Maya animation update 5

I did some retiming of the animation as it felt a bit too fast, even though I’ve animated large chunks after reference video. For example, the hands should use a bit more time to slide over the sides of the body. Other moves needed more time to match the heavy body.

A short part of the animation had the arms going too forcefully into the side of the belly area. This made the arms stick to the belly, which made the belly shake a lot when the arms got pulled away.

And to see if the new changes fixed the issues, I did another 4 or 5 more physics baking of the character mesh to get everything in order. Each bake now takes almost an hour to calculate.

After each bake, I slightly adjust the poses where it’s needed, going around the character to see if everything behaves properly. :D

 After the work on the animation part, I wanted to fix the hair around the nipples. The issue here is that a hair modifier called ‘interpolate hair curves’, emits hair in the areola area. Interpolate hair curves use weight paint to define where hair should be emitted, but it relies on mesh density and face shape for its precision.

To make hair emission more precise, it is possible to use a black and white image, where white means hair is present while black means no hair. I created a black and white mask in substance painter and saved it, and since I use UDIMs (a workflow with the ability to spread UV islands over multiple textures for higher resolution or performance), the mask is saved onto 3 images. Back in Blender I inserted the first image in the interpolate hair curves, normally it would add the other images automatically, but it did not work. That was pretty unfortunate. I searched the internet for a solution and found that UDIMs for textures are not fully supported in geometry nodes yet, I had to use a single image.

I added a additional UV map to the character and packed all the UV islands into a single image and baked the UDIM based textures onto the single image map. I inserted the new texture map into the interpolate hair curve modifier and changed the modifiers UV map to use the new map, but that messed up the hair. All the hair grooming was inverted.

 I went through the hair modifier to look for clues and see if there was anything I could modify. I did find a section of nodes called ‘Density Textures’. I knew I had to make the interpolate hair curves modifier use a different UV specifically for the mask texture.

 I could see the textures used a shared value called ‘Surface UV Map’ which uses the standard created UVMap for the model. I tried to expand the group input and here I could see the UV map input. I tried to duplicate it so there would be the option to insert another UV map. I changed its name to ‘Surface UV Texture Mask Map’ and connected it directly to the texture, then I inserted the new UV I called UVMap_UTIL map into the new socket, then the single image mask into the Mask texture socket. That really seem to do the trick!

 Now, it’s possible to use the UDIM workflow for the character textures and use a single texture for the fur mask by having two different UV maps with different UV layout on the same model. Making it possible to more precisely define where hair should grow. :D