July Update

Hey guys, I'm back from vacation and I have updates for various projects.

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First up, I finished the animation drafts for those last five poses I mentioned earlier. They are ready to send out for recording.

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Second, I started planning out poses for the next wave of projects. I know it seems a little excessive, but I like planning these things out early. Starting a project is usually the hardest part, so I will ride the creativity to build the ideas out now. I think, perhaps, I am just really excited to work with more voice actors.

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Third, I did a dick swap on another model. In early planning, I wanted a demon model to partner with Lady from Devil May Cry. There's a really good one on smut base, but the dick was a little vanilla. I swapped it out for something a little... spicier.

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Fourth, for some reason that model swap put me in the mood to do a little more modelling. This news might actually be the most exciting for you. I decided to start a new nude krogan model.

The idea is fairly simple. I'd use the krogan behemoth model from Andromeda as the new base. The trouble is that it is a very spikey model and it doesn't have an IK rig. I figured I could head swap a trilogy krogan with the behemoth and that would take care of most of the modelling. Still, I deemed all of that a little too much work and figured I'd save it for later.

Anyway, I decided to go for it, and it turns out the project was much easier than anticipated. Perhaps my skills with Blender just make it easier now. In any case, the model is in really good shape from only two days of work.

To start with, I used auto rig pro to rig up the behemoth model. After updating it for the latest version of Blender, it only took minutes to set up. Fixing the weight painting manually took a few hours. Mainly, I had to fix the shoulders and hips. Considering I didn't have to do any face bones because it would be a head swap, the weight painting was quite reasonable.

Next, I smoothed out the spikes on the model to make it look more like a normal trilogy krogan. I did some minor vertex editing on the largest of spikes since they couldn't really be smoothed down, and then use the sculpting tool to smooth the rest of the spikes out. Aside from the vertex editing, the sculpting was used in a shapekey so most of the work was non-destructive.

I actually ended up using the Andromeda krogan model from OpenLab for the head swap. I figured that graphical fidelity would be a better match. It is more or less the same model. This model did have its own challenges though. The face bones were awkwardly positioned such that it made them hard to use, so I had to clean them up a little. The jaw bone wasn't really weight painted properly, so I had to parent most of the lower jaw face bones to the jaw and reposition its pivot point. After that, I cleaned up some unused bones.

Lasty, I swapped in the head. This is a fairly simple process that I've done for many other models. Only, it was probably easier this time because I didn't really have to worry about welding models or smoothing texture seams. By the setup of the krogan itself and their pronounced collars, I basically just had to overlay the models and merge the armatures. It only took a few reparented bones and a little weight painting to fix it up.

All that I have left to do is unify the textures and shaders and then add a dick model.

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Fifth, this isn't really a project of my own but something I commissioned. I've wanted to try particle hair for models but between other projects haven't committed the time to doing it. I figured I could test the waters by trying it out from someone who knows what they're doing.

I commissioned The Fastest Gman to do particle hair for Miranda. It's one of Rigid's older models by now. The hair mesh is not that good and the weight painting is pretty poor. It took quite a lot of work fix up for the last animation I did with her. Rather than spend a lot of time learning how to do it and likely have subpar results, I think it makes most sense to first play around with it from a well done example.

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I thought this was going to be a short update, but it turns out there was a lot to go over. Various WIPs will be posted.