#wipples

Coral going thru redesigns and color changes like a girl changing clothes 😞 but i do like the ocean wave look a lot

something i started working on a bit ago, at the end of the holiday rush bs at work, as part of my new years' resolution to finally update some character refs, since the old ones are seven and therefore exactly that; Old so here i am, returning to the blurg with a wipples of exactly One [1] Wulf the Bartender, the dayjob when not perusing about the Schwarzwald

Character sheet for Wipples the cat from Jar Full of Cosmos. For someone who has focused mainly on characters for the majority of my artistic efforts, I really struggle with expressions. Also, I have no clue how I'm going to rig his extremely bendy, amorphous form. Some process work below the cut!

a wip of the washes for the new promo

I started this project about a month ago, and finally Pearl and Wipples are together. There are definitely some issues to fix with the character models; Pearl's clothing does not follow the rig through space, so I had to manually put her dress back on. Wipples' whiskers are clipping through his face and his fur is nearly pitch black in spite of setting the material color to grey. The kitchen environment is a work in progress with further adjustments needed for color, composition, and scale. The lighting is very temporary as well.

He has fur! Sort of!

I have hit my first serious barrier with Jar Full of Cosmos, and that is the fact that my little laptop just doesn't have enough compute power. Unfortunately it's too laggy to effectively experiment with materials and do a better job grooming--not to mention animation tests. Thankfully, I have new PC components on the way. In other good news, the fur system obscures pretty much all my bad mesh deformations. It also obscures his facial movements, but I planned for that and intend to do most of his emoting with ear and eye movements. Next time I make an animal, I think I'll use shapekeys instead of bones for facial animation.

The groom holds up from afar (and with lower resolutions) but up close it needs a lot more work. It's also worth noting that I am using the old particle system because the geometry nodes still feel too confusing, and apparently they can't be animated.

He moves!! Holy wow, this was a LOT of work. I've been attempting things that I am 80% capable of doing; familiar enough that I'm not struggling the whole time, but with a good amount of challenge along the way. I'd say I had a solid handle on maybe 30% of what it took to pull this off. I haven't used Rigify much on account of the complexity, but that complexity is exactly what's needed to ease some of the manual effort of animating. Further, I have not once set up a face rig. Not only did I have to get into the mechanics of Rigify (those airplane ears? Those are a custom setup), but I had to learn how to use it too.

It is with great misfortune that I realized my mesh doesn't have the right topology for good deformations. Here I was all worried about the face when it was those quadruped shoulder and hip joints where my topology falls short. I have two options: press ahead with corrective shape keys and counter-animation, or take 8 steps backward and retopologize. Honestly, I will probably animate a few sequences and see how the model moves--especially with a fur particle system to cover some flaws.

By the way, check out this rig! It come with so many neat features like IK/FK switching on the limbs and a full bendy-bone network on the face. I added dilating eyes and retractable claws

Here's Wipples! Or at least, the first version of Wipples. I haven't done facial animation before, so I may need to modify that face mesh depending on how well it deforms. As you can see, it's quite dense! Additionally, the whole model may be too bulky and shapeless once I add fur particles, so he may get slimmed down and sculpted some more.

As usual, process below the cut!