April ProgBlog #2

Finally got all the stupid hair guides sorted and grouped, time for some expression testing!

Which also gives me a chance to fix weight maps.  The auto-weight mapping does a pretty decent job, but it's not perfect and touchups around the place are usually required (like for some insane reason half the innermost wing membrane was associated with the little finger why).

Also don't know when this thing came in

or what it even is but it has allowed me to apply the armature scale (I had to make the model and armature 100m tall for automatic weight mapping to work otherwise I kept hitting the dreaded bone heat map failed problem) without the model turning inside out.  This is good as it means I'll be able to link it this into another scene file now (as prior to being able to apply the scale, things were going very wrong when linking).  Even better, I tested applying the scale while the model was posed because why not, it's a test file anyway and it seems to have worked, which will hopefully save me repeating work I'd already done on the weight maps.

My biggest issue now is atrocious fps when the animation is playing back in the viewport.  Less than 1fps is just lame.  The only things I've been finding that are related has been that the code for the viewport is old and outdated and apparently being updated (when is another thing as it seems to be an ongoing issue over a few years) and the only solution seems to be to use low poly proxies or to buy a 3d app that can handle playing back a scene containing millions of polys.  Sigh.

I'll probably intersperse sculpting the next character while doing this.