(CMDL2) Snake peek

Here we go. While my Patreon was silent I was working on a new model. This time it’s a snake, to be more precise - Kaa. So what’s with it?

First of all, this is the most complex and best-looking model I’ve created. Creating a cylinder and rigging it doesn’t seem to be hard at all but this is wrong. If I went with this “simple” approach I would end up with a quite simple model which may look good, but when you try to animate it… it may become a nightmare.

A little walkthrough of each stage I’ve finished and plan to do:

Starting with - Head mesh. By far the most tricky part. The main requirement from the commissioner was a head that doesn’t look way too cartoony like the Kaa model I was working with before in one of the posters. I was required to find a balance between an original cartoonish face and a real snake face. I ended up creating something in between. It looks stylized with some forms of the original cartoon face.

Then - Rig. Kinda hard because of the gimmicks it has. To be a good snake rig, it should be able to do a few things:
    Be able to animate it crawling on a floor.
    Be able to wrap around its prey.
    Be able to move like a snake (Obviously).

We can make it stupidly simple with just a long chain of bones, but… It would be impossible to animate it without shaky moves. To enhance the situation we can add a “Spline IK” modifier, but then we would also create a Bézier curve which will control the chain of bones. It will work for sequences where snake just moves on the floor, and maybe for bounding its prey but only if the prey isn’t moving a lot. To make it better, we could add an array of curve controllers and now, it’s more or less usable for most cases. Now we have a chain of bones which is controlled by a curve and a “base” bone which controls where the chain of bones is located on a curve.

And now - Scripts! At some point, you may begin to use scripts for your rigs as it gives a bit more freedom in what you can make and how easy you can make it. One of the most notable scripts most of you have seen - is UI scripts. These little panels on the right of the viewport where you can show/hide bone collections (Bone Layers in old versions). Sometimes, like with Rigify, these panels may also provide a variety of tools to use on a rig.

This model has a special issue - body length. To solve it you have a few options:

• Make body length as you like - You have less troubles with creating and editing body bones, but now you will encounter a problem that length isn’t suitable for most use-cases as it’s too short.

• Make body really long - Now you get a nightmare that you need to create and edit, but you’ll get a model that most likely will suit most use cases. But… let’s say you want to see a whole model in frame and whoops, you can’t fit it! Or more likely you end up with cases where the model is way too long. Also, there will be an issue with the amount of body controllers. Actuality these issues have workarounds, but I would like to go to the next option.

• Make the ability to make body length as long as you want - This is what I want for this model. How does it work? The user edits the body curve for his needs, poses it, make the desired length, adjusts the size, etc. Then when a user is pleased with body, he presses one button and magic happens! The script I wrote for this model creates a rig for the body curve and creates a new model with the head and body combined. I’ve already tested it and it works very well.

But how does it perform in animations? - Short answer - not very well. Recently I created a test animation where I saw all problems current model has. Despite these flaws, overall it performs VERY well. It’s a real pleasure to work with. About issues I’ve encountered:

The most notable one - not working face rig for eyes. Currently, it’s impossible to do any emotions using current rig. Then - quite sad results with the part it is created for. I’m talking about vore animations, current rig breaks when you try to push something in his mouth. Also, there is the same problem as with one of the tentacles rig - if head moves the whole body moves. So it’s quite difficult to lock his body on something.

But no worries! All these issues can be fixed, except the last one… I’ll come up with a fix during the creation of my tentacle rig.

What’s next? - Adjusting rig, creating a mouth and rig for it, script polish, UV unwrapping, and finally textures. All these steps require some time to do. And considering how long it takes to create such a model, I plan to resume work on other projects, it will be slow but at least you get some new content to watch.

That's all for now.

Currently, I'm gathering info on what CA9 will be, so if nothing goes wrong I'll post a start pose for the animation in a few days.