#headpuppet

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I FIXED HEADPUPPET FINALLY, for real this time! And guess what I can use it to do! Because the eyes on my gryphon head are constrained to the eyes on my invisible human head. If I gaze forwards while headpuppeting my gryphon head to the side… I CAN LOOK AT YOU OUT OF THE SIDE OF MY HEAD LIKE A BIRD

I crossed a bunch of stuff off my singlepage gryphon wip tracker list today! And applied for a job! I’m going to either focus on texture work tomorrow, or sculpting new blendshapes, or vore rigging!

I cannot WAIT to become able to yawp my head (snap my jaws) while puppeting it, and to have a chair collider appear in my mouth on yawp, and to try to set it up so that I hold onto people somehow if they get in it.

The only problem is that stations in VRChat are still super cursed, and the default behavior is to seat people by their TOES (not their Hips). It seems unfun and disorienting to get people by their ankles and swallow them feet-first. But no, on second thought that actually sounds amazing. I can enable a physbone once they’re in the seat so I can swing them prior to the swallow cue... I swear I’m not into vore, I just love attention.

[always-is-music-to-my-ears-blog]

headpuppet started following you

Thank you so much! :D

I've been stuck in the 60's for so long, and I've been wanting to hit 70 Followers for a while now.  Thank you for making it possible!

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Blar, the hand thing doesn’t work in-game, only in the emulator. I know LaserRaptor got a variant working in-game though. I’ll have to catch up with him.

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ok I refuse to work on the outside of the gryphon. Time for vore chair.

I’m going to put a chair in my mouth, disabled by default. When I enter headpuppet mode AND grip trigger strength engages so I yawp, I enable the chair. The chair has an animation controller that’s just a tpose, but modified so the shins are fully contracted, putting the heels right in the butt (there’s offset fuckery in station animations involving the distance between the hips and toes). The chair is positioned so the center of it is in the center of the mouth, and the transform it’s on is half parent constrained to top jaw and half to bottom jaw.

This parent constraint has additional Sources to two more (three more?) target transforms placed in the neck, so it can smoothly move itself along to each of them in turn. This is triggered, for now, by releasing the trigger grip (closing the mouth). At that time an animation plays that moves the chair and plays a series of swallowing blendshapes I already have. The chair then stays in the crop target with that blendshape active until the uhhhh hmm I’ll need a Contact to tell if somebody’s in the chair. Well when the person leaves the chair, it disables itself.

Ohhhh… maybe if I engage headpuppet again I hork them back up… yessssss

I kinda wanna add something that people can grab to prevent swallowing; maybe just an invisible physbone on my beak top jaw, kind of shaped like it. But I’m not sure what a desktop player would be able to see to click on, if anything. They’re the only ones who play station animations correctly without extensive cooperation (“Yeah, you need to get back into the middle of your playspace—”) so they’re the only ones that could be meaningfully eaten. … I think you can detect VRMode in a station animation controller; perhaps I’ll give desktop players some sort of Mixamo struggle animation for their upper bodies…

It’s just gonna be a clipping mess but stations and constraints are so FUN. I want to grab desktop players and swallow them and then hork them up, to general acclaim!!!!!

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In threepoint crouch mode, the new foreleg logic must be disabled (lol) . (if you spread your hands rn, your forelegs drop out of handfollowing mode to hang loosely, while your hindlegs and wings keep following your hands… so you dopily do the splits, behind).

In threepoint mode with openflight compatibility enabled, the right foreleg doesn’t lift on rockout (it still does when both hands do rockout).

In threepoint mode with openflight compatibility enabled, jumping makes you size back up.

In threepoint mode, the headpuppet function doesn’t silence the left front leg. It really ought to, but this means moving the silencing layer further down, and retargeting the layer weight driver to account for it

Wings still aren’t flapping at idle and idk whyyyyyyyy, I can’t test it in emulator bcs it’s hands distance apart based and none of my anims have enough hands togetherness -_- ok uh guess I need to find mixamo:prayfor or something

[manyblinkinglights]

TO DO

Add additional FX layer to convert Upright to StandingBOOL (and stop doing it on the Base/Locomotion layer, which fullbody users can disable).

move headpuppet controls and contraptions etc to the RIGHT hand rather than the LEFT one (left hand is locomotion for almost everybody; as it is, you can’t puppeteer your head and run around at the same time).

