Strap rigging updates and other assorted nonsense

Ugh.

To quote the professor from 1996's Chain Reaction- "We learned something very important today. We found another way that didn't work."

So as it turns out, the method I've been developing to handle my strap rigging... doesn't actually work. It kinda does, but it also totally doesn't. Part of this is my fault- I probably should have seen some of these issues coming from a mile away, but part of it also has to do with the software I'm stuck with. I use an absolutely ancient version of CINEMA 4D (R17 to be exact), which is the only thing I can run at the moment without a new computer. It kinda works, except for the fact it was never designed to handle character animation in any sane degree. The tools it does offer are absolutely antiquated when compared to the rest of the CG world (even newer versions are pretty hopeless- I'm looking at switching to something else entirely ASAP because of this), and while I've been trying to build my own tools to make up for some of those shortcomings, there are some seriously fundamental issues with the way it handles everything in general that cannot be worked around.

Long story short, I got nailed to the wall by about a dozen different priority issues with this particular technique. When C4D updates the scene, things have to happen in a very specific order- and while most of that can be controlled through custom expression priorities, the priority at which C4D regenerates the scene geometry cannot. In my case, I had to read in the deformed geometry of several proxy objects to determine where the straps should be positioned at the head and tail end. This has to happen after certain geometry has been updated, but before other geometry has been regenerated. Normally there is a very small window where you can shoehorn some stuff into this process to make it work, but it doesn't always follow through (depends on if it's a polygon object or a spline object). Other times you'll just land up running into a chicken-and-egg problem where you need certain things to be updated before others, but because of the object hierarchy layout and hardcoded priorities, there's no way to force those evaluations to occur in the correct order so that the rigging updates properly within a single scene update.

As seen in the GIF above, this particular problem manifests as the front side of the suit lagging behind everything else, totally tearing apart the geometry. Fun and joy.

To further compound matters (and this is the part I should have seen coming a mile away), the overall workflow for this sort of setup is really, really gnarly. I'm not actually sure what I was thinking when I started working on this because that should have been evident from the get go. Even if I hadn't gotten shafted by C4D's priority system, actually making this entire thing work would have required about 10-20x more time and effort than creating the initial morphs to fit the outfit to an inflatable body. And assuming that everything somehow worked out in the end, maintaining this sort of setup would have quickly devolved into an absolute nightmare of Eldritch proportions, the likes of which would drive anyone mad with only the most briefest of glimpses into the resulting scene hierarchy.

So... where does that leave all of this stuff?

1) I'm not giving up, though I am going to have to tackle this problem from a completely different angle. I've actually got some stuff going on later in December which is going to prevent me from working on outright fetish related content (so no big boobs on-screen), which means I'm going to have a lot of time on my hands for doing some more math-y programming stuff instead. I will likely be using this time to try and come up with some sort of cloth simulation toolkit for C4D, or at the very least, a simplified object deformer plugin that can do something similar.

2) I was really, REALLY hoping to be able to deflate Vanessa this month (cue audience going "Wat? That's not why we're here!"). Reason being, you've got to be small before you can get bigger, and since this is supposed to be a expansion/inflation related Patreon account, it's really hard to do that when your characters already look like they're about to float away at any moment. Unfortunately this is going to have to be postponed until I can figure out something to drive the straps in C4D.

3) In the meantime, I've decided to switch up tasks and work on introducing a new character instead. She's gonna be stuck at Vanessa's usual size for the time being (which kinda sucks), but there's not much I can do about that right now. At the very least, I've still got those "overinflated" morphs kicking around (the ones I used for Sequin Floatoshoot, which get around the whole strap rigging issue by not touching the top of the swimsuit at all), so this should still let me explore some new dynamic poses and situations with more than one character.

Anyways, yeah. I wish things would have turned out differently, but that's life, I guess. The only thing I can do is to keep trying to produce as much content as I can, while simultaneously researching alternative methods of handling the outfit rigging. I'm sure it'll get done eventually, though it doesn't really help when you're stuck with the CG equivalent of sticks and stones and you've got to build all the rest of your tools by hand. I guess the upside of this is that you learn a lot by creating your own tools, even though I'd rather be using pre-built tools to focus on making actual content instead.