Queen Jinx Exclusive Update and Insight

  If you haven't seen the public preview yet, Click Here! 

  I've been in the tunnel for the past two weeks setting this monster up. The complexity of preparing and animating 5 characters in unison is a unique challenge that I can't say I was totally prepared for, but I've already learned a fair bit, and I'm finally at the point where I can truly dive into the deep waters of the animation, as all the setup and extra rigging is (mostly) done. 

  Let's dive into some behind-the-scenes stuff.

  Firstly, here's the animation set compared to the first render set, made when I was still sane, and not thinking about animating a scene with 5 rigs. 

  As you can tell, the set for the still-render is pretty low-quality, but since the characters were taking up 80% of the screen, it didn't matter much. An animation isn't so forgiving, so I had to make something higher-quality from scratch. 

  My favorite part of the set is these pillars; they really tie the room together. I used the screw modifier to add those nice spirals (👀) to them.

  This preview was the second render attempt done in the past few days; I think it might be interesting to share the first one, warts and all. 

  Click HERE to watch the first render attempt. 

  As you can tell, sub-par color/lighting, and all sorts of little glitches that only seem to reveal themselves in renders, rather than viewport-playback. With this first attempt on repeat, I got out my most valuable tools: pen and paper! After watching the blasted thing several dozen times, I compiled a list of the most pressing issues, in an extremely professional manner. 

  After fixing these issues I do another render; if things look good, we're off to the races (it's at this point I try and avoid being a perfectionist; there's still little things I can-and-might change in the current render, but at some point you have to accept that it'll never be perfect; you've gotta get it to a state of quality, and then release it). 

  The first 500 frames of an animation like this are always the most difficult, taking almost as long as the next few thousand. It's in this period you figure out the unique needs of your setup, and how you can simplify things. 

  Some examples; I knew I wasn't going to spend hours counter-animating Jinx's hair. The quick and dirty solution would be to hide them behind her body. Done! But, as in the render, I loved the visual of them draping over the KDA girls. 

  Of course, this isn't a render, these girls are going to move! So, how can I set the hair up? 

  I went down the root of the hair and un-parented every relevant bone. This made the hair strands act like a "curve", staying where I put them, unaffected by Jinx's head movement. 

  Then, I used a combination of "Child-Of" and "Damped-Track" constraints to attach the strands to the relevant parts of the KDA girls (Eve's torso, Ahri's elbows, and Seraph's shoulder). After spending some time fiddling with the influence values, we have an effect that should work with minimal manual clean-up.

  For Akali's nipple rub, we have a simple process. A curve is parented to Jinx's nipple bones (a custom addition of mine). An empty is attached to this curve using a "follow-path" constraint, and then the hand is attached to this empty using a "child-of" constraint. 

  If I might critique myself, I should've set the "influence" value of this constraint to something like 0.8 instead of 1.0, so that there's some "give" for the hand, rather than it being attached 100%. This is something I may re-render, but we'll see. Don't want to labor over every part of it, but I do want to make the mental note. 

  Finally, Click HERE to watch a viewport view, for no particular reason other than I think they're neat. 

  Back soon with a full exclusive preview and some goodies! I hope everyone is doing well.