Canned motion test

After basically having the model done-- spent a lot of time on weights and physics the last couple of days-- it was time for my very first canned motion test.

I was a little terrified.  It's not bad though.  There was a bad angle on the neck, which I'm going to blame on the motion (60 degrees Y on the neck and only 20 degrees Y on the head; after splitting it more evenly, it looked fine.)  I might do a little bit of weight tuning, but I think in general it's working.

Some leg peek through that I can handle.  I think.  Thicker dress plates ought to do it, at least for as low as they're happening.  Hard to find good starting poses due to physics; that skirt is awfully tight to the body.  But once you start from a working pose, it mostly stays where it should.

Sleeves are another matter.  Motions aren't built for big physical sleeves.  I'll redo physics, go crazy on the joint count, and see if that helps.  If I can get away with really, really floppy cloth, it might work.

Hair physics are too tight right now, but that's fixable, I think.  You can't notice it, but I actually went ahead and made the center wrap a physical object as well, just so that I could get reasonable looking distortion (it will squish, but not stretch like it was glued to her skin).  And it actually worked okay!  Leaves me with ugly texture scorches where I used an ambient occlusion bake as a burn layer on the texture, but I can fix that.

Oh, and I did something cool with the sleeves, something I tried before but screwed up.  I'm using a IK bone on the sleeves' elbow rather than using the arm twist bones, so that the sleeve should slide over the arm when it twists, rather than twisting with it.  It just orients the kimono elbow at the hand to bypass all twists and get the right angle started for the physics (do not want to make a sleeve that can handle an elbow bend, I did a test and that's a nightmare).  I have my doubts, this kind of stuff has bit me in the past, but so far, it's working.

So... redoing and tuning physics.  Then I'll check my morphs, check for any improvement from SDEF, maybe get some autoluminous codes on the decals, clean up the bones (visibility, move, display panel), all those little detail things that are pretty mindless, hard to screw up.

Except part of the plan here is distribution with custom effect files too, and those are in a pretty questionable state, so maybe I'll spend a day or two on that.  Which will be cool.  Hopefully it won't reveal how awful all my normals are.  Once it's really beautiful, I'll know, because I'll start a few pose tests and get lost in posing.

Edit: Oh, it's the end of Womanizer.  Great motion, probably my fave.