Nephilima / Progress Report (Patreon)

If you were wondering where the bulk of my studio time went to this weekend, it was spent on her. Nephilima is a troublemaker but she's worth it. I had been racking my brain for over a week as to why her toes won't bend correctly. Why does bending the toe bones cause the bones to move beyond the mesh of the toes themselves, causing all kinds of ugly distortions?

    I tried everything. In the end, as is usually the case, the solution was simple. It comes down to weight painting. The foot bone had the mesh of the entire foot painted onto it. The master toe bones had all of the toes painted down to the tips. Each primary toe bone had an entire toe painted in association with it. All wrong.

     The grafting of the feet that I did caused these invalid paintings to be done automatically. I learned that in weight painting you only paint the area in the immediate vicinity of each bone. Those parent bones are connected to bones further down the line so that when the parent bends, the rest of the bones, each with it's own local weight painting, also bend and with it the mesh.

     Nephilima is fully rigged now. When I applied Rigify to it which converts the base skeleton into a more easily pose-able skeleton (grab the hand and the whole arm moves etc), this time there were no crazy artifacts. This time I only parented the n@ked mesh to the skeleton. The clothes manage to follow along perfectly - sitting on top, being connected to the mesh which connects to the skeleton.

    I also made use of Blender's weight painting smooth function. This takes care of any kinks in the mesh as bones bend. It works surprisingly well.

     Finally, I reduced the number of subdivisions in the preview mode while keeping the subdivisions high in render mode. This makes her extremely fluid when posing.

    Nephilima is rigged and ready for both posing and full animations. She has functional gen!talia now so she's able to go all the way in Blender. I'm sure she'll be down for it when she meets her new partner.

     In other news, I've acquired collision software that will allow for b00bs and b00ty to squish a bit in response to being touched by other character's hands (and mouths). That's high-level stuff. Bioware never figured it out. I spent some time with it today. I would have settled for a pushed-in pillow. It didn't quite work out, but I did managed to create cages and bounce effects for simple shapes. In combination with Wiggle Bones, I'll have all of the software jiggle physics I need to make future animations look very real and satisfying. I'm looking forward to riding to the top of that learning curve.