Falcon Punch Ch.3: Faking Normals with Eevee

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 2hr, and a lot of it was figuring out how I wanted to use a mask -- and making several sculpting mistakes: the shin falcon was made very weirdly, and I kept the x-ray view on when I only needed to project the front-facing faces onto the UV map... From experience modifying these further, this process is sub-5 minutes in expectation going forward.

You need:
1 image texture to hold normals
1 image texture to hold a mask
AVersionOfReality's geo node setup for easy viewing & storing & transferring normals
the infinite wisdom to only uv unwrap the faces that matter
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Follow us at
  / cut_teeth  
https://cara.app/cutteeth/all
  / cutteethstudio  
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0:00 Shin Normals
3:34 Don't UV Map without knowing where to put it
4:12 Use a masking texture
5:12 Baking base normals
5:50 Abs Normals
7:18 Don't leave X-Ray view on when UV Project From View
7:36 Pecs Normals
9:33 Don't remesh and bool when the problem is X-Ray view
11:57 Outro
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Not affiliated with any of these fine folks, but here's links to stuff I've mentioned:
AVersionOfReality: https://www.aversionofreality.com/