Dragon model armature improvements incoming (Patreon)

I've had a few people ask me about a follow up to the dragon animation, and while I did plan on eventually making a follow up at some point, there seems to be a good amount of demand for it, based on twitter folks, some e621 comments, messages on patreon, etc...

This would be a really good opportunity to improve the dragon's rig, which is exactly what I've done! The biggest problem I had originally was posing the back... it was quite stiff, so what I did was add a few more bones and turned the spine into an IK bone chain. Seems to work pretty well! The gif in the header is the result of only moving the hip bone.

Here's a demo of each of the main posing bones:

*I've changed the bone shapes since this give to some better ones*

Another problem I had was animating the tongue, so I tried to make it a bit easier by adding some more controls. The "lock pos" bars control whether the tongue follows the bones that are attached to the head, or bones that are floating around in space and can be made children of other things in the world if need be (such as a pp).

Here's an example of locking to head or the orange position bones:

I've added position bones for the hands/head/tail/feet/etc... And, last but not least, the file size won't be as ginormous. I figured out what bloats the file size for some characters I do- if they have hair, using the mesh deform modifier takes up a lot of space, when used on high polygon meshes. So, I unbinded the high poly hair meshes, made duplicates and decimated them so they have much fewer polygons. This is just to be seen in the viewport, so you can have an idea of what the dragon will look like with the hair enabled while animating.

When the time comes, the high poly models can be re-binded to the hair cages and used.

One more thing, I tried to make some j[i]z[z] on the camera. This was using some meta balls and a material that takes advantage of screen space refraction + the reflection of the mesh. It looks pretty nice, but the effect breaks when the object isn't a kind of flat disk.  But this might work nicely for giving the illusion of fluids landing on the camera, then animating them dripping off!

I've attached a pretty quickly put together animation, just to test the improvements out. It's not terribly good or exciting, but shows more natural spine movement. The follow up animation will be pretty different than what I originally had in mind- I originally would like to have the camera also show the person on the other side of the stall, but I won't be doing that (I don't have to make a new character/repurpose an old one/animate another character)

I'll be posting the updated .blend of the dragon soon! I would like to mess with it a bit more before posting an update.

I won't be focusing too much on the dragon thing though just yet- this was just something to take a bit of a break from animation the kobold solo thing.