CGMan

Upper Body Sim Starting

I've just finished preparing all of Nadia's upper-body parts for her upper body sims.  Look at how many pieces and parts there are!  The ribcage is not included you can see that in my previous post.  Anyway...  I'm gonna start that up now and we'll see what happens! :)

Quirky Upper Body Setup

The tech that makes all of this Storm Softbody stuff possible is the ability to "nail" Storm particles to non-deforming (but moving & rotating) objects.  Well the ribcage is deforming all over the place.  So I am setting up these little nail spheres that follow the ribcage at strategic points.  The softbody will collide with t...

Legs Simmed

I am pleased to announce her large-sized legs are now simmed.  Note the attached clip is not the actual Nadia model but a low-poly proxy model.

Synchronized Legs

I've just finished simming her medium-sized legs.  Cool, huh?

Now to sim her BIG legs.

EDIT: And that's that..  Her big legs are now simming.  This will be the longest stretch...  Nadia at her full size is by far the largest section of the animation.

EDIT2: The Big Legs sim ...

She's Got Legs

A lot of techno-babble to follow...  Skip if you wish:

Hello!  I've just finished simming her legs.  Well actually I did the sim 2.5 times... Let me explain:  I was having trouble toning down the quivering, jiggling quality of the sim.  But I managed to get an audience with the Storm developer and he said to try th...

Storm Sim Redux

I am such an idiot...  All this time, I forgot to bring in her leg bones.  So she was another boneless chick.  I'm getting FAR better results now.. I just need a bit more damping to tame those jiggles a bit.  But I am loving how this looks now.

Storm Sim Status

Hey all...  I'm still working through this sim stuff.  As you can see in the attachment it looks really good except at some of the joints.  The reasons are technical... I'm working with a Storm braniac to get this solved.. I'll keep you informed as this gets resolved and the simulation can begin.  I'm really close.

This is Neat.. AI Frame Rate Increase

I just tried this out and it works.  Right now I am using a 30-day trial but to get it is only $20.

What I can do is render the background only every 4th frame and this utility will create interpolated frames in between to fill in the missing frames.  It can introduce some artifacting.  But who cares.. it's the background! 2022-06-10 02:59:14 +0000 UTC View Post

I like my women floppy

Howdy!  I'm preparing Nadia's pieces and parts for Storm... At present she only has bones in her torso..  So I thought you might find this clip silly.

Finger Bang!

I've just finished animating Nadia's fingers.  I may need to adjust parts of them after her flesh is in place.  Speaking of which; let's put some meat on these bones now!

Attached is a modified cow sim..  I've managed to reduce the fine wrinkles that were happening when masses compressed...  Which is a good thing for Na...

Moo?

Howdy!  On Nadia's fingers I have finished animating her left hand..  And then I had the fun idea to mirror the animation data over to her right hand fingers and make various timing or pose adjustments throughout the animation.  I think it is saving a nice chunk of time.  I've passed the halfway mark of refining the fingerwor...

CGM - Post #069 (June 2022)

Hello this is an advance post for a future release.  Send me a private message if you have any questions.  Thank you so very much for your support, without it, these fun animations would not be possible!

Paid Post Incoming

Hello!  I'm still animating Nadia's hands... But I wanted to let you all know I will be posting a "Paid Creation" on the evening of the 31st.  If you do not want to get charged, you can remove your pledge now... Or you can reduce it to $2 if you still want access to updates and work-in-progress stuff.  If you have pre-existing cre...

Cool Storm Update

Storm just came out with a new update... And it has a lot of slick new cloth-simulation features..  That shrink-wrap feature looks very promising!

I'm still animating Nadia's hands... More to come on that.  Have a great day!

Eyebrows Animated

Hello!  I've just finished animating Nadia's eyebrows.  Attached is a quickie preview.  Note when they render they will not be so prominent/caterpillary..  You can see she's really looking alive by now.  I stopped animating her eyelids partway through my task so I could focus only on her eyebrows.. I need to now finish u...

Big Hair (Rendered Version)

I set up both machines to render this while I slept; just for fun.

I intend to render the rear hair with thicker, fuller locks.. But for this render I just made them all the same, so the back of her hair appears thin.  Enjoy!

Big Hair!

I took a break from animating her eyebrows to convert her hair models over to Storm.  Disregard the spazzing particles at the hair tips.. I'll fix that.

EDIT: Updated with cleaner sim

Hair Cables?

Testing using cables to style Storm hair.  It works well, until the hair gets tangled up in the cables!

Whew! Mouth Done!

Six minutes..  30 channels of mouth rig controls.  Over 11,000 frames of animation.  Here's a clip of the entire sequence in zippy speed.  More to come!

More Speech

Mouth animation 75% complete!

Whew!

Halfway done animating her mouth.

Talking Progress

Hey all...  Just a minor update here...  I'm over 50% done animating her eye movements, and almost 25% done animating her mouth.  I've also been fine-tuning some of her head and hand movements as I go.
Most of the dialogue is in the start here so hopefully I will pick up speed now.  I left all the gizmos visible so you can...

Deep Breathing

Hey all... I've finished animating Nadia's breathing.  It's pretty subtle at the start but you can see it if you look at her ribcage.

I've started animating her facial animation.  I'm using the newly rigged presets for mouth phonems, so I am going to skip doing performance capture with SynthEyes... I want to see which path is fas...

Knuckle-Down

Hey all..  Minor update..  Nadia's fingers are now fully rigged.  I've added bones for knuckles for better deformations.  Typically having so many automation-driven bones slows things down, I am doing the hand rig in a separate scene for the first time.  I've been doing facial rigs in separate scenes for the past three c...

Nadia Animation Progress

Hello!  Here's an updated clip.  I have a bit of cleanup to do on her head... Probably another thousand frames...  But apart from that, everything you see animated here is complete and cleaned up for the entire ~6.5 minute sequence.  These steps remain:

1. Facial animation

2. Fingers animation (and finger rigging)...

Major Announcement

I've figured it out... Cracked the nut.  I can now use Storm in my characters.  In the attached clip the tube ends were animated externally and Storm did the rest.  A bit of scarring where the two tubes interacted with extreme tension..  A character would not get anywhere near that much collision tension so it shouldn't be a ...

CGM - Release #068 (Apr. 2022)

Hello this is an advance post for a future release.  Send me a private message if you have any questions.  Thank you so very much for your support, without it, these fun animations would not be possible!

Cleanup Progress

Hey everyone!  I'm just at the halfway point cleaning up (and/or re-animating by hand) Nadia's clavicles and head/neck animation.  I've attached a little preview clip so you can see how hand-animated changes make a difference.  It really locks her into the audio.

I will be posting a "Paid Creation" post tomorrow..  If y...

Neck And Head Action

Her head moves now... Isn't that so much better?

I still have clean-up on the head.. as well as her clavicles.  Otherwise the entire sequence is cleaned up (more or less).  I still have to bring in her hand animation of course.

Cleanup Progress

Hey everyone!   I'm truckin' along with the motion capture clean-up.  Here's a look at the beginning of the animation.  Note her neck/head and hand animation has not yet been transferred over...  This makes her look a bit like she has a neck injury.  I'll post an update when she's more fully articulated.

I don...