Week 20: A Hodge-Podge of Items

This update is a bit of a week 19 and week 20 mashup, as the past two weeks I have been traveling by both plane and car and was in some places with poor wifi/ability to work, so I wasn't able to finish quite as much as I wanted these past two weeks. However, things are still progressing rather nicely!

The first thing that has been completed is Signe's (skin) textures! Arne and the Wolf's textures had already been revamped, so it was only a matter of time before Signe's were as well. I wound up taking a bit of creative liberty with Signe's textures and adding some dark, sooty Viking facial paint to her, which makes her look a bit wilder but I actually kind of like it! It allowed me to play around with some different brushes in Substance Painter which was definitely fun, and I think the paint does match up a bit with her wolf form markings more than just a plain skin texture.

Arne's belt rig from the previous update has also been completed! Some hierarchical items were altered and there is still a bit of a lag, but it's largely due to the surface modifier on part of the belt, and won't affect any of the animation, which is good.

I've also been working on helper rigs for Signe's dress to help with the deformation on the hem, which has largely worked! However, there have been some problems as I attempted to automate the deformations by setting up a rig system that takes the rotation of Signe's knees and applies the dress hem deformations automatically depending on how much Signe's knees bend. This would ideally help me not have to key these deformations myself in all of Signe's animations, which would make my life a lot easier. However, there have been some odd issues where the deformations don't apply themselves properly/essentially break now that they're being driven by these helper rigs, so I'm working on resolving that at the moment. Once that's done though, Signe's helper rigs will be completed!

I'm also going back into the layout stage and finishing up my layout animations in both 3D and 2D! I've primarily started going into the 2D shots as I've reworked how I'm going about doing the storytelling for my flashback scenes after some critiques, and while I think it works much better now, it does require a bit more work! So far I've just been setting up the base sketches to lay out the shots, then I'll go back and start adding flat colors once I'm happy with their layouts.

So while I don't have a terrible amount completed/rendered to show for this week, a lot of work is being done behind the scenes and I'm slowly checking off things on my list! With a little less than two weeks left over winter break, I think I'll be able to finish at least 90% of what I wanted to get done over break, so I'm feeling pretty confident about my progress so far!