(Almost) Mid-month animation report (Patreon)

Hey all :) Since it's been a bit of time, I figured I'd make a post and update everyone on where I'm at. Right now, I'm in the process of working on that animation I posted a preview of near the beginning of this month. It's going good, but as usual I ran into some road blocks during the process.

This time, the biggest challenge has been trying to figure out how to balance the motion of thrusting from different directions. The hyena's armature was originally built with inverse kinematics on the legs, but forward kinematics everywhere else. For the body, that essentially means that if I rotate something like the stomach, then everything above it such as the chest, neck, and head, would all rotate as well. 

The hips are part of that same chain, which causes the problem of moving everything up the chain when they move on their own. So, every time there's some thrusting in one direction, it pushes up the whole chain, causing the head to be misaligned with the rest of the animation.

There are a few solutions to that problem. Firstly, I could have manually animated the FK bones, creating a kind of antithetical motion to the rest of the animation. But to do so would have been extremely time consuming and likely would have lead to a subpar result.

The other solution was to have an IK chain on the head/neck/chest, so I could animate their motion independently of the rest of the FK bones. This was almost working, but because the motion of the IK didn't follow the motion of the hips, what this caused was for any forward hip movement to push the IK bones "out of alignment". Again, I could have animated against that motion, but I would have had the same problems of it having bad results and taking too much time.

So, what I ended up settling on was an IK chain on the head, but the IK controller is parented to keep the offset of the hips. What that means is, when the hips move, the IK moves and has the right amount of movement -- so I don't have to mess around with any opposite motion, and can instead focus on animating the head by itself.

All that said, the animation -- in terms of the animation -- is largely complete. I haven't started rendering anything yet, and I don't have any sound effects set up. I'm estimating a week before I have the Eevee-rendered video ready to show, and it might be a week after that until I have the final video up and running, which will be released to y'all a week prior to e621 gets it. So it's possible that the video will go public sometime near the first of next month.

Honestly, that could be a bit of a stretch, though. I could have things done sooner depending on how other stuff pans out, but we'll see. :D

Either way, I'll be posting more stuff as soon as it's ready. And as always, thanks for the support!