colortwist

Advanced character rig (7/???)

Work continues on the facial rig.

A little while ago, I noticed that the intersection between the corneas and the eyelids was getting pretty bad. Normally this is something you can just ignore because the eyelids should be thick enough that the cornea won't actually intersect through them, but if the cornea is realistically shaped then there's a good chance the bump on the front of it mig...

Vanessa - Adrift (totally random bonus)

Don't ask me why I rendered this out, I don't really know.

To quote a comment left on one of my other pieces (which was, incidentally, more or less just a gratuitous shot of her chest)- "This is like baking a cake but there's no cake it's all frosting".

I guess sometimes you just wanna sit down with a bowl of frosting and leave the cake on the counter. It's not like it's going anywh...

Advanced character rig (6/???)

Ditto, though partial face rigging is working again. Still not entirely sure how I should be handling the control UI for that though.

Advanced character rig (5/???)

More testing and ironing out various bugs/glitches.

Advanced character rig (4/???)

Whelp, it kinda looks like the body portion of my custom character rig is now complete.

This took an inordinate amount of time and effort to construct (especially inside C4D). To be honest, I'm not even sure if this would be possible with a copy of C4D straight out of the box, since it took an awful lot of custom code to get this far. However, pretty much everything about the body works p...

Advanced character rig (3/???)

Another screenshot of the WIP rig, but this time from only a couple of days ago. While the pose hasn't been tweaked that much, it only took a few seconds to bring her down onto her knees and pose the arms- which is something that would have taken 5-10 minutes before if I was trying to rotate each of the joints by hand.

Advanced character rig (2/???)

This isn't really a chronologically accurate post, since this screenshot was actually taken more than 2 weeks ago (before I realized the wrists/shoulders/legs were kinda messed up at certain angles due to faulty twist extraction).

Nevertheless, the body rig was pretty much done at this point. There's no face rig yet so she's kinda expressionless, however this was more or less a test to se...

You spin me right around (4/4)

Last but not least, an actual demo of how this stuff all works together.

In this example, the forearm twist is being driven by the twist angle extracted from the orientation of the hand controller. Even as the hand rotates around in 3D space- the forearm twist will align itself correctly with the hand, ensuring that the forearm skin doesn't get too tangled up or accidentally flip rotation...

You spin me right around (3/4)

Another quick demo of some more (boring?) quaternion stuff.

This is a decent example of why normal 3D angles don't really work that well for twist extraction. In this demo, the source objects (on the left) are free to tumble around in 3D space while the destination objects (on the right) are constrained to only rotate about their Z axis.

What should happen is that the green axis of ...

You spin me right around (2/4)

More super exciting quaternion stuff! Woohoo! </sarcasm>

Anyways, this is a quick demo of one of the things that quaternions gets you- the ability to add and subtract rotations on a slightly more intuitive level. Essentially, what's happening here is that the left and right objects are having their respective rotations added together and set to the "result" object on the far right.<...

You spin me right around (1/4)

Alternatively titled "I'd like to get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride"...

So, yeah... I'm still here.

Long story short, I've been busy working on my character rig and dealing with all the lovely little issues that have crept up along the way. One of those issues has to do with the subject of "twist extraction", which is essentially the black art of aligning a rotation along a specific axis ...

Beach fun prototype WIP

Figured I might as well post this since it was something that I was working on, though I'm not sure if it'll ever be completed.

This was a work-in-progress of a scene I wanted to do where Vanessa was posed in the water with a splash coming in from the left-hand side of the screen (though that's not visible in this render since I never got around to modeling it). I wanted to try and play a...

Advanced character rig (1/???)

Have you ever started to work on something that you thought would be easy?

And then after a while, everything starts to look like a big ole rabbit hole, but you keep on pushing forward because there's no way it could possibly be that deep... I mean, they have to call it a rabbit hole for a reason, right? There's no way a cute little fluffy bunny could possibly dig something deeper than a ...

Vanessa - What goes down must come back up (3/3)

Third angle of the aforementioned scene.

Vanessa - What goes down must come back up (2/3)

Second angle of the aforementioned scene.

Vanessa - What goes down must come back up (1/3)

Whelp, here's something you probably don't see every day.

I kinda wanted to take a break from character rigging for a bit, and I've been meaning to fiddle around with this idea for a while now. It mostly stems from an ancient conversation I had with a friend about breast inflation. The subject of "overinflated boobs" had come up, and we were discussing the various ways that you could depict such...

Revenge of the strap rigging

You ever start something and think "oh boy this is going to be so simple!", and then it's not- it's really, really not?

Long story short, I've been bashing my head against this particular brick wall for the past couple of weeks. Originally I thought I could setup a system for handling the strap rigging using perfect circles and tangents between those circles (which are easy enough to calculate),...

Vanessa - Sunset Flight Bonus (4/4)

Fourth and final angle of the bonus shots.

Vanessa - Sunset Flight Bonus (3/4)

Third angle of the bonus shots.

Vanessa - Sunset Flight Bonus (2/4)

Second angle of the bonus shots.

Vanessa - Sunset Flight Bonus (1/4)

I'd gotten a few requests to pump up Vanessa even more after Sunset Flight was posted, so here she is approximately twice as big as the last panel.

I should probably note that I don't intend on blowing up this particular character to these sizes very often- while I've got a few other characters in the works (including one who's obsessed with the feeling of expansion, regardless of her current si...

Strap pluck controller demo

This is the first part of the character rig that I'm developing to handle the swimsuit strapping (among other things).

One of the things that's always bothered me about 3D clothing is a combination of: A) outfits that don't react realistically to tightness or stretching (ie, straps that fail to remain straight as the character bends and moves around), and B) clothing that the characters themselv...

Updates and stuff - 16/10/18

Just a quick update- my new keyboard showed up early (which was a nice surprise) and seems to be working exceptionally well. It's probably going to take some time to get used to typing on a mechanical board again (especially after using low profile Apple BT keyboards for well over a decade), but at least I can get back to working on the things that matter.

On a somewhat related side note, I had ...

Updates and stuff - 14/10/18

Long story short, I'm a bit behind working on stuff at this exact moment. My workstation keyboard broke down last week while I was trying to clean it out. I ordered a replacement right away, but I picked the wrong switches (Cherry MX Blue) thinking the noise wouldn't drive me insane- which it did about 6 hours after I unpacked it.

So I had to ship that board back, at which point Amazon decided t...

Finger IK tech demos

Ermehgerd, more boring non-boob related stuff!

I hate dropping off the face of the planet, so I figured I might as well post something that shows what I've been working on recently.

Long story short, I hate finger posing. Traditionally it's done by rotating a set of controls constrained to each finger joint, but that means you're dealing with a minimum of 15 joints per hand plus the metaca...

Vanessa - Sunset Flight (12/12)

Third angle for this particular shot.

Vanessa - Sunset Flight (11/12)

Second angle for this particular shot.

Vanessa - Sunset Flight (10/12)

"Just don't let go of me, OK? That is, unless you really wanna spend the rest of the night chasing around after me up in the sky- rather than having some kinky fun with these two buoyant balloons back at the resort ;-)"

Vanessa - Sunset Flight (9/12)

Second angle for this particular shot.

Vanessa - Sunset Flight (8/12)

Looks like she's going places... even though that seems to be in a rather specific direction.