(CMDL1-7) How model gone wrong and a rig prototype

"I should do rigging first so if I change something in a mesh there are no problems with textures" - Wise words. Fells like I knew something will go wrong with doing textures first.

What is an issue? Petals model is way too slim for animation (and overall, I don't like how they look).

After finishing baking normals, AO, and other stuff, I returned to Blender to check how the model would behave with a simple rig. It was... terrible and good at the same time. Good - it works great with automatic weights, so I'll spend less time messing with weights. Bad - It looks bad and is way too different from my references.

And here it begins, retopo gone like it was never done before. Immediately I made them very thick. It's easier to slim them out than to make them thicker. It made it... better. But they fell way too heavy now. And now there is another issue, it doesn't look obvious on thick iteration but can be seen on the next iteration.

The final (for now) iteration was made a bit slimmer, it's a middle ground between slim and thick iterations. But there is now a new issue - the back part is not smooth at all. And it looks a bit square. A fast solution is to smooth it in sculpt mode, but nope. I've tried and it's not working at all.

Currently, I don't know how to smooth parts in a model that is intended to be smooth. For some reason "Smooth" brush just flattens a surface. Probably it works as intended, but I don't know how to use it properly :/.

While the model is somewhat ready, it's time to create a proper rig. And this is where fun begins. Weirdly enough but as a 3d animator, I can't come up with a decent rig design that will be easy and comfortable to use. For now, the whole idea is to make "Spine" for each petal and controllers for the sides. There is a big problem with the "closed" pose where each petal intersects with the other. It can be seen in all animation tests. The solution I found is to make a "lock controller" for each side tweak bone. It will allow automatic connection with each side without intersecting.

The model rig is created without using Rigify, Auto-rig Pro, or CloudRig. It makes it harder to create (kinda) but it allows to create a lot more flexible rig. Thus I'm gaining experience with rigging which will be useful in the future.

After I finish creating a somewhat working rig, I'll come back to creating textures. And I will come back to creating CA8. I miss working on it.