Physics, Rigging, and Death

Remember how terrible my computer is? It is still evil.

After I completed texturing, I figured that it would be an easy, quick stretch to being able to fully animate. This was very, very wrong. I decided to ignore Wren, as Calla has much simpler clothing. In putting the metarig was simple enough, just tedious. Blender has a built in metarig, and I simply had to place the bones where they would accurately deform the mesh.

Upon completing this, I began to create some physics. Calla wears a skirt, and these physics were fairly simply. Then I tried the hair. In order to show the way the physics worked, I created a simple animation. Here is my first test:

I quickly left the hair physics to be dealt with another night. In other words, I have to do it as soon as I get home today. But, for this test, I was able to have the hair sit normally.

After this interesting animation test, I decided that it was time to make the character really usable. There is a feature on Blender call 'rigify', which makes buttons and makes it easier for animation.

I was very excited about this. As you can see, My first mission was to close the mouth. The mouth has been haunting me since I tried this, as I realized that the mouth does not actually close all the way.

Now, I realize that this is a tiny, TINY detail. Then in comes the next problem. The riggin of the wings were not included in the rig from rigify, only the original metarig. So at this point, I had wasted hours learning how to rigify, waiting for rigify to load, and messing with the weight paints for the mouth.

In the original metarig, it is even more difficult for me to close the mouth. It keeps getting grandma wrinkle lines, no matter how much the weights are changed. I am stuck in debugging mode, which feels like death. And yet somehow I still love this.