Work on internal skeleton mesh and more (Patreon)

I have been having trouble getting the knees and joints to stay smooth when they’re bent at their max angle, the mesh would spike on the outside and inside of the joint. I experimented with different settings to get the physics mesh to be of higher resolution, it did work but only at larger body sizes.

I found out that the internal rigid core was too thick and would clip through itself, therefore pulling the outer mesh into the pinned internal mesh. It was time to get it properly solved and I made the internal mesh much more skeletal like.

Doing this made more room for the soft parts of the body to squish. There were still some unevenness, but slimming the knee of the internal mesh further helped making the outer mesh a bit smoother. It can become even smoother if a smooth correction modifier is added, but I don’t want to make it more complicated.

When using volumetric soft bodies, it generates a physic mesh based on the 3D model and if the 3D model has intersecting parts, they will merge. Since the fat shape has a lot of intersecting areas, the belly will for example stick to the thighs. To prevent it from merging, I use Blenders own cloth physics with self-collision, as the character expands into the desired size, the mesh will prevent itself from intersecting. I save the current physics cache as baked, so blender remembers that. When doing the transfer action in the zozo solver, it will see the cloth deformed mesh and create a physics mesh from that, without any intersections.

The back needed a bit of reshaping to prevent the fat from having strange indentations from the cloth self-collision preparations, but also, at a very large size, the back folds would be so deep it looked strange when the character bends forward.

The torso for the female is reworked so it looks much more female, the shoulder with and ribcage have been made slimmer.

All these changes have been done on the dragon as well.