Recent Projects Breakdown and Insight!

  Hello! Here with a breakdown, going over the last two projects (The Juicer and Lady D Halloween).

  The main theme here is going to be “jankyness.” I like to think most of my projects are fairly smooth and professional, but behind that professionalism is a house of cards. When you're making big projects, the main thing for me is “how does it look on screen?” Every project starts with the best intentions, but as more props, rigs, constraints, textures, and shapekeys are added, things start to get convoluted. It's here where I worry less about making the functionality pretty, and more about making the finished image pretty, even if behind the scenes it's a hodge-podge menagerie of “just make it work.”

  Through what knowledge I have of how big studios operate, this is fairly common. A good example would be an environment artist fixing a bad UV seam by placing a potted plant in front of it. It's a good solution in many cases. Clunky, perhaps, but the trade-off is saving hours of work in re-doing the UVs, which would be the technically correct way to go about it. At the end of the day, though, it's unlikely the player/viewer is going to notice a difference, which is what really matters. 

 For our first example, I quickly realized the Ada rig didn't have enough topology for me to create the shapekeys necessary for the tickling device I had planned. A solution would be to apply the subdivision modifier, but this would then prevent me from getting 24fps playback in the viewport, as the subdivision is applied to the whole model (the tens of thousands of new faces would slow the viewport down considerably).

  My solution? I cut off her feet! Through the whole animation, Ada's feet are detached. This allowed me to apply the subdivision to the feet and not her body, creating the extra geometry needed to make the shapekeys. I went through the whole animation to make sure this would hold up, and indeed it did! No one would be the wiser (except y'all here; it'll be our little secret). 😉

  The straps presented a number of challenges. I wanted to use a shrinkwrap modifier to get them to stay on Ada's face, and I also needed to create shapekeys on Ada's body to sell the effect (bringing her cheeks out to simulate the pressure, for example). The straps, though, didn't react well to the shapekeys, as they would mess with the shrinkwrap modifier in messy ways.

  My quick and dirty solution? Let's just duplicate the entire Ada mesh, hide it in the render, and set the shrinkwrap to this mesh. This way the shrinkwrap remains clean (as it's set to the “unmodified” mesh), and I can create all the shapekeys on the “hero” mesh. So throughout the entire "straps" portion of the animation, there's a spooky “ghost” Ada hiding there, driving the straps. Wild, but it worked well.

  Another challenge was the transition between the “straight” straps (no shrinkwraps) and the shrinkwrapped straps. To do it cleanly, I duplicated every set of straps, removed the shrinkwrap modifier, and then animated them “on/off” (using a mask modifier) for the transition. This kept things clean, and sold the transition fairly well, I think.

  A final issue came in regards to the rig itself; while overall it's a GREAT rig and I appreciate the creator (Rigid3d), there were a couple issues (which is to be expected with any rig). Namely, the pose I had Ada in (arms above her head) created some conflicts with the shoulder bones; namely, I couldn't raise them up past a certain point, otherwise the IK would glitch-out. I investigated the source, but my rigging knowledge is fairly rudimentary, so I sought a different solution.

  What I did was create “supplementary” shapekeys for her shoulders, so if they needed to be raised past the breaking point, I'd raise them as much as possible using the bones, and then add in the extra bit of movement with the shapekeys. Quick, dirty, yet completely functional!

  Moving on to Big Mommy Milkers Suckle Yes Good boy... uh, I mean the “Lady D Halloween” animation...

  The main challenge was creating a similar effect with two very different rigs. Jill and Claire, while both quality rigs, couldn't have been more different in their construction. Jill contained all sorts of extra bones to control her body separate from the main chain (I.E., I could move parts of her body independently without effecting bones above/below the chain). The Claire rig was more straightforward in it's construction, without these extra bones (this is definitely not an indictment of the rig, of course. As you'll see below, there's ALWAYS a way to get the result you want... but you might have to get messy).

  The first step was to detach Lady D's breast bones from their main hierarchy, so that I could animate Lady D's body while her breasts would stay in place (which made sense, considering Jill and Claire are holding them up).

  The goal became maintaining the loop while giving Lady D the ability to move around. I wanted her to be able to lift her legs up and move her knees back and forth, giving a feeling of presence to the Lady, and a feeling of lightness to the two girls. Of course, I quickly realized any movement from Lady D would destroy the nipple suckling loop, so I had to come up with a solution.

  I started with Jill; utilizing the aforementioned secondary bones, I was able to to add some child-of constraints to keep her in motion with Lady D's legs, while also maintaining the integrity of the loop.

  While not perfect (moving Lady D's legs too far quickly broke the illusion), it worked for the small amount of movement I wanted to add.

  Of course, Claire did not have these same bones, so my approach would have to differ.

  After some experimentation, I ended up selecting the bottom half of Claire and assigned it to a vertex group. Using a hook modifier set to this vertex group, I was able to connect the bottom half of Claire to Lady D's left leg bone, thereby syncing up their movement.

  I was SHOCKED that this very hacky solution worked, but it gave me enough leeway to add the little bit of movement I needed. Adding in some smooth corrective modifiers (set to “only smooth”) helped smooth out the intersection of where the hook began/ends.

  As an aside, I always get a kick out of watching the props bounce around in the viewport. I very frequently move stuff around to either fit a camera in, or subtly adjust the placement of props for a better shot. You don't want to overdo this, as it'll eventually create odd continuity, but there's definitely some wiggle room here.

  I hope you enjoyed this breakdown! I'll have a new animation out soon, and I'm currently reaching out to VA's to get the Catwoman/Powergirl piece voiced. I'll keep you updated; appreciate you and I hope you're doing well!

  Back soon...