mrsdrpepper

comm - zilch puppet (part 1)

Added 2020-02-14 03:38:57 +0000 UTC

some progress of an animation commission for @zilchfox! i rigged it today and made some still renders before i move on to finally animating it

these can take quite some time. i've been working on it nearly nonstop for 3 days and i still have animation to go! it's fun but for my time i might have to charge even more on the next batch

for the extra curious, i made a video touring the blend file with the rig and moving parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2-EhN2MttI it might be a bit of a mess but it works!

if you know anything about blender you might notice i have a strange setup for switching the pieces with alternate textures such as the arms, eyes, mouths, and feet. i've had bad luck achieving this using the UV warp modifier (which seems to be the popular way to switch/animate 2D textures?), so these parts are texture-swapped by toggling different actions in the non-linear animation editor. not sure if it's the best way, but for my purposes it's fine. to do this, i created different actions for each state (mouth_smile for example) by keyframing UV coordinate locations with the addon AnimAll (position the UVs on the texture map where desired, then on AnimAll panel, check to animate only "UVs", click 'insert', and it adds a new keyframe for that UV location. this forms an action) and plunking each new action down in the NLA editor as its own strip that can be toggled with the star buttons. i think this method is actually faster to put together than using UV warp because you don't have to create a controller or anything like that. you still need to be sure you move your textures are evenly spaced and so you can adjust your UV locations exactly when keyframing for it to work neatly