Bronto update #3

This is a long one!

Finished the retopology and most of the rig (the texturing/material needs some more finesse though!).

Originally, I just wanted to move the bones around of the original rig and go from there, but there's just way too many bones to deal with and there were some things I wanted to change anyway, like how the neck works. I had an IK/FK switch, so you can switch between inverse kinematics and forward kinematics, but I didn't like using the IK because it was very rubbery and hard to pose.

My FK setup used the old trick of each bone copying the rotation the previous one, but it was limited to curving from one bone. Enough time has passed to where I had some good ideas coming back to it!

The new neck rig is much nicer for posing the neck with a more natural sense of flexibility. I haven't used it much yet, but it seems like this is a really good compromise between an IK and FK setup. I don't even think I need to do an IK version of the neck because this seems like it'll work so well.

One of the tricks is that the new neck has many more bones in it's chain! I was reading about diplodocus' and saw that they had something like 22 vertebrae in one species- that inspired me to have way more bones to the neck this time. Not 22, but way more. This is the old neck:

Here's the new neck!

The old rig has 1,372 bones total (700 in the 4skin though, since 1 bone = 1 vert for that section)

The new rig so far has 1,391 bones (814 are for the 4skin, added some more). When I rig the tail hole, it'll have more, but I haven't gotten to that quite yet. This is what it looks like when all the bone are shown!

Here's a quick, quick test of him getting up from a chair (or from sitting on someone!?). It's important to do some quick tests with your rig, to make sure the mesh is looking good for the stuff you have in mind.

Arms test (the chest doesn't squish as much as I'd like, my method for shoulder/chest rigging looks best on more firm chests, but it still looks okay enough for now)

Here's a little pose, a quick lewd idea I was thinking about... which gave me a cool idea that would challenge my 4skin setup and how it plays with the shrinkwrap modifier (for a more detailed P-niz).

(This doesn't have the shrink wrapping on it, it's still not perfect yet!)

I thought having the bronto wear a vibrating ring on his head, which just flexing his PP and squirting some pre on his body/face could be neat. And then I was thinking, what if the 4skin is pushed down, bundled up beneath the ring, then slips over it and covers the head. Then, he pulls it back down. To do this, I added a shape key to the shrink wrap target of the PP, one that adds the shape of the ring to the mesh itself. This is going to be what the bones of the armature shrink wrap to, as well as the subdivided mesh.

The shape key for the ring is activated when the 4skin is up, then is turned off as the skin pulls back. The problem with shrinkwrapping the bronto's mesh to another one is that the 4 skin deforms enough to where it will be "off" the target mesh. But it ends up wrapping anyway. You can get around this with a vertex group, such that only a certain area of the shaft is affected, but for this, so much of the geometry is pulled upward that it ends up not working (and it's too much of the mesh to where the veins won't go very far up the entire thing).

I got around this by using a "shell" around enough of the tip that a vertex proximity modifier would remove geometry around the head. This is what's happening when it's animated:

(What's red is what shrink wraps, what's blue doesn't get shrunk wrapped)

This is the amount of geometry that would be on the mesh when rendered. I thought it looked cool, seeing all those rectangles move around :p

This animation is a very rough test, I went lower effort near the end because this just a test, but the final combination of stuff is extremely promising. I can make something that looks nice out of it!

Here's a comparison of with/without the shrink wrapping. This was kind of a pain to work around, but it really does add a lot of "oomph" to it!

This is the large veins though, the ones that are closer to the skin, that move more with the skin, I'll either use a normal map or some kind of displacement that's mapped to the UV. Probably a normal map, since that's more straight forward of a process.

Also while doing that, I've been doing some more fluid sim stuff on the bowl boys. I've been tweaking the fluid emitters and seeing how they sim, like these nice globs of pre: 

Or some pre squirt:

Also, I've attached what'll probably the final version of the fluids for mon[ey] shot near the end.