WIP - Belly Expansion

Hello, everyone! November has been a very busy month, so I didn't have as much time as I'd like to spend on this. However, I've made some decent progress lately so I thought I'd share this in the meantime.

I sculpted some new blendshapes for the belly weight gain route. I always forget how tedious it can be to make these in between shapes, especially now that there are so many for this model. Plus every shape needs a male version with slightly different proportions. Here's all the shapes in the model so far with the new belly shapes on the bottom row.

There's also this annoying issue where the blendshape order is reversed between Maya and Unity, which basically means I have to reconnect all the blendshape nodes in the correct order whenever I add a new one. Otherwise the code in Unity will apply the wrong blendshape. That means I have to enter the 7th layer of Hell (also known as the Maya Node Editor). Then I have to reroute all this spaghetti in a way that makes sense to Unity without accidentally breaking anything else.

Thankfully that part is out of the way and I can work on getting it set up in Unity without too much hassle. Here's a little preview of the belly growth in action.

I still need to make the hyper obese and blob stages of the belly, which will require a totally different setup to work with the softbody physics sim. The character will probably push the belly along the ground in the hyper obese stage. Then the blob stage will be a big rollable version of the belly with the rest of character's body being pulled along for the ride.

With that said, there's still a decent amount of work to be done, but I hope to have this build ready within the next 2 weeks. Thanks for your patience and I'll see you again soon!