TheGatewayOfRealities

Fireborn Dragonkin, part 2

Added 2022-09-08 14:54:29 +0000 UTC

I left off the last post with the next immediate goal to start rigging, and now I'm happy to report that it is done! Let's take a deeper look at what's new and changed on my Fireborn Dragonkin model - the model that I have big plans to use it everywhere (in lewd animations and art, public videos, as an avatar base for VR , and as an in-game character). I've completed the skeleton and fully bound it to the mesh, modeled internals, additionally I also refined the shader and textures a bit further.

https://twitter.com/Salireths/status/1567544771454935042?s=20&t=LOc5wIAektJ15uT-lRaH6g

Don't forget to check the tweet with the model fly-around. It's something I threw together quickly but I think it's a better showcase than a static picture. Too bad I can't embed such videos to Patreon (If you know of any way to do so, please let me know, I have a ton of videos and animations planned for the near future)

Here is a progress checklist:

The Deform Rig

The deform rig consists out of around 350 individual bones, each with a thoroughly considered purpose, each carefully placed and rotated, each with a unique name (that I had to come up with), and each with hand-painted influence zone around it. Making rigs is not the most difficult thing in the world, but it is a test of patience, a craft that you have to put a lot of hours into.

What most of the deform-rig bones do is self-explanatory, they simply move the corresponding parts of the body. However there is a few special rig areas that I think will be interesting for you!

The face rig took a lot of time to create and plan for. I can't afford going for Pixar-like facial rigs, however I wouldn't want to have motionless faces either. I had to choose a middle-ground that will work for the game, youtube and VR settings, all without taking me months to rig it all.

Previously I did facial rigs using pre-sculpted expressions (shape-keys), however this time I decided to go for a more versatile bone-based approach, where expressions can be crafted on the spot when animating, and not just pick one of the preset ones. It takes a quite bit longer to rig though, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

Similar to facial bones, I applied the same approach to various stretchy sphincters (slit, tailhole, throat) on the character's body. Thanks to that I can adjust the shape of the lips to conform to what's being inserted there, like fingers stretching the hole, toys or bodyparts of other characters.

It is also possible to spread the innards just so we all can take a deeper look inside the lovely Dragon fleshy caverns.

I made sure that the delicious organ is flexible and can slide in and out of the slit without a hitch. I also even rigged the hole on the tip of it so it can stretch or close - I don't think that detail will be something you can notice in game, but perhaps I can make a few closeups later on when I'll be animating him!

Now writing this I realize I should have rigged these little nubs on the sides of the tip, so they'd deform and bend nicely when it is inserted in and out… Well, more bones to add to the rig!

I rigged belly-scaling bones specifically for the case when player has too many items in their inventory (their belly). That, and some jiggle-physics. I'm sure that will tickle someone's fancy!

The quality on this gif is just for a quick preview, not a final UE5 render.

Once again I modeled internal organs for the character. I just couldn't do it without that - especially after testing the tailhole stretch capabilities, I just needed to see deep inside the character to be satisfied.

I can use those lovingly modeled organs for internal shots, vore and a lot of other fun things later down the line. It does add up some polygons to have guts and stomach on the model at all times however, but I plan to offset it with creating optimized mesh variants (LODs) that are shown when the camera is far away.

Wings were the biggest pain to make. They always are, due to how math and programming of 3D models works - it's simply not made for anything that has some sort of a stretchy film between two bones. Movie studios use cloth simulation for that, but we don't really have that in UE5 just yet (what we have is very demanding on performance).

Thankfully, now that I'm acquainted with matrix transformations thanks to Hopfel's teachings over the years, I was able to create a membrane system that exploits the math behind the bone transformations, and created a custom solutions just for wings! I have plans how to extend that system to avian weathered wings as well, using the new Unreal Engine 5 hair system.

Creating solutions like this are almost never understood by general audience, and the a colossal effort that goes into them is just overlooked. But making things like that work and look good what Technical Art is all about!

Shader and Textures

I iterated on the shader significantly since the last post, but it is also way too technical to go into detail here. But just so you know, now we have more detail textures that are visible when you zoom onto the model (e.g inside the maw and on the horns), it is more optimized and even easier for me to create! The shader is also very compact and efficient, and comes with sexy sub-surface scattering.

There is 32 color zones now (which is less than before) but each zone is a gradient instead, so actually there is about 64 different colorable zones (which is more than before). For example: horn-base and horn-tip. And of course, the main skin and pattern areas are still the same.

Except bumped the resolution to of that color-table to 512 instead of 256 pixels. Still very cheap on performance and disk-space. Modern games go all the way to 4096 pixels with their textures, and it eats so much disk space and GPU memory (think ARK: Survival Evolved).

I made the model look smooth and stylized with much less pixels, exploiting the blurriness that happens with low-resolution textures, yet I added tiny details on top using a secondary tileable pattern projected on top.

And since these textures are compatible between different characters, my goal is to make hundreds of these color-tables for player and NPCs to use.

Here is a list of all colorable zones:

Also, how about this: since you read the post thus far, I'm including a PSD file with that color table (in the attachments below). You can download it and customize the colors yourself, then send it back to me as a *.PNG (over discord) and I will make a render of it for you!

Feel fee to change colors and even draw patterns in the big boxes to the right, and we will see what results you can achieve! The PSD file has all the layers named, so it should be easy to figure out, but if you have questions, I'll gladly answer them on Discord.

Next Steps

So, all of this is what I have completed, now, let's check what is there left to do.

First up, I need to make a Control Rig - a system that will allow me to animate and pose this guy (and a lot of future models) quickly and efficiently. It is possible to pose models with just a Deform Rig, but a good Control Rig is a must-have to animate models, and it also makes posing them at least 10 times faster.

Usually people would create such Control Rigs in Blender or Maya, however I'm going full in and doing it right in Unreal Engine 5. Not so long ago Epic Games have created a state-of-the art rigging system for it, and while I haven't played around with it much yet, Hopfel has already been making all sorts of awesome rigs with it. I'm betting that it will be much faster and efficient to make Control Rigs in Unreal Engine 5 than in Blender.

But because of that, all animations that I'm going to be doing in the future will have to be made in UE5 as well. But hey, if some movie studios (like Disney) use it for serious big-budget production, why can't we, right?

Cant wait to start properly producing lewd animations and more pose renders! I will also have to make some better background sets for the renders soon…