Blender Progress

Since learning how to use Blender is one of the main reasons I'm posting here less frequently, I thought it would only be fair to post some updates on how it's been going.

For context, I'm not a complete newbie to 3D stuff, I've actually played around with 3D software before, (since I was a kid actually) usually to block out backgrounds or props to trace over in a drawing since perspective isn't a strong suit of mine, and I learned the sculpting tools at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 for 3D printing. What I'm trying to learn now is rigging, how to animate what I've sculpted.

The first attempt at this Circe model, I didn't take any screenshots of in any poses besides the default, because it doesn't bend good. The weight painting is absolute ass, but for being a first attempt that I spent months chipping away at, and some pretty crucial weight painting tools just straight-up don't work for me for some reason, notably the blur tool, I just click with it on and nothing happens, dunno why, so I was ready to just call it done and try something else. The lack of a face is not the result of just calling it done, that was intentional. The idea is to animate HotDiggedyDemon style; batch render all the frames, import them into Flash, then animate the eyes, eyebrows, eyelashes, and mouth on another layer. I know it sounds kinda shitty to admit that I intend to rip off another artist's very specific animation style, but he didn't invent it either, the Disney cartoon JoJo's Circus used a similar technique but in stop motion. This would benefit me since I already know how to sync animation to audio in Flash, so that would reduce the amount I would need to learn about Blender before I can actually do anything with it. I can start like this and then worry about learning to make a proper face rig and sync movement to audio in the same program some other time.

With Circe crappy yet done, I decided to test a theory by making a model of Woody and Mr. Mime, that being that if a character is designed in a way in which they are segmented, therefore much more of the body can just be separate meshes, that makes the rigging process MUCH simpler, there's so much less weight painting to worry about. With Mr. Mime for example, because his arm isn't actually attached to his body and there's that big-ass sphere hiding said fact, I didn't need to weight paint his shoulder, just his elbow. The sphere for his shoulder could then just be parented to the shoulder bone with no weights at all. And since his hand is also a separate mesh that his arm just disappears into, I can rotate his hand without having to worry about the wrist twisting shut and looking like the segments connecting a pair of sausage links. Because of this, I now believe Gooseworx to be a character design genius, since I'm almost certain that they had the same idea when designing Pomni. When looking at her normal standing pose, it very much looks like her arms don't attach to her body under those arm sleeves, they're just kinda floating inside them, which would make weight painting her shoulders unnecessary, and with her wearing gloves, the same trick could be used to avoid making the wrists rotateable. Testing this theory and finding my hypothesis correct gave me some hope, that if this whole thing I'm learning just ends up being too hard and I decide I don't want to anymore, I can design characters specifically around not having to do it, kinda like how Yogi Bear specifically wears a collar so that his body and head can be on two different cels, so if he's just standing there and talking they only had to redraw his head. There is a 3D equivalent of that that not only can I fall back on, but I don't have to feel bad about it since I'd bet money Gooseworx does it too.

Next thing I decided to learn how to do was use bendy bones, while watching Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken with my sister the day it went up on Netflix (and premiered at number one on Netflix, which I totally predicted, I knew it bombing at the box office wasn't because it wasn't liked by the people who saw it, I said that 81% audience score didn't come from nowhere, but noooo, I was "coping", get fucked Film Twitter), I really wanted to see if I could animate a rubber hose style character like that. At first I was just going to straight-up make a model of Ruby herself, but decided I didn't wanna put THAT much effort into something I wasn't sure was going to work, so I made a much simpler green alien that my sister named Steve. When rigging him ended up working exactly the way I expected it to, much to my surprise, I did another Steve rig where I tested another theory by only using bendy bones where a joint would be, rather than the reverse which is what I used on the first one, basically making a skeleton out of drinking straws, I was able to get a bend that isn't necessarily more natural, but closer to how I would draw a bent limb.

I decided to try that on my Circe model to see if I could use that method to fix some of the problems I was having before. It helped somewhat, but not a lot where it mattered, namely where the thighs connect to the hips, that's the part that was giving me the most trouble the first time. After days of trying over and over again and nothing working, I hit a point of "fuck it", broke the legs and butt cheeks off, rigged them separately, then parented each leg's armature to the pelvis bone on the main armature, making a segmented model that looks like an N64 promo render. Although the head, arms, and boobs weren't giving me much of any trouble, I broke them off too just so the segmentation is consistent, and made the materials shinier to commit to the aesthetic, so if anyone asks I can just say it's a stylistic choice. Right now I'm working on her clothes, which is more complicated than I'm sure it should normally be because each leg and each arm have their own separate armatures and parenting one object to multiple armatures doesn't work too good, but thankfully while working out the much simpler weight painting on each mesh individually, I think I may have finally figured out what I was doing wrong the first time, meaning I might be able to just go back and fix the first Circe. Or maybe I can fuck it up even more and make the N64 style even more palatable to myself, guess we'll see