Falcon Punch Ch.2: Shaders & Rigging

Welcome to an animation study of the iconic Falcon Punch!

For convenience we're cutting out the downtime but otherwise trying to (if sped up drastically) give a taste of what each step looks like start to finish to approach any animation goal in Blender! This comes with some review of tools used in addition to base Blender, as well as some opportunities to improve on the part of the artist.
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The original video ran 3.5hr, not counting the entirely skipped 1.5hr tangent trying to learn "wrinkle mapping" that yielded nothing but backtracking. With the ability to reuse the fake rim lighting, the shader half of this problem should be able to be cut down to all of 10 minutes (give up on painterly normals for this style, minimize fresnel, don't get lost in the color sauce and keep it cooking). ARP is not nearly as daunting as originally feared, so the apprehension and procrastination should also be cut out going forward! Finally, while skinning was a bad time, we've invested in the Voxel Heat Map add-on and will be testing out an improved skinning engine in the future! Estimated time for this step going forward is sub-1hr (for a base character! if we end up adding extra stuff to rig I'd give each stuff another 20 minute to the est).

Also, I forgot to say, but to weight paint with a rig:
1. make sure both the reference bones and control bones are visible
2. select the rig and then the mesh
3. go to weight paint
4. use alt-leftClick to select bones
4a. use controller bones to deform the mesh and identify the regions that aren't good
4b. select reference bones to select the vertex group you'll be needing to modify with the weight painting
5. repeat until it's fixed or you give up
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Follow us at
  / cut_teeth  
https://cara.app/cutteeth/all
  / cutteethstudio  
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0:00 Skipping Wrinkle Maps
0:58 Messing with painterly normals
2:14 The "Good Stuff" (Fake Rim Lighting)
3:23 Need New Eyes
3:58 Last Wrinkle Map Attempts
5:14 Procrastinating with Shaders
8:06 Auto-Rig-Pro
12:51 Time to skin
17:06 Odds and Ends
18:35 Outro
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Not affiliated with any of these fine folks, but here's links to stuff I've mentioned:
Wrinkle Mapping Tutorial (doesn't work as I implemented, but maybe you'll have better luck!):    • Easy Wrinkles in Blender  
Painterly Normal Shader Nodes Tutorial (wouldn't recommend for humanoids but hey, I did try):    • EASIEST Way to Make Painterly Animati...  
Fake Rim Lighting:    • Fake Rim Lighting [In Blender]  
Auto-Rig-Pro: https://www.lucky3d.fr/auto-rig-pro/d...