3D Shenanigans!

WHEW!

Aight, not gonna lie, Blender's kind of a blast xD! 

Since that last update - I wanted to do a lil loop of this mouse rubbing herself off :> In about an hour and a half I had something I dug, but thought, HMM, wouldn't it be MORE spicy if I added a dildo and a low poly vag? 

Hell yeah it would.

I was super pleased to be able to model/rig/animate these additional pieces on a whim! It's great seeing how much more comfortable I've become with this program over the past few weeks. Just last month so much of this seemed so alien, but now I'm able to confidently mess with a ton of this to a decent degree of success :>

Additionally, I wanted to see if I could purposefully animate at a lower frame-rate to make sure each key was gonna be solid, then auto interpolate it up to have it smoother.

IN GENERAL, It kinda works! 

I realized that the low-frame-rate animating actually lets me get away with "lazier/messier" key frames since the movements are so small, certain keys can "resolve themselves" simply by convenience of lower frames.

Throwing this at a higher frame rate kinda exposes a few of those areas where some jankness happens. I coulda smoothed it out, but I think it might be better animating with higher frame rate in mind in the future. It was a good experiment for sure :>

THERE ARE STILL a few things that I didn't get around to messing with unfortunately, but over all I'd say this was a very productive month of 3D! 

Texturing/Rendering - There's a lot of tricks and aesthetics 3D can do, but a lot of it comes into how an actual texture is being handled. I actually just used colored UVs so I think I'm not able to take advantage of some of these other nodes for rendering. I didn't put too much time into, since I think it'd be better to just learn about unwrapping polys and painting in textures. Especially since I kinda wanna mess with pixel textures 'n what not in the future anyways.

Anywho, this sort of stuff I couldn't get to.

Singular Mesh - This entire mouse is made of of multiple meshes just smashed together. Though it works for the low-poly aesthetic, and I think was particularly handy as an intro to skin-weighting/rigging - I would like to get some experience on mashing meshes together and cleaning that up, as well as dealing with a singular full mesh in general. I think it would speed some things up, but I also think it could make things a lot harder.

For example, I made a separate "vagina" rig for the low poly vagina here. The "rig" is quite robust to accommodate for the complex details involved with penetration. So it was super convenient to easily rig JUST the vagina to the vagina rig, then I could parent the vagina rig to the main rig. Otherwise, if I was messing with a single mesh, it might be harder to completely separate the influence of bones on certain meshes.

I'm sure each method has its pros and cons - but the reality is a singular mesh is the way to go in the long run, so it's important to learn in the future.

Controllers - Rigging is only one part of the equation - mapping out proper controls sounds like an absolute must long term! 

I was easily able to make this lil' loop without any sorta controllers, but I definitely ran into issues where larger-controllers would have been useful. A friend showed me some good 3D Animation workflow practice, and I definitely got away with bending some rules for a 9 frame loop - but I could easily see that workflow getting SO MESSY and broken for anything more complex.

That said, I don't intend on doing anything too complex - BUT it's still super important to figure out how to go about constraints with controllers. I didn't even mess with blendshapes either.

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So that's a majority of what I've been up to in August!

I ALSO set up a small Carrot Talk I should be uploading relatively soon. It's more of just an experiment/test though, so nothing too crazy :>

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OK that's it! 

Keep an eye out for the next lil update soon :> Prolly some time tomorrow.