Arm Stretchies (Patreon)

(file attached down below in case google docs gives any trouble)
Sorry I haven't updated recently- I got incredibly tunnel visioned on finally rigging a full anthro. it felt like a whole lot of "one step forward, two steps back" progress, like a jenga tower, where if I tweaked one thing the rest of it would fall apart. genuinely made me wanna weep sometimes T-T

my first goal was to fix the FNAF looking eyes I had goin on in my first models, which I'm confident saying I fixed now lol the face/general head of this model is my favorite of all the previous attempts I've done. And I think it can easily be sculpted to different shapes so its not elusively a hyena lol
but rigging persisted to be my greatest obstacle. every tutorial that tells you "oh, all ya gotta do is extrude the bones and then auto assign the weights ^_^" fAIL to inform u how big an issue it will be to have your mesh get twisted like a wringed towel if you dont do a bunch of other shit. at some point i broke, and downloaded a professionally rigged model to dissect it and see how its meant to be done, and its actually kind of frustrating that blender just doesn't seem to have an easier way to rig a wrist/arm than cobbling together 25 bones, held together with duct tape, 50 bone constraints properties, and paper clips. wtf

so anyway, i recreated what i saw in that pro model as best i could and ended up with somethin im pretty happy with. the next thing i tunnel visioned on for these past few days was programming the joints not to collapse in on themselves when they bend. I threw together this lil animation to show off the elbow flex, which doesnt sound like much but allow me to demonstrate
this is how it looked before I programmed the drivers

still doesn't look perfect, but im choosing to fight this battle later >W> i wanna keep making forward progress

currently, im trying to streamline how I do the texture painting- the built in tools arent my favorite, and in the future im probably going to explore options for alt programs dedicated to texture painting, but for now my process is essentially tweaking the pattern between my illustrating program and then slapping it on the model in blender and then editing between the two.

oh, also, somethin i shouldve mentioned before, ive taken up a few college classes for the spring! I have been kinda quiet about it bc ive been tryin to figure out my schedule and all, and I think i'm in a nice place now. im keepin myself busy in a lot of different places, but i appreciate all yalls support <3 i'll be experimenting with some animations now that i got a couple of passably workable models to play with :3