Triceratops updated again! (Patreon)

I've just about done all the major rigging stuff for this guy I think. The arms, legs, torso, tailhole, lips, eyes, tongue, [p]en[is], feet, fingers, etc... but still need to add some more controls to help with things.

The wiener is pretty interesting this time around- I've tried a couple new things to get a bit more flexibility and detail out of it.

Awhile ago, I tried getting more detail on the mesh by using a shrink modifier on the proxy mesh that the 4skin bones shrink wrap to.

This was an early test with the mesh from the original bathroom animation, where he flops his junk through the hole. I did the usual shaft rig stuff, but I had an idea- deforming the shrink wrap target mesh to have the skin roll across these little crease to give the illusion of skin buckling. Additionally, I shrink wrapped the subdivided mesh to this target mesh so that the skin even more closely matches the target mesh.

I couldn't quite get it to bend correctly at the time, so going from soft to hard was a no go. Today though, I got it working!

There's a still a ton of bones- and it works similarly to the previous ones I've done, but the big different is how the 4skin parent bones deform with the shaft. I've made it so each shaft bone stretches to a target bone:

So you can do awful stuff like this. Of course this is terrible looking, but the rig isn't intended to be deformed like this :p but getting a bendy shape is pretty easy to do since the 4skin bone parents stretch with the shaft (before, the just moved with it since the shaft wasn't like, flexible like this).

Here's the different between vein and none:

Quite a nice bump in detail! Very subtle skin is done with texture (procedurally) but the veins  and small ridges accentuate the texture-based detail nicely.

In fact, all texture on the model is procedural. I use what I call separation maps to determine what area gets what procedural texture, or to what parts are what shader. For example, on this one, red is the horns, green is shaded black and black is the regular skin shader:

Here, black is the smallest, softest skin, red is medium scales and green is largest scales (these colors are additive, so yellow is a blend of medium/large scales):

The private parts are very different, texture wise, from the body. They have their own set of textures and it's own separation map. Here, red is small pores, blue is skin folds. Green is wrinkles on the tailhole.

Here's the shader graph- I've tried to keep as organized as I can, so I can try and generalize it more to use on more characters who might have different kinds of scales or shader needs.

It's also pretty slow because of all the textures being procedural.

I've included a quick test animation of using the lips/eyes/face controls. There's some body movement, but it was mainly testing the lips to see how they pose. (The audio in the animation is from Darkseed 2)

That's it for now!