This is my second, successful sculpting and (ongoing) rigging of an entire character (the first having been the owl whose animation I published here) in Blender 3.6.22. This character, a hybrid (chimæric) being with lion head and serpent/snake body, is meant as a symbolic/mythical portrayal of the Gnostic entity known as Yaldabaoth/Yaodabaoth.
I started sculpting this character 6 days ago. Once the rigging is ready, I intend to release this specific character to the Public Domain (CC0).
The animation, render pictures and screenshots can be found at the end of this post. Most of the behind-the-scenes from my (over-engineered) artistic pipeline are disclosed below in collapsible accordion (to try and keep this post well-organized), if you want to know more about how I built this from scratch.
Feedback is appreciated!
Detailed behind-the-scenes
Sculpting
I used the grand-old "UV Sphere" as a clay for giving shape to his initial body, a cylinder for a teeth which got further replicated and became part of an entire upper dental arch (the bottom dental arch is merely a down-scaled, vertically-mirrored clone of the upper one), another UV Sphere for his bifurcated tongue, and a non-sculpted UV Sphere for his eyeballs (which I specifically edited so to add internal irises, cornea, sclera, tapetum lucidum and actual pupil dilation mechanics through Shape Keys).For his body, I also sculpted an oral cavity, teeth gums, inner cheeks and a throat/esophagus, mostly for the sake of it.
For the entire sculpting process, I used no image references directly; rather, I looked at a Wikipedia photo of a lion to visually derive an approximate lion shape (similarly to how I sculpted the owl by using one PC screen with a specific Macaulay Library photo and another with Blender in Sculpt Mode).
The mesh and its topology were cleaned up and symmetrized with an adequate distribution of different Dyntropo densities (low-poly tail and spine; medium-poly head; high-poly facial features, oral cavity and teeth).
Texturing
For the eyeballs, I was initially usng a similar procedural material I made for my owl, but then I decided doing a hand-drawn texture using Texture Paint (with some post-editing in GIMP Editor) due to how both eyes are expected to be different (avian eyes vs feline eyes).Both the feline skin and the ophidian hide are a composition between a baked Voronoi image texture (rather than using the Blender's Voronoi Texture due to performance constraints; also because this specific Voronoi texture was designed as perfectly symmetrical so it can be tiled; it's also a repurposed texture from other models/assets I made) and a baked noise image texture.
UV Mapping
Because his body was originally sculpted as an S-shaped cylinder, and because the "Cylinder projection" operator doesn't work as properly with deformed cylinders as it would for straight cylinders, I had to create a proto-armature based on a Zhang-Suen skeletonization/thinning of the body's silhouette seen in orthogonal profile, then I used Python to rotate all bones into a straight line orientation, this way deforming a copy of the mesh into an almost perfect cylinder, then I proceeded with "Cylinder Projection" operator, generating an UV Map which I then transferred to the originally sculpted mesh (it was a perfect, 1-to-1 UV Map transfer).I did neither clip nor scaled it to the texture bounds, because keeping it beyond the normalized boundaries allows for determining, using the position across the vertical axis, where to blend between feline skin or ophidian hide along the body length.
Capillarization
I guess this is one of the least over-engineered steps from my entire creation pipeline, pretty straightforward. I used two different Hair Particle Systems, one for his mane and another for facial hair (eyebrows, beard, mustache and ears), each with different materials and different settings.I also made two different vertex groups for each of them, as the fur is not meant to be scattered throughout his body (the serpent part is meant to be fur-less, but the feline part is meant to have a thick mane).
Creation of a custom metarig
For this specific character, I had to make a custom metarig. I got to finally understand how Rigify metarigs are supposed to work (Feature Sets, Rigify Rig Type for bones, Rigify Layers, etc), then I made my own metarig from scratch, first adding a spines.basic_spine, then attaching a spines.basic_tail at the end of it, then extruding the tail bones multiple times and adjusting the bones to my earlier Zhang-Suen skeletonization (which I then used as a reference image), then editing the basic_tail so it can be rotated in all axes (originally, basic_tail chains are constrained to a single axis).I also managed to literally isolate and extract the face of the Cat Metarig, then merging/stitching it into my custom metarig, like a Frankenstein of sorts. The result is a limbless rig, meant for serpents, but with a full feline face.
Despite this stitching between metarigs, the Generate Rig was successful and a fully-functional rig was made.
Rigging
And this is where I currently am, trying to improve things for this character’s rig.
The head, torso, chest, spine and tail are deforming the mesh flawlessly (partly thanks to the skeletonization I mentioned in UV Mapping, a skeletonization of which accurately determined where the bones were supposed to go for this specific sculpture).
As for the face, the tongue is also pretty functional after I manually edited the automatic weights so to make it slightly fixed at the back of his esophagus while simultaneously following the tongue bones, and I also had to remove the automatic weights Blender assigned for lip bones (because the tongue isn’t supposed to follow the lips).
But there are some issues regarding specific facial movements:
- When the jaw opens, the teeth bone quite of “sinks” inside the teeth gum, especially the lower dental arch. Because the dental arches are attached (via “Parent”) to the respective
teeth.?bones (teeth.Uandteeth.B), the lower dental arch also “sinks” with theteeth.Bbone. - When moving the bones for brows, but especially the upper brow bones, a horn-like protuberance appears in the forehead while there’s some sort of “seesaw” going on in this part of the mesh (i.e. when the eyebrow moves upward, part of the forehead moves downward, and vice-versa. They’re okay while in their original (rest) positions.
- Eyelids, as well as eye movement (i.e. the “eyes” IK bone), tend to deform the corners of the eyes in a strange manner (as seen in the initial frames of the animation when Yaldabaoth performs a few sideways glances). They’re also okay while in rest position.
Other parts of the face, such as the ears, and to certain extent the cheeks, are working fine.
Curiously, I didn’t exactly “face” (pun intended) these problems back when I rigged my owl, but then the face rig from the Bird Metarig (which I used for the owl) doesn’t seem as complex as the one I extracted from Cat Metarig (and also, because I used Shape Keys for the owl’s grumpy and blinking expressions).
I guess it’s far from just incorrect weighting, it also seems to involve the position of the original bones in relation to the sculpture. I’ll likely have to do fine adjustments to these bones from within the metarig and regenerate the rig.
Animation
This animation was mostly a quick test, both for showcasing the current state of the rigging (including face and tail movements), as well as for me to better diagnose what and how much I should fix in the rigging. It’s a quite “simple” animation placing Yaldabaoth amidst the cosmic waters before the earliest sunrise.
