New year, new techniques (Patreon)

Happy new year!

I've been letting stuff for the raptor/parasuar thing render and also exploring more rigging techniques further- first by adding some lattices to my dumb dragon that eats candy pigs and animating it (for the Deep Dish thing)

I think the lattices really add a lot of potential for pushing the expressions further, giving them more personality, here's a little video posing the face a bit:

https://youtu.be/26sr4p2-WA4?si=SCH-eFiE1D2yCNRM

Then I got distracted by learning rigify, something I've been wanting to look into for awhile but haven't because I always thought making my own rigs from scratch was the better way to go. So it became a tangent sort of but one that will ultimately be very beneficial for improving the quality of the animation and the usability of my rigs. I know it's been awhile since I've posted a model download (a long while) and there's been a few reasons, one is I keep making tweaks to rigs I'm using and I figure I'll just post a model when I feel like it's in a good state to be used. But then I heard about them getting rid of bone layers in Blender (which is how you organize your bones) and replacing them bone collections so... I figured I'll just wait until that change gets implemented, since it's a lot easier to make it clear what layer is what (since you can name bone collections!)

About rigify though, it's a lot more powerful than I originally thought it was. I started testing it out on the dumb one eyed alien guy I want to do something with some day but haven't yet.

https://youtu.be/1sKDD-Xu1YQ?si=o2pkyhUvLWxDG0po

What really had me curious about rigify was the spline tentacle that was added to it in Blender 4... it's a huge pain to setup a spline IK anything manually and this spline tentacle thing looked like a useful time saver.

It's pretty sweet actually! Something like this would take a solid 30 minutes to setup manually (if you know *exactly* what you're doing).

For some reason I thought rigify was just a couple "meta rigs" that you line up with a mesh as best you can and that's it. But I was extremely incorrect, it's a very powerful modular rigging system! If you're curious about it, the rigify series by CGdive is probably the most informative stuff you can find on rigify (this is for pre-3.0 Blender but it's mostly the same)

https://youtu.be/-JSFcSxsaTs?si=U7e8_rYmJyYABSqP

If you're using 4.0 you might run into some errors, this video does a great job of helping to solve errors with bone collections:

https://youtu.be/OztTaW3wnoo?si=9QNB8Cgq9nfz8trP 

At this point I was like "well, it can make for a good tail and arms and legs but how good is it for faces and eyes and stuff" turns out, pretty good. This eye is several stretchy bone chains going across the edge loops. It's not difficult to make a full blink (the weighting of bones isn't great but that can be fixed manually, here corrective smooth and subsurf is doing a respectable amount of work making it look nice)

Then I was thinking "well, could you rig breasts with rigify's spline tentacle?" And actually it does a good job without a ton of fixing weights. It influences the collar bone too much but that's a small price to pay for a spline boob (and should be easy enough to clean up the weights manually)

So now I'm thinking "can I rig the face of one of my lewd characters with rigify" and the answer is yes, this is the meta rig for the head at this point:

Which turns into this.

Rigify also can play well with the lattice rigging stuff, he has a lattice for the lips, lower eyelids and eyebrows. With rigify and the lattice rigging combined, you can get some pretty good results I'd say! I made this angry chewing loop to test it.

I wanted to do a bit more of an in-depth test- some expressions. It's so much easier (and possible) to do a wider variety of expressions with the lattices on the eye brows and lips and stuff. Rigify helps with making the posing of the face more intuitive- the face is almost entirely stretchy bone chains which are amazing! It feels more like sculpting than posing, if that makes sense.

I ended up adding fingers and posing him in a pose that was pretty hard to hit with my own rig. He's just sitting pretty, waiting for someone to use him

There's still some stuff I need to figure out how it'll work, stuff like the tail hole, balls, d*ck... (the d*ck right now is a spline tentacle, which is a good starting point). I think there's no reason why rigify wouldn't work well for the tail hole for deforming. And I should be able to add custom stuff to get the functionality I've done with my own rigs (like shrink wrapping stuff)

I've also been doing some experimentation with cloth sim, since it has a few advantages in some situations over soft bodies. So far I've been unable to do some nice ripple-y jiggle with cloth sim (which is an area where soft body shines) but it's pretty fast in comparison to soft bodies it seems. And is a lot more stable, I was pretty surprised the breasts here didn't have some horrible clipping or terrible deformation.

It seems to also be good for dongs (yellow is the mesh without cloth and the purple mesh is the one with cloth sim)

So what started out as a bit of quick experiment turned into some very useful R'n'D for future stuff... I've also attached the shot I was working on for Deep Dish, it's very... WIP, I'm trying to nail down the basic motion of the pig's heads as they make out, it'll make animating it with the actual pigs a lot easier.

I've also attached some other test videos, pretty much everything you've seen here but in video form.