In parallel to this and the last cycle, I spent some time setting up and beginning development on Blythe: the female variant Lapsa base model. Still very, very early but I'm hoping it'll save time to be more cognizant of the model's proportions from the start.

The model using the same topology and skeleton and I will be making changes and adjustments as I go along. To illustrate this, I have used Blue for the portions that have changed to be like Blythe in shape (and in the case of the breasts, topologically) while the red portions remain from Rederick. Except for the eyes. The eyes are red, but they are Blythe's :P

As you can see, I started with the torso, figuring it would be easier than the face but still one of the most distinctive and challenging areas. And challenging it is! The breasts have already seen significant topological changes. The whole upper torso area, along with the shoulders, is really one of the more fragile areas and isn't very good with shape changes, even minor ones. The delicate balance has been shattered by the radical changes required by the female form. It's going to take a lot of work to make it deform well, but I've begun to take steps in that direction.

The goal is to minimize the impact of the changes on compatibility. If I can keep skeletal changes to no more than leaf/end nodes on existing joints, I can reuse the same scripts and poses between both the male and female models with only minimal adjustments. For example, the spine at the rib cage has rib bones jutting off them. In adding joints to rig the breasts, I either need to have a individual leaf nodes off the spine (like an additional rib on both sides) or a single bone off each the rib joints. So far, I'm going with the latter. Since my scripts don't keep positions of leaf nodes (as they are usually helper joints meant not to move) the script will only add the rib nodes when looking to save the skeleton. Since the male model has the rib joints (but not the breast leaf node helper joint) it will be fine. I will need to save joint-based breast motions separately, but that's not much of a concern to me. I'm hoping to come up with something better for doing breast placement, than manually adjusting joints.