Move the viewpoint to the most compatible possible position (centered precisely above the Head bone pivot), and test moving it up and down until the elbows stop twisting so badly.

Got that, future mbl?

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Got the paint file up, did final readjustment of the duck face, added face radial to top level of menu (and confirmed that the fingergun smiles will stack acceptably with it, and thus do not need to be silenced while it is active), fixed headpuppet on the wingless variant and OpenFlight jitter across both gryphons today. Tried to add translation correction to the wing corrective blendshapes and FAILED! Gave up; not worth it! They’re fine. Also, I’m not having much of an art day so some future mbl will have to actually paint this thing.

The wingless one still has hind toe issues maybe. Uncertain.

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I think I can adjust the existing wing corrective blendshapes to also fix feather translation.

Longterm is make editable layers and pattern masks, and more bird species blendshapes

and a Medium wingless variant

and a talons-behind variant with attendant dragon tail blendshape

and an alt muscular heightmap/aobake/normalmap

and a gravid blendshape (waffling on this one because I don’t want people thinking of it as the fuckgryphon, but I had someone ask) (and I don’t want it added, like, badly)

and an edit to Morghus’ free dragon wings to duct tape them to the hypothetical wingless dragontail talonsbehind model.

And then a dragon face for it, in a Windstone Editions honoring way.

And somewhere in there, an IK Assist verson, that does IK on the foreleg pickup and headpuppet modes. I simply will not ever do any more IK than that on a model.

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threepoint mode’s offset for TrailerHitch needs to scoot up the Chest a bit to keep viewpoint shared with the avatar while bent forward

A hint for why I’m not flapping in idle: my silenced left wing (forcibly set to animated Sources) flaps in idle, though maybe at only half-strength(?), while headpuppet is enabled. So my wings are in an inappropriate CONSTRAINT state, somewhere else. (My animated Source behavior is fine).

Moving the silencing layer down and attempting to override the left front leg to poseclone mode hasn’t “taken,” I’m assuming bcs I haven’t actually updated that layer to reflect the fix I imagined.

Being grabbed from threepoint mode should keep you tiny…

Your hindlegs should somehow still act like your thighs in crouched threepoint????

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Tomorrow is TEXTURE WORK and RE-UVING MY FEATHERS which is also, texture work, because right now they’re all the Same Feather, and I need to individuate them across like, my audiolink map, my roughness map, and my diffuse map. And my fur groom map but that’s incidental (feathers all have no fur). Ideally all in one multilayer Krita pass

Headpuppet is fixed for everything except tweaking the elbow angle; I’ll need to (gag) give it its own Contact system for elbow angle. Or POSSIBLY I can adjust the forefoot pickup system to be more accurately capturing elbow angle. (An apparently somewhat shitty proxy for elbow angle is currently driving neck extension and retraction, as well as forefoot pickup).

I have yawp in on right trigger grip strength. It is indeed amazing. And I can finally preen myself and others… I also have ruff fluffing and slicking in, on hands-distance-apart, like before.

There’s gonna be another big combined Unity push for fur and feather based momentum responses. If possible, I want to be sort of vaguely wind ruffled while in flight (fur shader’s Wind section, my blendshape that ruffles my procedural feathers on my subdermal feather mesh), but I also want to redo this other whole-avatar fur momentum response the fur shader comes with, and change it so it’s masked to just the local momentum of my tailtip. I want just my tail poof to swish through the air. Luxuriously…

VRC stations are more cursed than I anticipated. They position the player based on their Hips at first, but then apply an offset of the player’s hip-to-toe distance IN THE STATION ANIMATION. Without adding an unwieldy stupid Contact system to try to guess at people’s sizes, the least offset pose my mouth station could have is. like. fetal. Or at least kneeling up very folded. Which I GUESS maybe works? Like then ppl could be in my mouth up to their waists? That’s like way more vore than I want though that’s like scary, I just want to lightheartedly yet disconcertingly pick people up like… regular…

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Okay now that vrchat has magically fixed the in-flight jitter (while causing me several other problems), I just need to amp up my angle of attack as driven by VelocityY, and flight will be, broadly, passable.

Still some clipping on twist(?), especially in the secondaries. The ones towards the pinky need to raise, the ones towards the index need to lower(?).

