Testing some things~ (Updated with mp4) (Patreon)

EDIT: I noticed the animations were in .mkv which is the default container when using ffmpeg in Blender and I forgot to switch it! I converted them to .mp4 with handbrake (but left the mkv up just in case).

I've been testing a bunch of stuff and trying make an environment for this animation.

The bed is HUGE (and modified from this: https://blendswap.com/blend/20991 ). I gave it some basic materials, including a a fancy, sparkly one for the blanket. 

The laptop is this: https://blendswap.com/blend/22592 but I replaced the razer logo with a nice, innocent symbol~

Honestly I'm kind of struggling to come up with an environment that's pretty and functional! 

Here, I was testing to see how the camera imp thing looked here: 

One thing that's missing currently that really would help out is some cushion to the bed. I did something similar in the bront/raptor animation, where the furniture cushion conformed a bit to the bronto's legs. I tried to do something similar for the bed (using a cage to deform the bed mesh), however they were all ineffective or very slow. And the bed just doesn't deform well, mostly due to it's geometry:

The person who made this model did the usual trick of running a cloth sim on detailed, high poly, all-quads geometry, then decimating it to really bring down the polycount without impacting the detail. Good for static meshes. But, since I want to deform this bed, it seems as though I'll have to retopologize it. Not a big deal, though.

On the character side of things, I've added more controls for various things (hand placement, shrink wraps, etc... )

Soft 2 hard~

I've given the kobold babe a bunch of controls for where the hands are locked to. Her hands can move freely, or they can copy the transform of "position bones" as I call them. These would be parented to various parts of the body (you can have the hands locked to the hips or the pp). You might wonder "why use position bones? Why not just use the "child of" constraint?"

The main reason is that the child of constraint isn't very predictable when you go from multiple parents. It becomes the child at an offset. To get around this, it's better to use the copy transform constraint on non-deforming bones that are the children of some other bone in the armature's hierarchy.

Above, going from position to position with ease! 

And as you can see, I've made some fancy boneshapes for these controls! It should be a bit more easier to use these controls.

A Patron, Neko Boy, suggested "fist[ing]" and I went ahead and gave it a shot, since it seemed like a good way to attempt something I haven't tried before (and see how the shrink wrap bone constraint works on more complex targets, like a first/arm).

The shrink wrap method works quite well on stuff that isn't very complicated (such as a shaft, egg, whatever). But when using it on a hand/arm, it wasn't acting as I'd like, like really snappy and unnatural. So, I tried using the remesh modifier on the copy of the arm that is the shrink wrap target. This works quite well!

I did a short animation with this- it's not terribly polished, but it was more of an experiment than anything.

(Also, a very early test of the kobold in the environment)

I meant to make a short post about all this stuff yesterday, but I kept getting really absorbed in different parts of this animation (like, trying to make the environment, which lead to a good chunk of time trying to get the bed deformation to work with the characters).