Heyaaaa floofs! <3
I hope all of you are doing well!! Been a hecky busy month for me, but I'm hanging in there!! ^w^

Here's a short little idle loop I created for animation practice, and to play around with some cute and silly fox emotions. Such a goofy, spazzy floofer. :}}


I'm also using this animation to promote a black friday discount thing on Twitter/X! :O

This weekend I'm planning to upgrade this low-rez video game fox to a lovely cinematic one by the artist VFX Grace. The new fox has a professional animation rig, lots of moving body parts, and detailed fur! :O


If you want to help me upgrade, go Like this tweet on Twitter/X before Nov 24th!

https://twitter.com/VixelFox/status/1727184047770669104

If I reach 51 likes, each like will give about 50 cents discount toward the upgraded fox!
Stretch goal is 181 likes! Lets gooooooo <3 And thanks for your help. ^w^


Here's a sneak peek at the new model. I CAN'T WAIT to animate stuff with it! :O

https://www.vfxgrace.com/product/red-fox-animation-vfx-grace/ 

Boop you soon! <3

3d clothing proved to be surprisingly tricky in that fox treadmill animation from my previous post! :O

The biggest issue was something known as "Poke Through". This is where 3d clothes don't perfectly fit and the character model becomes visible underneath.

Pokethrough usually shows up when the character starts moving and the clothes try to follow and deform to the motion. It's a common problem for game engines or 3d tools like Daz Studio that try to support an interchangeable wardrobe that fits a base character.

Why does it happen?

Clothes are weight-painted to deform exactly the same amounts as the character. The exact same character rig moves the clothes the same distances as the character. But somehow, pokethrough still happens! :O

Take a look at how much geometry there is for the clothing, compared to the character. (The clothing is much more dense.)

Turns out, the deformation math produces a different outcome for the character and her clothing, since all the vertexes start in different places. There's no way to weight paint it to work for all poses. Sometimes it'll overshoot, sometimes it'll undershoot.


How can we fix it?

My first idea was to fix it with masks. I can select a group of vertices and add a Mask modifier to show or hide them depending on if they're covered with clothing. This leaves a physical hole in the character model - there's *no* geometry visible underneath clothes.

This approach improves pokethrough for some poses, but not *all* poses. When the character moves, you can sometimes see right through her! Or else, pokethrough still happens at the edge of the mask where character and clothing geometry intersect.

A better way to fix it is to use the sculpt tool to inflate the clothing slightly. Then it's technically lifted off her body, but it's hard to tell when zoomed out. I step through the animation frame-by-frame, and fix pokethrough on each frame.

Inflating the clothes is delicate, because it can introduce strange wrinkles or bulges, or make clothes appear to be floating around the character. Inflating too much quickly makes gym shorts look like a diaper, for instance. >w>

I haven't found a quick fix that works for extreme close ups. I figure I'll have to manually align the clothing verts to the character verts so their positions are precisely the same, and then inflate the middle areas of the clothing to move them off the body. I'll cross that bridge when I get there! ^.^

Heya floofs! Here's one more update this month - an animation I made for learning using the Reyna base + sculpts + generated animation rig from previous posts.

Also see the attached mp4 for a longer sequence with camera movement.

This project brought together a bunch of different topics I've been learning the last few months. There's lots of room to improve, but it served its purpose for learning!

There's some weirdness with her model in a few spots. Later I might revisit this to fix those areas, add fur and textures, and render in Cycles for true PBR lighting (this is Blender's Eevee renderer, which is basically realtime video game lighting).

I'll dive into some behind-the-scenes in future posts. See you in May! <3