Hi everyoneee! I hope you are having an amazing week! for me this has been the most frustrating and harder week since I figured out how to do my first animation hahahah please read 'til the end this post to find out what's happening next! ( ´ ▽ ` )
This last Sunday at night I was scrolling through Twitter like any other day until I found out that there is a software program that could trace your movement from a video, it was late and I just saw for a couple of minutes but I got interested in it (っ˘ω˘ς )
Monday:
next day at Monday I started researching about it and got investigating a lot of different motion trace services until-
I found out about other 3D software's that makes animation more fluid by predicting what's the most natural pose for your character and applying better motion based on physics, there is also a wide and vast amount of programs that do this and I spent all the day researching about most of them ,their strong usage, their price and their compatibility with my current workflow inside Blender and that day I decided that Cascadeur is the best match for me so I decided to give it a try next day ٩(◕‿◕)۶
Tuesday:
Then I started testing their functions (at least the available ones in the demo trial) and got really interested by them, they are really cool and seem amazing to enhance the animations I want to make then I watched other fundamental tutorials to learn what common things can be done there and to get a bit used to the UI that is way different than the one I'm currently familiarized at Blender (¯▿¯)
Wednesday:
Then next day I began to try to import the blender character of Zhu Yuan inside it and well... (￣ヘ￣) ...
it didn't went any good, I spent all the day trying to find out why it was that broken, or if I got it imported with all the mesh the rig didn't responded at all no matter what I changed on the exporting, I looked a lot of troubleshooting videos and read forums in search for a solution but nothing worked that day (⇀‸↼‶)
Thursday
I started looking for more techniques but I had researched most of them so I started tweaking somethings by myself and sadly I didn't got anything new or better than the last result I got last day, but then I found a youtube video (with ony 3000 views WTF so underrated) and it tried a Blender Addon to convert the original rig to a "game ready" rig, without anything more that time to lose I gave it a try and after following more less the steps he made (cause the rig of our characters are different) I STUMBLE ONTO THIS RESULT୧((#Φ益Φ#))୨
It wasn't perfect yet BUT it was muuuuch better than the last result I got and that was only good news, so I spent more time trying to figure out how to give her back her face with hair and to fix her painfully broken belly that seemed like a missing bone in the rig, so after some tweaking I got this... (ಥ﹏ಥ)
IT WAS SO CLOSE WHY THE WAIST WAS TWISTED AGHHHHHHH ( ╥ω╥ ) then I got back to find out what was causing this weird twist deformation over her belly and after more troubleshooting time (I'm so tired somebody help me pls) I found a pivot and bone that was wrong and tried to fix it on the right position and...
IT FINALLY WORKED AND IT SEEMS THIS TIME IS COMPLETELY USABLE WITHOUT ANY BIG COMPROMISE LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! („ಡωಡ„)
And then I just started writing this update post because I have been dealing with painful broken rigs and troubleshooting to get Zhu Yuan imported and working inside Cascadeur so I can purchase a year license to be able to use the program (I need that license to export the animations I got there to use them on Blender in order to render the animation) (＃￣ω￣)
This means that I will start using Cascadeur to animate most of the actions of the characters from now on which will highly likely enhance their smooth movements resulting in a better animation for you all! I'm really excited to start adding Cascadeur to my workflow and give you all better animations on the next works! that's why I wanted you to read the post, to be informed on what I have been into and what this means for the future of my animations!(・`ω´・)
Without much more to say, I have to still do a lot of work to Zhu Yuan and I have to do this exact same procedure to all of the characters I want to animate so this weekend we won't have yet an animation motion update, I have to set all up for this new and promising new workflow, thank you so much for your support and for reading my painful update, I'm really tired of all this test and error over importing the character (╥﹏╥)
Have a nice day, see you all if not this weekend, the next mid week! love y'all (´ ε ` )♡