I feel like posting this work here too. I feel like reddit is underappreciating this work, while at least I get some attention on artstation.
This was mainly built for use in personal projects, like quick videos for smartphone screens and maybe some skits in the future. Also mainly improving animation and rigging skills, since I want to move my main focus on a videogame in the future. And while those are high Resolution characters. I feel like animation is learnt best with someone you enjoy animating. And whilst the game I am planing in the future may be far more simplistic than those characters I am also realising a childhood dream of mine. Working on characters in the quality of animated movie studios like dreamworks.
Of course I also noticed the flaws in blender hair system. I used the new curve hairs and while it is an improvement over the old system the hair generation still leaves allot to be desired. Also the deform node is atrocious. I swear the fur would look so much more cuddly and soft if you don’t apply this modifier but we want to animate it. It is very clear that the hair system was mainly developed to make, well, hair, like human hair. And I guess it would need a big budget to improve this. Which could happen in the future with more studies adapting blender.
About the rig, I made a complete custom rig, meaning that I built up every bone and made all the IKs and FKs myself. I did so with the help of a course of course. But also with some experimentation and improvement. Like the arms use 4 bones instead of 2, but you could just animate it as if it only had 2. It improved the armtwists so you can easily avoid those nasty overtwistet joints, especially on the hand.
I also made heavy use of drivers, to drive shape-keys and made some built in animations like the shown breathing action and also some eye jitter. All adjustable. Most of them are scripted, some even with full python scripts.
The mass of hair is also a challenge for rendering, while rendering speeds are fairly high the building speeds are insanely slow also the ram usage is insane. If both characters share a scene they use up to 40gb of cpu ram and all of the 12gb vram I have. If you put to much other stuff in the scene some of the hair won’t render anymore or will be rendered just halfway.
It also uses bendy bones heavily, a feature I cannot use in games, I know, but I know other ways of archiving same affects, only with the facerig will be missed, probably gonna use shape-keys if needed in Videogames. But yeah it is a complete facerig with bendy bones which can stretch the mesh far beyond the limits what a real face should without looking brocken.
I could say allot more but maybe some of your have questions or want special insights and more pictures. Maybe not.