Update and BTS

  Hey everyone, just wanted to update and give a little behind the scenes on the Elsa/Anna BDSM animation. 

  Progress is coming along well; almost have all of the body animation done and then will move on to faces/lip-sync. This'll be the first animation with dialogue, which, if done right, will make the whole situation sexier and bring things to life (Miss Moonified will be providing the voices, so I have a feeling it will be done right!). There won't be a TON of dialogue, mind you (besides whimpers and moans, of course) but a few lines at the right time can do wonders. We're not making a short-film here, we're making S M U T. 

  I wanted to share an interesting technique I learned. I'm sure it's relatively common but I haven't personally come across it yet (to my own detriment). 

  Elsa will be doing the "Ice Cube Trick" on Anna's 'lil nipples, so we have two rigs, and we need to animate Elsa's hand as well as Anna's upper-body in reaction. My challenge was how to keep both the hand and the torso in the same position while animating them. 

  I added an empty and parented (using a child-of constraint) both Anna's torso and Elsa's hand to this empty. I then animated the empty instead of the rigs, which kept both character's respective objects moving in conjunction. 

  The issue that came up was getting Elsa's hand to move in a circular motion (to rub the ice-cube around Anna's nipple). I tried simple keyframing at first, but this proved rather jittery. I messed with the F-Curves, and while you can get a respectable result out of this, if you wanted to change/re-time the animation, you have to finagle with the f-curves every time (I'm trying to utilize f-curves more and more, as they truly are powerful, but for this particular segment I wanted to keep it as simple as possible). 

  The solution was to add another empty right around Elsa's wrist, parent that empty to the first empty (the one controlling Anna's upper torso), and then use another child-of constraint to parent Elsa's Hand-IK Controller to the new empty. 

  Besides, shapekeys, the only things being animated in this shot are the two empties. 

  Elsa's hand IK controller is in Quaternion rotation space, while the empty is in Euler. In Euler space, it's much easier to obtain smooth circular rotations, as you are dealing with the basic x-y-z axis as opposed to the mysterious fourth axis that quaternion rotation brings into the equation (I don't know exactly what quaternions are, only that they are dark magic and should never be questioned).  

  Hope that made sense! Feel free to ask for any clarifications on here or on Discord: discord.gg/MQzFh3M 

  Look out for an animated preview going up later this week (want to include the facial animation with it). After this project is done I'll work on the loop for January while voting commences for the next big animation. 

  Back to work!