2D 3D-Blender Sentient tentacle creature, feedback appreciated

Abuzze

Newbie
Oct 22, 2020
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31
"Recruitable" "sentient tentacle creature NPC for a RPGmaker h-game. 3D model for making pre-rendered 2D sprites. Please share your thoughts on what should be improved.

I'm currently learning how to create h-content in Blender on my own. Kinda slow, as there are no reliable guides for this stuff specifically. If you know of any online tutorials/materials, please share the link. Especially how to rig these damn flexible limbs.

Thank you!
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Saki_Sliz

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May 3, 2018
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That's pretty cool!

When it comes to making rigs for flexible limbs, there's a whole lot of 'it depends.' The two main ones are, 'how do you want to control the limb' and 'what kind of animation do you want to do.'

Moving the limb around to interact with objects, grab people, express emotion, is different from trying to get a tentacle to slide smoothly, such as when being used as a toy. For the most part, I wouldn't worry about trying to get a tentacle to slide around, since setting that up typically is dependent on what particular animation an artist is trying to achieve, so they have to customize it every time regardless.

So then the rig depends on your philosophy for how the limbs should move and be adjusted. Should they act like arms, with an elbow like bend that can be controlled to bend down or off to the side. Should the limbs act like they have N joints since technically it is just a tentacle that can move however it wants and not look like an arm. Should the limb squash and stretch? How should bending be handled, should the mid length area be large radius bends and look smooth, and the end of the tentical more crisp and sharp so that the animator can have it finely grab things?

I'd also maybe ask about a way to control different ways the limb behaves, but in my experimenting I haven't figured out a good way to do this, and I don't play with blender code enough to add more complex behaviors. I also haven't experimented much with manipulating curves and having curves manipulate limbs, but I know that there are a few techniques around the idea of having a tentacle fallow a curve.

If it were me, I'd try to combine 4 techniques:
  1. Have an IK control a 4 bone rig, to allow for bending and posing of the limb, with a manipulator rig at the end to allow for fine control of the tip.
  2. Use the 4 bone rig to manipulate and bend a curve to control how the limbs smoothly bend rather than looking to have 4 bones (this is the one I'm not sure how to do, idk if curves can even be manipulated by bones this way)
  3. Have a length control node that slides the limb across the curve, to allow the limb to slither or at least act soft and squishy (volume is preserved) by allowing it to move in and out of poses.
  4. And a control path for the IK to allow for temporal planning of animation paths, possibly with the control curve also be controlled by objects of interest (this way a target character can move and bounce around without having to animate the limb to follow, it will do this automatically while smoothing out its own bend paths)
If you wanted to look into this, simply learning about IK's and using curves to control bones is where I would start, beyond that, its just experimental and experience.

Beyond that, it looks like you have a good start with the idle animation, with the only improvement I could think of being 'secondary physics' to make the tentacles bob and swing a little out of sync and organically, but that may just be a style choice.
 
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Abuzze

Newbie
Oct 22, 2020
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Thanks a lot for the detailed breakdown. Pretty sure that is the most elaborate reply I've gotten ON THE INTERNET so far haha.
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Abuzze

Newbie
Oct 22, 2020
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(I'll have to test to see what you mean about the envelope limitation, but ideally, I'd want to lock a curve's 'node' to a character's hip or pelvis bone)
Can be done by first setting up a Hook ("Control points" - > hooks) to make the curve node follow an empty, I.e this empty will drive the node. The same empty can then be made to follow any bone by using the "Copy location" object constraint. This way, bone drives empty, empty drives curve node.

What you can do is make curves that control the target and poles, setting a curve node at each key frame's position
Ah, you mean using the Bezier curves as a "rail" for the IK target, the pole or if FK, entire bone using the "Follow Path" constraint?
 

Saki_Sliz

Well-Known Member
May 3, 2018
1,403
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Ah, you mean using the Bezier curves as a "rail" for the IK target, the pole or if FK, entire bone using the "Follow Path" constraint?
Yep, If I was animating a scene that's pretty much where I would start out ( assuming that the character rig was already finished for both the target and the tentacle character).

I hadn't heard of hooks before, so def something for me to explore. It sounds like a neat project, and it would probably be something I'd play around with if I wasn't already busy designing another character.

I can't think of much else to suggest, since things like shaders and limb size would be up to artist intent, even if they were just using the monster for a 2D reference after rendering (I'd probably animate on 2's and 3's to get it to feel like a drawing, with animating on 1's for faster movement).