Have the stars finally aligned?? (Patreon)

Now that Toxic Candy is finished, I may have an opportunity to finally finish a version of Daisy's rig! I have no drawings planned at the moment - and to be honest I've been feeling burned out on drawing for a while now - and my next contract isn't expected to start for at least a couple of weeks. This is just the sort of opening I've been waiting for!

To recap, since it has been a while - animating Daisy and my other characters in 3D has been a goal of mine for some time, but one that has constantly been pushed back for one reason or another. More recently it's felt like this festering thing, where I either need to finish and animate Daisy's model, or give up and never look back.

Because I've been down this road before, the plan this time is to rig a lower-detail version of Daisy, as I might for a video game. Apart from being simpler, it's familiar, whereas a film-quality rig - what I'd been attempting from the start - is something I have no experience building. There are two areas where I'll need to be careful - her breasts, and my scripted tools.

How I'd planned to rig Daisy's breasts for some time, was to have multiple layers - a base layer with many joints for a degree of animatable shaping, and another layer for dynamics. The base layer I'd already figured out, and have at least partially scripted so that it can be rigged quickly. The dynamics, on the other hand, are something that I haven't experimented with in years, and getting it right could distract from finishing the rest of the rig. So I may need to be mindful to finish the rest first, and then come back to the dynamics.

One other thing that has derailed me in the past, has been my scripted tools. While these tools are meant to simplify & speed up the rigging process, writing, updating, and testing them while I'm rigging slows everything down. Fortunately the most-used scripts were production-tested last year while I was working on Dragonvale World.

Realistically, if Daisy were something I needed to rig for a contract, she might take me a couple of days, or a week at most. So, let's see where she's at by the end of next week?

...And also, since my recent trip to Japan was rather costly, and I haven't had a paying gig in over 2 months, once I get a sense of how the rig is coming along, I may take on some commissions in my spare time. No promises, but just in case, plan ahead!