Headpuppet is working, but I think I need to drive it off elbow _Angle to get the effect I want.

One zillion things remain undone but my immediate priority is texturing it so I like to look at it. I’m just gonna do Windstone Editions black with sunset trim, yellow beak and talons. Easy, flats only no gradients final destination.

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My MomentumX and MomentumXZ physbones, which I’ve fallen back to using (direct children of my avatar’s root, with smoothed parameters), had some additional jitter ameliorated by 1) making them bigger and 2) switching from a hinge angle limit to a polar hinge angle limit, permitting 10 degrees yaw. I figured if it neeeeeeded to jitter due to extreme forces, if it had that extra yaw room, it might jitter around in a way that kept the reported _Angle value more constant… I think it did help.

So I can change the wing momentum physbones to do this too.

I already tried making them stiffer, but this somehow made the jittering/flickering problem more apparent. :/

Bar fixing remaining jitter, flight is done.

Unity-side todos remaining: using the script to update all my custom poses, reworking animation controller logic to treat supine as an emergency exit for when and while the player rolls over too far, FIGURING OUT WHY THE ANTI ACCORDION FIXIT HAS STOPPED WORKING, seeing if I can adjust talon logic on forefoot pickup to fist them if you make the fist gesture after having made the rockout gesture to pick them up (before allowing your hand to pass through neutral, which sets them down again). Adding L/R “balancing” tail windmill on strafe. Fixing headpuppet. Adding the vore chair and swallow contacts/logic (chair in mouth, chair stays in mouth unless it detects Head and Hips in some small radius and infers a sufficiently small seated party, then if conditions are met, it reconstrains itself down into the crop). Headpuppet mode needs additional gesture support for snapping jaws/open jaws AND a viseme damper, which I THINK is possible. I want to be able to pull my head into headpuppet mode and properly interact with the world and other players with it…

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Fun stuff I am going to add: a damped, following position constraint, so I have a fallback “Am I moving quickly?” metric for situations in which VelocityZ and physbones fail (Stage Flight’s openflight implementation). When I’m flying quickly, I’m going to wiggle my feathers in the breeze (possibly), as well as swing my neck forward, make it head-following, and go into a custom flight pose. This will feel like riding the gryphon rather than being it, but whatever.

I need to disable the weird hands apart autoflap—autoflap is for jumping only. If you’re flying on purpose in this avatar, your wings go like your arms. Wait no. It should go on a toggle…

I’m going to add neck contraction and extension to headpuppet! :D

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Got visemes in today, speech and JPN MMD. I have a bit of a rubbery muppet face going on, but I’m going to let it rest (I articulated the top and bottom beak). I’ll need to go over the face again with some sort of reference texture on it to make sure it’s all right.

I added wing thumbclaws, baby hoatzin style, to tide me over my plucked chicken era.

I tested headpuppet, it feels GREAT.

Tomorrow I put wiggle bones in the ears, fix the tail postures (they all got overwritten with the same one), and implement the secondary pair of invisible reference legs, which I will use to clamp the constraint response weights against leg contraction. I trialled this on a test biped avatar, it works great; should cure my legs of ever folding up too far. I’ll then also use its reporter value to drive a talon clasp animation, fisting them up as my legs contract.

As part of the talons, I’ll rig in hindclaws, and set them up to extend versus hands-apart. I’ll need to blendshape the hind toes as well, presumably.

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I am within a sniff’s distance of being finished. Once I have the function that allows in-Inspector poseclone animation setting, literally all that’ll be left is calculating the poseclone’s offset transforms, and adding the flight collider, and a button to focus your chair so you can fix it, and then actual animation controller work. And adding the grabtarget phys bone handling stuff (local grab headpuppet, remote grab whole-avatar pickup).

And UI walking you through every custom project pose (regular worldspaced project poses, whole avatar pickup poses, specialhitch poses (basically just side lie and dynamic sit)). (and possibly custom flight poses, if I add the pounce and zoom for everybody).

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WAIT. I can make handpuppet mode trigger on PHYS BONE GRAB. you grab a physbone on yourself (fist gesture) and that actually iirc gives you a reported STRETCH PARAMETER. So—omg. So NOW when YOU grab your GrabTarget chest physbone, I can make it turn on headpuppet mode once you stretch it out!!!!!