WIP: Rigging more characters

Hello! Is it just me or did the week go by incredibly fast?!

I still have lots of work to do but I feel like I can handle my schedule a little better. In exchange I haven't been active in social media at all, my twitter's been bit abandoned this past week. All of the G'raha fanart yet to be seen!!!

I've been slowly able to work on more shots of the UT video, and I finally got to start (and finish!) the last shot. It took me this long to make it! When I was building the layout, I just had the idea to add it later, then weeks went by and I was procrastinating...because I needed to rig more characters.

You know, I really like animating the characters, and editing and post production is very fun! Building lights and messing around with render settings is good too...but I'm lazy when it comes to building the rig! For me it's still unpredictable if everything is going to work well and I have a lot to learn. There's characters that I can get ready and going in less than an hour, then there's those that have issues with the outfit or shaders, or they're Elezen-based. Elezens are always an issue for me.

I've mentioned a few weeks ago that I'm also procrastinating in updating to a more recent version of Blender. The reason for that is because I'd have to update every character rig, since the shaders have changed and they don't work as is in the latest version. Also, most of the time I'm doing just fine with the older one and everything works perfectly, EXCEPT...when I need Elezen rigs. Mektool's latest version doesn't work in versions older than 4.0 anymore so I basically lost support for the newest releases. That happened because Blender updates their shaders...and even though I only need the rig, the tool still won't work. :')

The ones that work in my Blender version either don't have an Elezen rig, or the one that does is missing the IK hand controller for some reason?! I didn't find it, at least. So I...improvised. Not all of the parts of them work all that well. It's possible to make them LOOK fine, but it's way less comfortable to animate.

There IS a reason why you can't see most of the Elezen characters' hands in this video...

So in this week's video I'm going to expose my lack of doing things properly and show myself putting together Emet and Hythlo. Most Ancients are Elezens in disguse. :P Hopefully the things that do work properly are helpful to you, or even those that don't may still give some ideas of work arounds* - or as I like to call them, ~advanced techniques~.

*I just learned there isn't a word in english for "gambiarra". "Work around" isn't quite the same! I live by the philosophy of the gambiarra. Anyway--

Not only I was able to build the characters and make a layout for the last shot, but I did animate it as well. I don't know if I'm going to include the animation part, depends on how long the video is!

If I get enough free time this weekend, I plan on animating at least one more shot. I'm still going to try to finish this by the end of the month! I also have to go after the sound effects as well...

So this is it for today. Thank you for reading and for your support!