I’m not expecting hand-holding, I’d just love to be pointed in the right general direction.
So, this is a kind of general and vague question, but it’s a general and vague problem, and my attempts to google have been so useless that I’m sure I’m not even asking it the right questions.
Most types of characters (barring robots, crabs, or whatever) are primarily made of soft tissue, which should deform or “be squished” somewhat when it touches something else, whether that’s feet on the ground, a bottom when sitting, hand on hip, or even just picking up and holding something.
So far I’ve only been able to come up with a couple of “solutions” to this:
tweak the pose in agonizing detail until the character’s skin is floating just above the surface it is touching and looks weird
tweak the pose in agonizing detail until the character’s skin is just slightly clipping through the surface it is touching and looks weird
XD
The only other thing I can think of is using corrective shape keys for every instance of touching anything, though I’m still not sure how to effectively MAKE them for that sort of use.
Am I missing something, or is this just How Things Are?
We fake it. Squash and Stretch. There are some actual studies in universities on how to implement this such as skin micro compression and expansions, but generally, you can use armature squash and stretch. If you dare to try it, sometimes soft bodies will work on a portion of a character, but I never have had success on using it all over the body. You could use blend shapes using shape keys if you need a specific action such as a depression in a cheek when someone sticks a finger in it. Here is an older research position from last year on a similar thing you are asking about. http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/13/9146947/animation-human-siggraph-2015 , but as of now the math is insanely complex to even begin putting it in a single animation product. Blender has done a nice job as has Maya and of course Disney has further advanced the effort. But for everyday animation, we still have the old squash and stretch.
I was afraid that would be the answer. The physics behind this sort of thing is wickedly complicated.
As far as “faking it”, I don’t suppose you know of any tutorials/discussions of doing that sort of thing? I can play with sculpting and shape keys, but it seems to always be a good idea to see how people with experience do these things first.
Like I said, I’m not even sure what terms to google, so I haven’t had much luck searching. Combining things like “blender character flesh deform under pressure” gets me nothing useful, and more hits like “person injured by exploding blender” than actual rendering results XD
So here is a question… I am given to understand that the “correct” workflow usually involves making and rigging a model, and then linking to that model in a new blender file for actual animation and rendering. However, if I do that, then I don’t have the ability to modify the mesh while animating, making using corrective shape keys and similar impossible. What is the correct way to deal with this?
Add a driver on your shape key and add a bone to your rig to be the driver for the shape key. Then when you link, you will have a bone movement that “drives” the shape key.
A lot of people set up a switchboard with the bones parented to the head bone so the switch board always faces the way the face is turned. You can google drivers and switchboards to get an idea. Good Luck! Taint easy!
Ah… so if you find something like “the character’s thumb looks off when I pose it just so in this scene” you go back to the original library file containing the model and add a shape-key there? Well, very little worth doing is easy. XD
Blender’s way of working with linked things (rigs, whatever) is broken but in the process of being fixed as we speak. Right now, best I can advise is to actually import the character into the animation scene. Yeah, I know… but… the only real downside as far as I know is the scene file size getting bigger with every character imported into it. It can stay manageable if you are careful with the number of increments you keep around.
