pictures of the new canine race I modeled, but there is just way too much work to do before I can comfortably output sexy renders. I'm working towards this goal all days long still.

Skeleton and bodyparts

The new character system works by first establishing a base armature that will be playing shared animations of all characters. That armature is invisible, but it is then "dressed" with bodyparts (sounds really creepy, I know). These bodyparts represent different heads, torsos, pelvises, tails, wings, legs and arms. Additionally there is a myriad of smaller parts, such as hair, plates, spikes, ears, horns and even the particular bodypart between the legs.

Each bodypart can then introduce their own sub-skeleton, making it possible for me add various additional floppy bits later on or even completely replace anatomy (such as I have a membraned wing, and an incomplete feathered Avian wing - two completely different skeletons)

List of body-parts thus far. It will be growing over time, I'll even be making special custom ones just for you folks!

The base skeleton supports different orifice and "organic interface" configurations (front and rear slits, sheath, tailhole or cloaca), has fully functional and stretchy maw-to-tailhole insides. It has support of different wings, tails - even includes a possibility to add a tailmaw at the tip of it.

Here, take a closer look at bodypart previews in Blender (not a final Unreal Engine 5 quality):

Hizathri Head + Horns

Dragyren Head + Horns + Saurian Ears

Wolcanian Head + Therian Ears

Saurian Feet, Hands, Pelvis and Tail

Therian Feet, Hands, Pelvis and Tail (tail is WIP, sheath is pink cause I worked too hard on it)

Wolcanian Interface

Dragyren Interface

Hizathri Interface

Wings are optional now

Currently all the bodyparts use the same texture - but that is exactly what I wanted, and it is one of the key principles of this new character system. I save time re-using same assets and multiply the possible amount of variations I (or maybe even player) can create with it.

Right now it's yellow/orange scales, but I can replace it to fur or feathers of any color and pattern - it's trivial too, I just didn't get around to it because I was focusing on more important things first.

Additionally I'll still have to figure out how to use the new Unreal Engine 5 fur system for this (and hope not to fry our GPUs).

Posture Transformations

In addition to bodyparts, the skeleton itself can be transformed, making it possible to turn that character into anthro or feral, just using different animation sets for each. I always wanted to make a variety of posture configurations be available for players, however I knew couldn't produce that much models to do it "traditionally". 

This approach is the best compromise - one set of bodypart models but with many possible transformations of it. Characters can even shapeshift on the fly. This is not just a different pose: proportions, such as length of libs and spine, change as well.

A long time reader might recognize its something I toyed with in the past… Essentially I've been working on this idea for over than a year, and now it's finally bearing fruit!

Strange T-Pose

The character is modeled in a very strange and elongated base pose. Perhaps you're curios why is that...

You might be familiar why 3D characters are modeled in a pose like they are asserting dominance - this is done to rest the limbs in the middle of their range-of-motion, making it look better when the mesh is deformed by the skeletal animations. If it wasn't done like so, the mesh would look like it's all twisted around and pinched.

I took this concept a bit further, adding an extra dimension to it, not only considering limb rotation but also accounting for proportional scale of all parts of body - this is what makes it possible to go seamlessly from an anthropomorphic upright-standing character to a quadruped with long neck and body, without the mesh just breaking. 

This whole ordeal took a lot more planning, careful measuring and testing that I'd love to admit, and I'm still tweaking it...

New innards

I already shown how the characters look on the inside, however I also reworked and streamlined the anatomy.

The fleshy tube is so thin because it hasn't been stretched yet to fit the things placed inside it (it is a procedural effect).

The blue glowing organs are mod-slots that I mention below...

It might look weird at first, especially if you compare it to real-life creature anatomy, but I'm making it like that because of three big reasons (that you might be familiar with if you read the previous posts)

1. Simplicity for the rigging. I'll have to animate objects passing inside the character via math, and it is a huge help it's kept plain and simple.
2. I want to make it possible for characters to use their bellies as storage inventories, with      capability of inheriting and retrieving items from any orifice.
3. I really like the kink/meme of furries being a fleshy tube. I decided to just roll with it and make a whole custom biology around this, explaining it all with LORE!

But during that I realized I could also introduce an ability to customize character organs also (like I always wanted). I still don't know if I will manage to actually program that in the games, but I'm adding that functionality into the models now anyway. The idea is that you can swallow special organic modules that you then can drag into one of those glowing slots. Once slotted they will provide stat bonuses, just like armor and trinkets do in RPGs, or how cyberpunk augments add new abilities.

To actually see the character innards you don't have to look through the tailhole or the mouth all the time (although that is certainly possible) - I created a special cut-away shader for it. Cutting a see-through hole like that is not something that's even possible in Unreal by default, but I found a very hacky way to achieve my kinky goals. Here is a proof-of-concept of it working on a hollow cube, will show it on a character next time.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading!

As you can see making a character model is often not even about stitching polygons together (that's the easiest part)! Now I'm ensuring that the model stays relevant going forward. Since I'm re-doing the characters anyway, I might as well make sure I won't have to re-do them the third time later on. There is a lot of planning ahead, and it's all very technical - something that I wouldn't be able to even think about a few years ago.

There is still plenty to do for those characters, but I'm really loving where it's all going. Not just from artistic perspective, but mostly that it makes my work more comfortable and faster - something I really need...

With lots of Dragon Love,

- Salireths.