pulsarbird

Koril BJ WIP

Published: January 31st 2025, 8:48:25 pm

This is a WIP loop of Koril going down on Pulsar. Thanks to Koril for letting me use his snake model. x) I still want to polish the motion a bit and do proper lighting and a background, and add audio.

I decided to use this loop as a test for a few new techniques.

I wanted to try the butt rig technique I used on Pulsar on a mouth instead, as a way to make the lips snap around an object without needing to use cloth sims or other physics solutions. (And I didn't really want to use Pulsar's beak. I wanted to try it with someone's mouth.) It kinda worked. I learned a lot about exactly what makes this sort of rig work effectively and it's not a blanket solution. But it worked well enough that I could have the character go down over the object and not need to worry about the exact jaw and lip position. As long as it was close, it conforms to the object, so that saves a lot of time in animation.

I also used this to learn how to use animation strips for character animation. Blender's animation strip editor is... well, it exists. (I feel like I end up saying that about a lot of things in Blender! "It exists and technically can work.") The strip editor feels like it's designed more for creating individual animations that can then be exported to a game engine and trigger in a game that way. (And I've used it for this before. It works great in conjunction with Godot.) But it doesn't quite seem set up for a typical animation workflow. When it works though, it's also pretty handy. For instance in the above animation I have the base loop of Koril bobbing up and down. But then things like the blinking and looking around are separate animation strips that are triggered on top of the main loop. It's really convenient for being able to move some of these smaller secondary actions around for timing purposes. That isn't too difficult in the TL editor too (although that's coming from me, who already has a lot of experience working with large numbers of keyframes at one time in After Effects). But it's even easier to do in the strip editor.

Anyway! I'm probably going to take next week to work on some SFW stuff I want to do so I might finish this one up in two weeks or so.