Fun with Dynamic Bones and other news (Patreon)

I've been working on the outfit I talked about the last time. The model itself is pretty much done. If you don't care about the technical details of the video, skip this bit of blogging.

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Now I'm on the weighting. I decided I wanted the chains and hanging medallion things to react to physics. I've been working hard on it, and it's paid off. They jiggle like I wanted them to. See the video to check it out in motion (I finally found out how to record videos with the GeForce Experience thing, definitely beats Fraps).

I'm using completely custom bones there, not the skirt ones, since these are too low and too long.

I also discovered that the last bone of the bone chain defines the "floor" of that individual bone chain. Which is why sometimes you have models whose weighting doesn't use the last bones of the chain, these are actually used by the DynamicBone script to define collision and a floor. So if you weight a mesh to the last bones, it'll "collide" with that virtual "floor". The solution for things that aren't supposed to collide is simple: Just add more bones.

Sadly, I also found out that if you add custom dynamic bones to an outfit, they don't load correctly, and the script fails to find them. So the only stuff that can use custom bones at all is accessories and hairs. So I made this a waist accessory. Gives me the ability to use custom bones, I can position/scale/rotate it, but can't use the main skeleton's rigging. Well, in this case it didn't matter a bit, thankfully, since it's just a waist accessory.

Anyways, wanted to share this with you guys, since I'm actually pretty happy with how it turned out.

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As for Mai, I'm almost done with her, I could use most of the sources I already had, now I'm working on giving her a separated scalp like the most recent girls. Next I fix the hair to not clip with said scalp. The textures are not finished though, I'm reworking the specular map again, and the makeup has to be remade since I changed the UV. So no makeup or good specular in this screenshot:

And regarding the requests, there's been a change of plans regarding one character. The patron who asked for Casca decided he'd prefer Motoko from the FPS First Assault, based on GITS SAC. Based.

So yeah, I'll be porting Motoko Kusanagi from there instead of porting Casca.

Sorry about the low resolution pic though, couldn't find a better one for some reason.

Does anyone have the game though? I'd love to have the original NIF files in my hands.

Well, that's it for today's long update. I'll continue working on Mai, the outfit and I'll start working on Fang.

See you!