Continuing from where we left off last time we are going to start working on the body which will be the beginning of the end of our rig.
Let's go through what the plan is here
We are going to create mesh deformers and assign parts and other deformers to them.
We are going to have a look at Body X and Y parameters (I won't be using Z) .
We will add a simple breathing animation.
We are going to prepare the model so that clothes can be exchanged in the future (aka we are going to rig the naked body and then rig the clothes on top of it separately).
Assign parts to deformers
Let's have a short recap on what we are about to do:
We are going to create a torso deformer which will function as the 'hub' of all other deformers of the entire model. You can see the Deformer structure here.
Now this model has a fairly simple body, as you can see, for now, there are no warp deformers on the arms, this might change as the body is starting to move. From what I can tell straight away is, that I will probably add warp deformers on the t-shirt sleeves.
Body X Parameter
The way I usually begin working on a body is just start deforming the torso deformer on the Body X parameter. You will see as you start deforming the torso, that the arms and legs will also be moving - the reason for that is because the rotation deformers are assigned to the torso deformer and as a result, these parts will also be affected by the deformation. Some as before, I will try to upload relevant screenshots here to visualize what I've been trying to put into words.
Breathing
Breathing is a fairly easy story, however, as a free version user, you have to plan this ahead. Generally breathing is done with the 'Breath' parameter. This parameter has been programmed to have a pendulum animation on it, going from left to right and slowing down at the very end of both sides.
So the idea is that you are going to lift the chest up on the one side and have it in the default position on the other side. The reason why I've mentioned that a free version user needs to plan ahead is to think about whether they want to have this animation on the torso part, or any deformer, due to the restriction that each part or deformer can only be linked to 1 parameter at a time.
In my case for this specific model, I've decided to do the animations directly on the parts, namely the torso part and the undershirt part. I drew a path on both on these parts and dragged up the middle points up a bit for the inhaling motion, and the default state serves as the exhaling state.
Since this is done on the parts, it should translate fairly clean to other poses, where the deformers were used for the deformation.
Since I am using the free version of Live2D here, that's pretty much the only option I had since I'm only using 1 torso deformer as the 'hub' for the model.
Body Y Parameter
Now the Body Y parameter I usually keep things fairly simple. What I will do sometimes is that I do something with the arms, so that the model gets even more movements into it than it already does. Take a look at this example, where I've animated the left arm for each of the 9 possible positions.
And now in motion:
In the next entry we're going to talk about the Texture Atlas and exporting Live2D files so that they can be used in tracking softwares such as prprlive and Vtubestudio.