Animation and Lighting (Wonder Bebil Mom)



Ah hah, here is the short and sweet of it: the animation I created using Blender.
I posted a larger animatic on YouTube (https://youtu.be/KZH1o1lL924), but you don’t need to see that to critique me.

Hi all. I’m back from the dead. And trying to learn this stuff better.

This is an old model I made for a 2D → 3D artsy kind of thing, and I’ve dusted it off to (re)learn Blender and hopefully gain some skill. Specifically:

Lighting

The background is an HDRI y’all might very well recognize from free online sources. I believe I set it up properly (as an HDR in the World node), but had to add a few emitters to help light my model correctly. I know that physical productions in the real world need to do this. Is it normal to have to do the same in Blender? (I am absolutely fine — happy even — if it is.)

I realize the lighting is a bit dim, too… but I’m looking for realism (with my cartoony character, heh), and the HDR room is kind of dim — I wouldn’t expect glamor shot lighting in that.

Still, I know I can improve a lot. Is there any specific thing I should be aware of to improve my lighting? I’m using Cycles and Filmic, BTW.

Rigging

I designed my own rig for this one — uses IK for hands and feet. I’ve used what I could learn online as the most correct way (which really hasn’t changed for some years now) to set up a foot rig. Notice how her left knee “snaps” when her hips pull her foot away from the target bone?

I often find that legs need to be animated near their extremes and have found it very difficult to keep this from happening outside of keyed positions. And trying to google this has just gotten me frustrated (with an ocean of detrius that takes me down a rabbit hole that ultimately leads elsewhere).

What do people do to combat this snapping motion?

Additionally
I find that the leg and knee tend to rotate the foot. So I added a bone to adjust the side-to-side roll of her foot. I could automate it to aim level with the foot target bone, just haven’t here, just keyed it like all the other control bones.

Again, what is the way people generally deal with this?

Cloth

I still haven’t figured out how to keep her hand from snagging her skirt.

  • The body = collision modifier
  • The skirt and apron below the tops of the hips and the sleeves = cloth modifier (slightly-modified cotton settings).

Is it possible to key the collision modifier off and on for just some specific vertex group(s)?

Other issues

I’m aware I forgot to set the bump on her skin to follow her geometry, and that the texture on the apron is wonky (wasn’t aiming to learn anything on that one, just slapped it on without a proper wrap session — I’m still learning nodes and spent my time adding freckles to the face).

Also, I’ve learned a lot about how to do cartoon eyes, but, alas, this model will not be updated to fix the problems. (For the curious, keep the eye as round a source object as possible, make the deform cage as non-eccentric as possible, and use some boolean operations to crop what should not appear outside of some very narrow limits.) So, not asking for advice on the eye geometry, really.

Please feel free to eat me alive. I admit I am, overall, pleased with the result, so be nice, but the whole point of dusting this model off was to learn what I can.

Alas, this was done in 2.79. 3.x came out while I was dinking with this (and I very much like the upgrade), but didn’t switch for this particular model and scene.

Thank you for your time!