BBC raptor x parasaur thing update (Patreon)

I've been wanting to experiment with more expressive posing on character faces:

The raptor:

One thing that I think I'll definitely be doing with my characters going forward is using action constraints for things like eye blinking! This is an example of using two actions- one for blinking and one for squinting. You can still pose the eye bones around to shape the eyes, but having the blinking and squinting happen just by moving a bone up/down is really helpful for shaping the eyes more.

I might do the same thing for the lips, for things like general mouth shapes (mainly like "o", "ah" and "e" sound shapes)

I'd also like to have the character's have more visible breathing, like being out of breath/exhausted- it actually just occurred to me I could achieve this effect with much less complexity if I used an action instead of a bunch of constraints! As you can see here though, there can be some subtle breathing all the way up to a more cartoonish inhale/exhale.

Also I tried a different setup for the hips based on a tutorial I saw that had an interesting way of rigging a spine, but I tried to push it a bit further. It feels like it might be not great to pose with though, so I'll either go back to my usual way of rigging the hips or do some experimenting with it.

More on this later! I'm rendering a 10x speed time lapse of most of the raptor's modeling process, it's got a bit of rigging, a bit of cloth sim in it as well (I find it's important to test stuff like cloth and bones to see how it works with the proportions and the topology and such to fix things earlier on).

I also recorded a lot of the parasaurs' process for rigging/posing the face but there were parts where I thought I was recording but wasn't, so a few hours of undocumented stuff happened but it wasn't all that interesting.