Optimizations

The entirety of my productivity today wasn't spent on working on scenes for my next video. However, I won't go out sad and say that no substantial progress had been made. In fact, the progress that I ended up making might actually make my workflow moving forward a lot easier to handle, therefore making progress more fun. So what did I do exactly?

First, I realized that Duik Angela (the rigging plugin that I'm learning for this video) has a feature called "Extract Controllers." What this allows you to do is to rig a character while every part, from the skeleton to the actual image, is still within a pre-composition. Before, I would have to paste every part manually, which would result in an incredibly messy (and laggy) timeline. There were also a bunch of complications that came with this. The "Extract Controllers" feature solved all of the issues that I've had with the rig, albeit it did create a minor inconvenience in which parented objects now have to be entirely in front or back of the character.

As shown in the video, being able to manipulate a single pre-composition instead of multiple separate parts together wasn't the only epiphany that I had. I realized that I can utilize drop-down menus and expressions to alternate between poses. Prior to this, I've used a separate plugin called SF Caddy, which also happens to be the backbone behind my sprite animations. As versatile as the plugin is, since I'm gonna be manipulating a single precomp, that plugin, unfortunately, wouldn't cut it. As it turns out, however, controllers extracted from a precomp still retain their expressions and their links, which is perfect for myself. By placing drop-down menus and complementary expressions for controlling separate hand/eye poses within the controllers themselves, I was able to further optimize my workflow by keeping things more consolidated, therefore removing the necessity of constantly alternating between layers throughout the timeline, while also solving another issue involving blinking.

Knowing all of this, I will go back and touch up on that Clownpiece rig that I used in "Touhou but it's a Terrible Mobile Game Ad" for future videos now that I've learned new techniques on rigging characters. I might also touch up on that Cirno rig as well.