Hey there, just a quick update this week since I don't have too much to show unfortunately.
Turns out animating a character sitting in a chair is way easier and faster than making her get up and walk...
Still, I managed to get about a minute of rough animation blocked out and I'm now at the point where I can finally start animating the good stuff :)
I had to spend most of the week troubleshooting and improving the character rig. I've played around making various funky rigs in the past but this project is the first real working test of them and I've learned a ton about goes into making rigs that are actually useful to animate with.
The method I mentioned in the post a couple of weeks ago about how I figured out to blend weight groups together has been very tricky to implement but I think I've refined it to a point where it can produce some really nice looking results. (see the first gif!)
I also managed to get working a geometry nodes based method of animating shape keys which allows me choose where shapekeys are calculated in the modifier stack but I probably should bore you with all that jazz lol
Thanks for reading (and for all your patience!)