New character project - Amber

I guess I might as well post something about this since it's what I'm going to be working on for the next little while.

Long story short, I've been going around in circles a bit trying to figure out what I want to do next (I see you there rolling your eyes, you know who you are). Part of it has to do with still being burned out on older stuff (though I think I've gotten past that enough to consider some older subjects as a backup plan if this doesn't work out), part of it has to do with me just wanting a decent challenge to cut my teeth on in Houdini.

You see... Houdini is a weird beast. I've been working with it for a couple of months now, and I still have no idea what to make of it. Is it a 3D program, or is it a data processing toolbox? Is it a DCC application, or something more akin to Matlab? I don't entirely know. What I do know, however, is the more that I learn about it, the more possibilities I see for doing things in weird and whacky ways. I want to take advantage of that technology in any way I can, because I know some of it can be leveraged to create some very interesting results that I don't think anyone will have ever seen before (think of rigging techniques that actually accommodate for expanding curves so things still move around realistically regardless of the body size, or the ability to alter meshes on the fly to remove any size related restrictions while attempting to preserve as much texture and mesh fidelity as possible).

So... that being said, I've currently got the following design goals written up for this little project:

• 30 y/o human female character, probably 1.8 to 1.9mm tall with a curvy athletic ("thick fit") build by default
• Full face setup with a totally new face rig (based on blend shapes and a skin sliding algorithm I've cooked up)
• Shorter (shoulder length) hair for now, since interactive long hair rigs are something I want to tackle in the future
• Completely custom body mesh based on latex catsuit-like outfit with adaptive hard surface components bolted on top
• Fetish oriented, so expect a crap ton of high pressure helium inlet ports everywhere and lots of bulging inflated latex
• Custom IK/FK deformation rig based on joint weight blending to reduce animation artifacts as the character expands
• A new (and possibly novel) mesh morphing system that allows hard surfaces and geometry to actually react to changes in the underlying body size
• Primarily hourglass inflation focused with auxiliary inflatable regions to really try and sell that tight/overpressurized look

TLDR; I wanna create the world's first VFX-grade inflatable character, and I don't just mean a character with a massive stack of morphs piled on top. I mean a totally custom asset that was designed to inflate from the ground up, where each and every subsystem that makes the character come alive was also designed to consider the fact that the body size is not static. I essentially want something where the end result of animating the inflation slider from 0 to 100% is not "wow, she got big", but rather "whoa... how the hell does that work?".

PS: not really worrying about lore or backstory this time, since this is purely a technical project... I'll figure something out later, depending on what I've got to work with when she's finally renderable.