Two more weeks to go and over $1700 pledged! Let's see if we can make $2k!!!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/humansbgone/humans-b-gone-praying-mantis-enamel-pin

Rose's rig is finally done, as well as her automatic walk cycle (as you can see above)! It's not a great walk cycle, but the fact that it's totally automated is fantastic. I now have a basis for a walk cycle of any speed and any location, without the pain of manually positioning every foot to keep up with the body!

I've also started work on the ant model! Well, not the model itself--instead, I've been working on a set-up to allow me to procedurally generate animation for crowd scenes. It's been surprisingly easy so far, compared to the headache of setting up Rose's eyes!

As you may have seen, I've launched a Kickstarter for a Sophodra enamel pin ($15 per pin)! It's already passed the goal and the stretch goal! However, $460 of that goes towards making and shipping the pins to me alone (to say nothing of portion that goes to shipping them to backers), so anything else you can add always helps!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/humansbgone/humans-b-gone-praying-mantis-enamel-pin

Let's give it a week to try to set up the procedural crowd animation system. Then, probably less than a week to set up the ant rig and model, both regular and realistic. Then, we have to work on hiver (and Mobia) model and rig improvements, and implement the system for them. Then, all the fun of Vera model improvements (dealing with that texture...), and several different bug models, and of course Sophodra... Yes, it's looking like model work alone is going to be at least another month and a half. At this rate, a final release date is difficult to gauge. A summer release looks likely. Thanks for hanging in there with me, and I'll do my best to make it worth your while. Until next time!

At long last, Rose has actual fur!!! (You would not believe how hard that was to set up, or how many approaches I tried before I settled on this one.)

Not visible in this image is all the work that's gone into Rose's leg rig. Also not visible is the automatic walk cycle I've set up. A lot of work went into both of those, too.

Apart from that, I've also been working on things for other characters. In the past, you may have noticed that crowd scenes were pretty stiff and repetitive. That's because my computer could only really handle having two or three base rigs and models set up in a scene to draw the crowd from--and only two or three animations, accordingly. However, I've now figured out a system that would let me offset and mix and match multiple animations for every individual member of a crowd! I have some other ideas that would add even more dynamism, too....

Over the weekend, I'll try to finish up Rose's automatic walk cycle. Then, it'll be time to integrate all the rig parts and tidy them up. And then, at last, it will be time to move on to another model.

I can't promise the rest of the models will be done in a timely manner. The work on improving Rose has also opened up a lot of ways to improve the others, in a way that will make HBG look dramatically better, as well as make it easier to animate. I can guarantee it's going to take more than a month, maybe two. Fortunately, I'll be having help on background work and animation to help balance out the rest of the workload. I'm going to say this will be at least another 4-5 months of work, for a June or July release. I hope you'll agree that it will be worth it. Until next time!

It's taken so long, and some bugs still need to be worked out, but Rose's eye rig is pretty much done!

This is something very ambitious that I've been working on using Blender's latest capabilities and Clay Pencil, a new add-on for Blender that was just recently released. Rose's rig now has the following features:

• I can draw absolutely any shape I want for her eye and have it automatically update not just the shape of the eye, but also generate the eyelid, eyelid crease, and mimic the shape for all eight eye shines/true eyes!
• The eyelid and true eyes wrap to the shape of her eye appropriately!
• I can tween that eye shape to any other eye shape that I drew on a separate layer!
• Despite being drawn, the generated parts are automatically rigged so they can still be animated in 3D space! (This includes the true eyes following the look target.)
• This especially applies for the eyebrow--it has five control points, so no matter what I drew, I can still finely control it!

This was a lot of nonstop hard work, and the work on Rose's rig is still far from over, but I'm very excited!!! To my knowledge, no one else is doing anything like this. I'm also going to transfer this technique over for Sophodra's eyes, and I plan to use it for some other things too.

Probably another week is left on Rose's model and rig (I still have to take care of her hair and legs), but I hope you'll agree with me that the extra time and effort spent has been worth it! At this rate, we're probably looking at a June release, but this time I'm not going to sweat it. Right now, I just want to focus on making sure the finished product looks right. Until next time!

I have done. SO MUCH work on Rose's model this week. Figuring out Geometry Nodes effect to make stylized hairs do what I want, figuring out bone constraints to make her eyelashes behave just so relative to the camera, figuring out Shader Nodes effects so I could convert her eye shines to a texture for better deformation while still able to transform them, correcting her cephalothorax mesh and re-rigging it, merging her leg meshes, completely remeshing her jaws and mouth, tons of other possible methods I discarded...

...and all I have that I can show off yet is the work I've done giving her fangs. (It'll be quite a while before this functionality even comes into play, but I figured I may as well add it while I was fixing everything else.) You'll just have to take my word for it that the other things are going to make a tremendous difference in making her much more expressive and lively for animation!

Jade is making fast work of the soundtrack, per usual! I can tell you now this OST will be more bangers.

And the work on Rose is still not done! Next, her eyes need to be finished...however I decide to do that. I've got a couple ideas. Then, more work on the hair method, and actually making the mesh...and rigging. So, so much rigging. I'll do what I can over the weekend, but again, this may take another week. Another month for work on the other characters. A month for staging, assets, and backgrounds, and anywhere from one to two months on animation...let's bump this up to a May or June release. Hopefully, all the methods I've figured out here will save me time on the future. Until next time!

By the way, new stickers are up in the Ko-Fi store!

https://ko-fi.com/s/329ea64403

The animatic is finished and has been shipped off, and work has already begun on background planning and music! I've also finished skim-watching the rigging course, and I'm ready to go.

First off, there's work on Rose, and that's going to be...a lot. New cephalothorax mesh, new method for hair, a completely new approach for her eyes, an entirely different rig altogether...the to-do list for Rose has been steadily building, and it's finally time to confront it.

All in all, the work on Rose alone will probably take a week or more, though I've already made a lot of small fixes (for instance, she's now slightly bigger, as she should have been all along--but that's a lore fix, not a tech fix). The hair stuff I'll try to get done over the weekend--right now, I'm just testing lots of possible approaches.

Blender giveth, and Blender taketh away. Blender has destroyed one of my main rigging methods...however, it has also finally caught up to my vision, and I can now do 90s Disney-style soft shading in realtime!

After that, Sophodra also has a lot that needs fixing, though not nearly as much. Lots of fixes for the hivers, a whole lot of fixes for Vera (not nearly as many as Rose, but the fixes do involve rigging, weight painting, and texturing...). And that's not counting all the bug models. At least I'm getting help with assets! It's probably going to take more than a month before I can start on staging, though. Still, holding out for an April release. Until next time!