Hi there people!
As there is no introduction thread and this is my first thread to start, I’d also like to take the time and introduce myself: I am a student of Games Engineering, so most of the time I do programming tasks like GameLogic (AI, UI, Interfaces, etc), but in my spare time I’m more of an artist. Coming from 2D, both traditional and digital art, I discovered Blender over a year ago and started using it along with DAZ3D and 3DsMax (for those who don’t know: There is a free student version for 3ds Max). However, I decided to stick with Blender. Maybe I will talk about that in another thread
Anyway, let’s jump to the topic:
After watching tons of educational videos, I decided to jump into it and started with modelling and simple animations in Blender. Everything was fine, until I started doing animations like a Roundhouse Kick. First of all, there are almost no reference videos for that, so I actually had to practice one myself, and then the real fun started: All those joint deformations made the model look like it wasn’t even remotely human. I went with shape keys for specific joints, ending up with 26 shape keys for arms, shoulders, hips, legs, knees, etc. but I discovered that while the limbs in the human body influence each other (like a two way relationship), this was not the case in my model and those shape keys did not play together very well, and I ended up, adding specific shape keys for the animations. Now I have over 40 shape keys and I haven’t even started doing facial animations (which I probably won’t, because the model will be exported into Unity and it will be a compromise of realism and performance), and it just doesn’t seem right. My armature is so cluttered with bones, at times I can’t even see the pose itself
Is there a way around it? I have seen so called “muscle systems” for Blender, but one of them is essentially 10 times the amount of bones, and more bones is something I really can’t have
cheers,
Animal