Greetings! Here is a short preview of my new 3D model: Strawberry Lemonade vX. Enjoy! This model is an update for Strawberry Lemonade v1.0.
This has been a huge update for Strawberry Lemonade, since she's been through so many experiments before the final product! In this post, I wanted share a few Blender experiments that I performed with Strawberry during the process. Enjoy!
Experiment 1 - One Interconnected Mesh
As an experiment, I decided to make her body mesh and clothing attached as one, interconnected object. This was to make rigging easier and less time-consuming. This method was significantly helpful when using Rigify's rigging add-on in Blender, because I noticed that Rigify couldn't recognize overlapping objects or meshes. One example was trying to rig her legs and her skirt. This method, however, may not always work: despite the legs being a whole mesh with the skirt, Rigify only rigged the legs but not the skirt. The only way for me to solve this problem is to manually weight the legs with the skirt or use the Armature Modifier. This brings me to my next experiment...
EXPERIMENT 2 - Armature Modifier
The Armature Modifier was a life saver! This method is extremely useful when you have hair, face features and clothing as separate objects and meshes. First, I rig my body mesh (which includes the head, arms, legs, torso and clothing) by applying automatic weights from my meta-rig to my mesh. Then, I apply the Armature Modifier to separate objects that were not rigged yet (such as the hair, face features and accessories). Then, in weight paint mode, I would apply the appropriate weight to the vertices of the mesh.
EXPERIMENT 3 - Hair Shapekeys
There are moments where applying physics to certain objects can be unnecessary. Strawberry has short polygon hair, so physics "bodies" are not necessary in this case. In addition, using physics would definitely take up most of my RAM, thus, slowing down my laptop. Instead, I create shape keys for hair. This method may make animating a little bit more tedious, since you need to manually create key frames whenever animating the hair. Using this method really depends on whether you would or wouldn't mind sacrificing your time manually animating hair. I think this method would only be best for those who made characters with low poly hair, lacks a nVidia graphics card (only applied to new versions of Blender). Since I use a laptop with a built in AMD graphics card, I can't change the graphics card to instruct Blender to use GPU instead of CPU.
I hope these methods and obeservations were usful to everyone! Thanks for reading, and happy modeling!