Nyro/Cerenthea update: Switching to NLA (Patreon)

First of all, if you're a frozen pizza patron and want to be in the special thanks and haven't sent me a message about it (with the name you'd like me to use), just a reminder to do that if you want! I'll be releasing "A suck of Milk" (the recent Nyro animation) publicly soon and want the special thanks to be up to date!

I was working on the parts where she sucks on Nyro's appendage and first I was having a very difficult time thinking about how I want to go about setting up this shot so it's not a big pain to animate. First, I used a similar reverse spine "temp rig" setup I used for the pigs making out in the Deep Dish project so I could animate her from the head instead of from the waist and chest.

This was working well but it was annoying having to deal with a separate rig. And I figured this is a useful feature for characters to have built-in as a thing you switch between using drivers. So from now on I'll just make this setup in the rig itself and not as a temp rig setup thing. Here it is in her rig!
 

Then, I was trying to think of how to animate Nyro's appendage along a curve that could be controlled independently from their rig. I tried a couple things but settled on this kind of curve proxy rig (using a spline curve and clamp to constraints on bones to follow the path)

The idea is that I can put copy transform constraints on the spline bones in Nyro's rig to copy the transforms of some bones in the proxy rig (so it follows the curve) and this is kind of good... but still annoying that it's it's own rig (but it's a bit too complicated to integrate into her main rig... I might add some bones that the proxy will copy the transforms of so it can be controlled from inside her rig)

There was also the challenge of like... how to handle deforming Nyro's junk around her mouth. It's a lattice based solution (obviously since you know me, #1 Blender lattice fan) but I'm still a bit unsure about how to go about it...

Like the deforming functionality is there but I'll probably end up adding more bones to Cerenthea's rig so that the lattice bones on Nyro's rig can be controlled from her's (and also the lattices would follow her mouth)

With that, I started animating some head. But I started running into problems with the animation layer add-on. It's a really good add-on and I still recommend it if you want a simpler way to get a layer-based approach to animation in Blender but the UI is limited and is doesn't do well for s*xy shots with lots of looping animations you want to transition to/from. It's great for character acting shots but it's always been a bit clumsy for shots with many different loops.

https://blendermarket.com/products/animation-layers (In case you're not aware, this is the add-on I'm referring too, not sponsored or anything. Just including a link if you're confused on what the animation layers add-on is!)

The animation layers add-on just obfuscates NLA stuff, it's not like... an entirely new system, it just does stuff to the NLA in a way that's more user friendly. But it's not very good for visualizing how you're using your layers or an easy of way of having like, "do this loop 3 times, then this one 1 time, then this one 2 times." Unfortunately, the way it works doesn't allow you to use both the NLA and the add-on at the same time (because you'll mess your stuff up because the add-on expects the NLA to be the way the add-on wants it to be)

So I decided for this shot (and probably others going forward) I'm going to work directly in the NLA. You can put actions in a more... well... non-linear fashion. And it's a lot easier to take advantage of Blender's capacity for scaling an action (so it can play faster/slower, good for adding variations!)

Honestly it's not as difficult to use as I remember it being when I first started using Blender and it's not as difficult or awful as people make it out to be. The problem is that you need to be pretty darn experienced with Blender and have a great understanding of how actions work to feel comfortable using it.

The animation itself was looking okay but eh... I wasn't entirely happy with what I had at this point. It was lacking something. I needed some reference! I should of done this from the start... so I recorded some reference of using my mouth on a phallic shaped toy. Not only do you get some motion based in realism from this but you get a better feel for it since it was you who did the motion in real life.

I've seen some people say "you can use some of the millions of videos online of this" and this is true but you'd have to find one with a steady camera from an angle you want, someone who's doing it exactly how you want... sure but if you do the motion yourself, with your own body, I feel like you get a more physical understanding of it.

With that being said, this doesn't look super great right now- I'm still trying to animate some specific actions and trying to get a nice feel to it... lips are a very difficult in CG (especially on characters with snouts >_>). But it's promising so far.

Another thing I did was try doing a little solo animation with her, to do some further testing with her rig. Glad I did! I ended up fixing some problems with the breasts (additional bones to help give more control over the shape) I feel like this is kinda cool and would be awesome with some fluids (like nice squirts, maybe some milk on the nips... maybe).

 I've attached that solo animation test! Let me know if you think it's worth polishing up. No appendage oral yet though, it's not quite ready to show a good WIP yet.