RxP pt 2 stuff (lots of stuff about lattices) (Patreon)

I want the character rigs to be as feature complete as I can realistically predict- which meant adding things that are pretty useful, such as lattices on each finger for squishing things.

In practice it would look a lot nicer because the squishing can be manually animated (so if you need more/less squish on something, you just tweak the bones that control the lattices)

And while doing some layout for the animatic, it struck me that I have no built-in way in the rigs of adding cloth bulge to characters if they're wearing clothing...

^ This is more of a temporary fix, not part of the character rig itself... but helped me figure out what it needed on the rigs to achieve a pants bulge of some kind.

So Taylor and Tyler's rigs have lattices for when they're wearing pants. I might change it around a bit but right now it can do stuff like this:

I kind of want to try cloth sim for the shot that will show their dongs flexing in their shorts but the lattice approach is a good fall back (also technically the lattices could also be used for stomach bulge). Here's an example from a short test loop I talk about below:

(You can bulge anything when you attach a lattice to it!)

The beauty of lattices is that they don't need weights, they don't need binding to a mesh, they can deform any mesh as long as it has a lattice modifier pointing to that lattice. That's why (for another shot I want to do) I've whipped up a lattice-based "body."

Here's a video of it:

https://youtu.be/F2eRHffZ4eo?si=rolvsAyJbuLe6PHY

And here's it in use:

This is intended to be a modular thing- each bone (arms, legs, hands, etc...) is meant to copy the transforms of a rig with two arms, two legs, a tail, etc... so it can be used on pretty much any character (technically should be able to work fine with quadrupeds but haven't tried that yet) . So this could be used to have a character laying in a bed and deforming the mattress a bit. Or sitting on a couch or something like that.

Props stuff

I also modeled some more props for stuff I couldn't find models online for to buy but would be nice to have in the scene. One is a metal bottle:

And also a gallon of water. This is an improved version of a gallon of milk I modeled long, long ago back in the Blender 2.79 days!

I've also finally, after a long time of using Blender, started using linked libraries. They're really nice because for a character, you can link the character from a master blend file. And changes to the mesh/rig/material/etc... propagate across the other files that link to those assets. And if you need to, you can override data blocks.

For example, I just now added additional scratches on the metal of that bottle and since it's a linked library asset, the changes I made to the source file are present on the model in the room scene.

And a friend suggested stickers on the computer to add more personality and I though like, what if there was a Mario or Pacman type character that's popular and the early 2d incarnation of the character is it's own iconic brand imagery. Like how Mario from the first NES game transcends the character of Mario- his appearance is inextricably linked to Nintendo and "gaming" in a broader context.

Anyway, the link library thing is how is an approach I'm going to using going forward. I don't know why I never just... figured out how linked libraries earlier because they're not that hard to use.

Also I'm working on whipping up a very short looping animation to test the new rigging stuff out (like... actually animate something with it) and also to have something finished in a timely manner for once...

A 240 frame loop that will have fluid sim. I've put a wip that's mostly the final animation (but needs some more polish but it's like, 80% done character animation wise, I've included it in the attachments).

I'd like to try doing more short, simple loops, like around 10 seconds long... it's less stuff that can end up looking janky, twitchy or otherwise badly animated (trying to not have bad animation is an ongoing process)

I was hoping to be able to have an animatic done... but like I'm kind of thinking about having it just end with the two looking surprised at the screen. Not sure yet... but I've attached that below as well (it's layout so there's barely any animation, I just wanted to try getting the expressions and stuff vaguely how they will be in the final thing so the VA's have a good idea of the vibe)