Asura 3D model update!

 So! This month didn't have such tangible improvements, it was mostly a lot of backtracking and re-doing stuff. But here's what happened:

1) Hips Topology fix.

The biggest change is that I had to re-work the topology of the hips [I ended up doing a few changes on other areas too, mostly trying to reduce vertex count a little.]

From what I understand, it's good practice to have the topology form a curve on the crease that forms when raising the leg, so the deformation looks natural and you don't have to fight with weight painting so much. I did have a curve... but the placement was all wrong! I tried to make it work and it kiinda did.. But it required very weird bone placement and not all rotations worked very nice. [Side to side were especially problematic].

With such a big change in topology I'm glad I didn't do the textures before the rig! That work would be lost.

2) Weights/Skinning.

After changing the topology I messed up the weight transfer and I couldn't undo to before I applied it, so.... I decided to just re-do the weights! I also tried to do minor adjustments to the shoulders.

3) Face Rig.

Once I had done a first weight painting pass on the body, I realized that the failed weight transfer [or maybe even something else] also messed up the face on certain areas! So.. I decided this could be an opportunity to try a different face rig approach to what I was using. Instead of "floating bones", I wanted to try using connected bones: the veeery basic understanding I have is that this approach should help make the skin stretching more natural. I thought this could come in especially handy  on the mouth and cheeks!

I did way too many bones though! and because everything is connected, sometimes moving one point means you're actually moving 4 bones and if the weight painting is off it becomes very obvious real fast!

I've learned that it definitely feels different, and there's areas I really liked! Like the mouth! But I can see some of the mistakes I made! I connected more bones than what was necessary and because I didn't really understand how it would behave I didn't plan things properly. The biggest trouble areas were the eyes/eyebrows! Too many bones, and there were bones that I weight painted so they would hold the shape, but because they were connected, when other bones moved they ended up moving and it looked very unnatural!

The next changes I'll work on:

1) Re-do the face rig! I've realized I liked my previous approach! It's nothing fancy but it does the job, I can then automate certain actions like quick smiles or frowns using action constraints as if they were shapekeys/blendshapes! [Or I was also advised to use pose libraries... I'll check that too!]

2) Make a test rig for the arms and legs using a single bendy bone!

Currently when I rotate the arms and legs [like the rotation of the forearm] there's an ugly twist. I've been trying to fix it by adjusting the weights, but even with my best attempts it's still visible. So I want to see if using a "bendy bone" fixes the issue! if it doesn't, my best bet is keep adjusting the weights or do 3 bones per section instead of 2.

3) keep trying to get the shoulders right! Currently the shoulders don't deform so well, I don't know if it's the bone placement, the topology, the weight painting, the fact shoulders are tricky because they bend in all directions... or all of the above! I want to make it behave as nice as possible! [I think the reason the shoulders don't look right when they're to the sides is because I did a T pose instead of an A pose?]

04) Try to make the torso deform better! Currently it's a bit difficult to get a nice torso deformation, especially slouching. It bends a bit weird and I don't know if it's just a matter of  playing with the bones placement and weight painting or if the torso is just too long.

5) File cleanup! I want to figure out why some of my meshes appear double in the outliner for example, I suspect it's because I've linked some meshes, I just wanna understand it so I know it won't cause me issues later on. Also I want to look closely into cleaning up all unused vertex groups. One thing I noticed is that my file feels a bit heavier, and I wanna know why that is.

Then once I'm happy with the way the base bones deform, it'll be time to get more deep into the rigging process! [Following the "Art of Effective Rigging in Blender" course!]

After the rig it's time for texture painting and modeling things like hair, eyelashes, clothes, etc.

Before the month ends I'll post some sketches I did this month and the asura sketchdump!! :D