How To Attach a Finger to a Wiggling, Writhing Body (in realtime)

  Thought I would share this useful technique I discovered while creating the Ashley and Ada Tickling project!

  Animating one character can be challenging; animating two even more so, but animating them interacting and touching one another can often devolve into keyframe-by-keyframe work, fixing intersections, errors, etc. Not fun, and not at all benefiting of a creative workflow (one minor change to the base animation requires you to go "upstream" and change everything else). 

  What's needed is a smart use of objects and constraints, to make the process as easy and automatic as possible. 

  Let's say you want a finger to stroke another character's firm tummy (😏). You may think using a "follow path" and a curve is the way to go (something I've done in the past), but with a few clever tweaks, we can have more freedom. 

  Step One: Add a plane object, go into edit mode, select all the vertices, hit "M" and select "Center". This will merge all the vertices into one. You now have an object that is simply one vertex (this makes it tricky to select in the viewport, so name it something appropriate so you can find and select it in the outliner). 

  Step Two: Bring this new vertex object to where you want the stroke to begin, and add a shrinkwrap modifier, selecting the character as the shrinkwrap target (in our case, Ashley). 

  Step Three: Set the 3D Cursor to this Vertex Object, and add a new empty. Name this empty "Finger Target." 

  Step Four: Pose and place the hand/finger of the other character (Ada, in our case), and parent the IK hand to the new empty. 

  Step Five: Animate the vertex object and, presto! The finger stays connected to the body! You can now slide this finger over the subject. This technique gives you a LOT more freedom than a traditional follow-path setup, and it looks a lot cleaner.

  As a bonus, you can animate the rotation of the empty, to give the hand some much needed sway (adds that realistic tough we're going for). 

  I love this new technique! Will keep exploring it as we do more tickling projects; there's definitely potential here to expand. Will keep you updated on what I find!

  I hope this was helpful! As a side note, I've been adding the audio from BordeauxBlack into the new project. I've usually cast Bordeaux as the dominate character in these BDSM projects, but having her as the submissive is such a treat! Really looking forward to showing you her range, and those deep, breathy laughs I didn't know she was capable of (my mistake). It's truly something special.

  Back soon. ♥️