[WIP] Expansion Rig, Tracer Thigh Growth Animation, Widowmaker Multi-Breast Revamp

Hey all! I know it's been radio silence for the past few weeks, and I wanted to share a couple WIPs of the projects that I'm currently working on.

The first project that I wanted to get through was building a proper expansion-friendly rig that has more versatility with the included shape keys. When I made an expansion rig last time, it was fairly basic, and given the lack of outfits and shapekeys that were built to work with that body type it made it less useful when trying to generate character-specific content. The new one that I put together is a kitbash with PharahBestGirl's base Pharah body, Rigid3D's breasts, and Nyl's dong for the futa variant, plus a bunch of custom shapekey/adjustments. Getting all the UVs, geometry, and weight paints took a bit to get figured out, but I'm pretty pleased with how everything turned out. The reason that I chose to use PharahBestGirl's body as a base was because it has a slew of shape keys and outfits that work right out of the box, not to mention a very intuitive and useful UI that makes it easy to adjust the character on the fly. Currently I've head-swapped Swurst's Brigitte model on to the rig, and I'm looking to do the same with the other OW characters I use often so that I don't need to keep remaking the character every time.

The next project that I'm working on is a thigh-expansion animation to learn and test soft-body/cloth collisions with an armature base. Ideally, I'm trying to have Tracer's thighs interact with not only each other, but also other collision objects to really highlight the growth and jiggle physics. Currently I've got most of the expansion shape-key'd out, and I'm trying different versions of cloth physics, soft-body, and lattices to see what gives me the best result. I'm hoping that once I nail down thigh physics, I should be able to apply something similar with breast physics, but Blender doesn't make these physics interactions easy.

The other project that I'm working on is a revamp of the multi-breast rig that I made last year for a Widowmaker animation. This animation didn't get out of the initial test stages when I last worked on it, but now that I have a better expansion rig I'm thinking that I'll create a multi-breast version using what I learned from the previous multi-breast rig. This may take a little bit to get right, but given the lack of animated multi-breast content out there at the moment, it might be fun to give this niche a shot once I figure out the expansion physics. Stacking several growing breasts is definitely going to be tough to simulate, but I'd like to give it a shot once I have some extra time.

All in all, I've been spending a lot more time animating and learning how to texture, rig, and work with physics objects. It's been a lot of trial and error, but I'm glad to have the time to try and learn how to make more custom solutions for animations. I've still got a bunch of things to figure out, but I'm pretty happy with the progress I made this month and I'm looking forward in keeping this momentum rolling.

Thanks for letting me ramble, and I hope you all have a great weekend!