Character rig update - 15/08/19

I really need to stop starting every Patreon post with "So I'm still here"...

Long story short, I haven't gone anywhere. I've just been busy trying to solve some scene management stuff inside C4D, which of course involved writing Yet More Plugins (TM) to get everything working properly. A couple of weeks ago I'd actually tried to pull everything together (so I could start rendering out stuff again) and immediately ran into two rather annoying problems:

1) Incorporating everything (body + outfit + hair) into a single character file was a huge mistake. You land up in a situation where any of the rigs involved get overloaded by the shear amount of connections between them, turning everything into a giant pile of spaghetti that quickly becomes as unmaintainable as it is unwieldy to use.

I've always known that I'd have to deal with this problem eventually, but I didn't think it would be this soon. Lacking any better options, I decided to bite the bullet and sit down to write up my own little system for handling this sort of thing (specifically rig synchronization between independent and sometimes differing object hierarchies- this is loosely related to animation retargeting, but not quite). Thankfully it's done now and works perfectly, which means that I'm no longer restricted to having a single character file containing *everything* inside it. I can mix and match whomever I want with whatever outfit I need, and things should mostly work with only a couple of mouse clicks. Likewise, I'm no longer limited to working on outfits and character development in tandem, which means I should be able to create more of either without having to worry about a large portion of the interactions between the two.

2) Once I'd solved #1, I promptly realized that one of the most important components of my character rig (specifically the C4D "Driver" tag)... didn't actually work all that well.

In fact, it didn't work at all.

It kinda worked, except when loaded under an XRef (or "external reference"- which is the system I'm using to keep everything and everyone compartmentalized, so a dozen different scenes don't contain a dozen identical copies of the same assets and characters). This was sort of a workflow killer for me, so once again I had to button down and write my own replacement. Thankfully this didn't take too long since I was already familiar with all the APIs and what not required to actually write such a plugin. Above and beyond fixing the immediate issues I had with XRefs, a rather nice bonus was that my own replacement tags managed to speed up the scene evaluation while posing things by about 300%.

Anyways, yeah. Mixed in there are about a dozen different other things that escape my mind at the moment (various rig fixes, better viewport controls, optimized scene shaders, etc, etc). I have been putting about 8 hours/day into this stuff (sometimes upwards of 12), and as much as I wish I had something more to show for it at the moment- all I really have is a massive pile of C++ code and some screenshots of everything finally behaving inside the same scene.