August 2022 Update [Download]

Hello everyone! I hope you've been well, I've been well and I'm here with a new update!

This time I'm not super sure how to show my progress, but I'll give it a try!

I'm still working on the weight painting and a bit on the placement of these initial deformer bones. It's required a lot of posing the characters, tweaking the position/number/orientation of bones, changing topology a little!

• What remains mostly untouched: Face, Hair.
• What still needs a lot of focus: Shoulders, Crotch, Butt, Palms of the hands, Neck.

The crotch will probably require changing the bones themselves, like adding or removing some. It's still not clear to me how I want to control that area.

The hands need a lot of adjustments to the weights, but they are small adjustments, I'm actually really happy with the hands and how fun and easy they are to pose!

The neck is tricky, I think I'm getting a good range of motion and I can achieve the poses I think about, but something still feels wrong, and I'm not sure if it's just because the neck is so long, or if I need to change some pivots slightly.

I think the Shoulders and surrounding area are /fine/ atm, what makes me worry the issue could still be bone placement/weight painting related, is that the shoulder feels like it stretches a bit far when the arm goes up. It used to be way worse until I lowered the shoulder bone a bit. But moving anything more starts to mess with the other movements so... I think I'll leave it like that!

Other things I got to fix regarding the shoulder: The deltoids lose volume and don't rotate nicely with the arm. The upper part of the pectorals [the area between the clavicle and arm/shoulder] sinks when the arm/shoulder rotate forward. No nice scapula movement following the rotation of the shoulders. Latissimus dorsi should poke out a bit [viewed from the front] when the arm is lifted, right now it doesn't and it sinks a bit in the back. I really think all of this is gonna require extra bones that activate when the arm and clavicle rotate.

Oh, one of the bigger reliefs this month was when I moved the pivot of the legs a little bit, and suddenly the deformation on the hips improved SO MUCH!! I thought at that point I had done the best I could, and helper bones/shapekeys would have to do a lot of heavy lifting to improve that area. But thankfully it won't have to rely so heavily on those! [I wish I still had saved a pic that showed that!]

Topology Changes: I made big changes to the arm and thumb.

ARM- added loops to the upper arm and one on the forearm near the elbow, to help when the arm rotates [so the twist is not as obvious]. The bigger change was that I rotated the mesh of the elbow and "inner elbow" so that they would be more aligned from the front and top views. This may not have been super necessary, but by doing this, the bones could be aligned to the front view as well, and posing feels more comfortable. This area needs a few adjustments though, there's something about the upper arm that looks weird when lifting the forearm.

THUMB- This was a very necessary change. While adjusting the orientation of the bones, I had to pose the hand a lot, and it became obvious that the thumb was way too long, it also needed to be rotated a bit, now it feels way better!

I can't show much of the changes, since I just save on top, I have a added pics that shows the knuckles before and after I moved the pivot. And the changes to the topology.

Other than that I can offer a video with all the poses I've been saving, it is weird and derpy lol, the purpose of these poses is to see how all the areas behave, so when I'm making changes to the weight painting, I know it's not messing up with things in a different position. I also just make poses here and there, for fun and to test the rig.

Keep in mind: With all the big and small changes to the rig, I keep breaking and fixing the poses. Some of the original details are lost, but the poses remain pretty clear [It's mostly the arms and fingers that aren't in the intended positions anymore, some discrepancies with the spine too]

The video is ready for download in this post, called "TekkiPoses" [Thought it would be a bit risky to post on YT.]