Weekly Progress Report (2023-12-07)

Another progress report.

To be honest, there hasn't been much progress lately. I'm still stuck in learning the Houdini 20's new animation system. It turns out to be more laborious and less automatic than I originally expected.

So I'm at a quite awkward situation: half of my rigging/animation logic has been migrated to Houdini, and the other half is still in Blender, which makes the workflow (unnecessarily) complicated and the whole development suffers.

(The below is a bit of technical rant:)

I could just throw what I've learned in the past month away, and go back to full Blender workflow.

But Houdini *does* has some advantages: For example, I once have a very messy custom Python script to export from Blender to Unity. Blender has a built-in FBX export script, but this game requires some non-trivial data processing: it needs to separate heavily physical-simulated parts like breasts into different meshes, while keeping shape keys intact, etc.

It worked, but the code is so bad written so when there was a bug it took me the whole day to pinpoint it. With Houdini it's so trivial that I barely notice it.

Houdini's rigging is much more modular too. Which means once I migrate Iris's rig completely, Seraphina and other future characters' rigs are effectively 80% done. Many other tasks: editing normals to make the face more "anime-like", transferring skinning weights from body to outfit to avoid clipping, etc... are all much easier than in Blender.

The hard lesson here is there isn't a perfect tool, and I'm not as good at handling all the technical difficulties as I thought 😅

I'm still trying to push through it, and hopefully the development can go back on the track after I get over the initial ramp.

Thanks for your patience and support so far.