Renamon Mark IX for Blender - Free

Technical name “Prototype 07 Ausf D Mark IX” For Blender 3.5.1

There were lots of improvements over Mark VIII. Now it it’s MUCH easier to do all kind of poses, also added the possibility of change all limbs from IK to FK

Arrows can move only 5 cm, just grab, press G and move. The selected limbs will change from IK to FK, ALT-G for reset the position and change back to IK. Also you will note that I added a “Disable all rotation limits for FK mode”, that is because every single bone it’s limited on IK and FK mode to prevent impossible limb rotations. I found out that it’s much easier to animate if you don’t have to worry about breaking her model. However I do understand that perhaps I might make her too stiff, or limit her too much, or just for some reason someone wants to overstretch her. That’s why I created the controller. I can make such controller for IK mode as well if there is any interest on such feature.

When you change from IK to FK mode the corresponding bones will appear and disappear. For instance, in IK mode only the controller will appear and all the other bones in the limb will disappear, in FK mode the controller will disappear and all bones in the limb will appear so you can change them at will.

The IK controller rotation

Up to Blender 3.5 (not sure if 3.6 fixes this) for some reason I can’t figure out why if you use a pole target ALL the limit rotations set in the “Inverse kinematics” section are ignored. I tried to change this to a custom rotation (linked the rotation of the controller to the limb bones) which works most of the time, but seems to fail for some extreme positions.

I could make a feature where it could be easy to change from this “custom IK” to a regular IK with pole target (like in Mark VIII) if there is any interest in such feature.

Voice box

it’s best to set the view in ortographic.

The voice box it’s separated in two parts; As you can see each phoneme it’s controlled by the central “sphere” (it has such a shape to make it easier to identify the rotations). Basically you should set a keyframe at the beginning in neutral state, then some frames later move/rotate/scale in the corresponding axis and set another keyframe.

The main advantage of this system over the previous model (Mark VIII) which had three spheres is that it’s much easier to change seamlessly from one phoneme to another one, without having to worry about overlapping two blendshapes if you don’t want to. To make visualization easier the selected phoneme will appear on the box as well.

The second arrow it’s the intensity of the phoneme, either whispering or shouting. The first controller only takes care of the position of the lips, the second one is the one responsible of her opening her mount and how much.

In the first case she is saying the O phoneme in low tone, in the second one she is shouting or exaggerating the expression. Consider these values for the Y rotation (the one which this controller uses). -30º: closed mount / -15º: extreme whispering, silly talk / -15º to 0º: whispering / 0º to +30º: normal talk / +30º to +60º: shouting. / +60º to +90º: extreme shouting, exaggeration.

“Bake sound to F-curve”

There is an option to make the sync much easier.

First, make sure to set the final frame rate you will use since it’s troublesome to change it later.

Set a keyframe on rotation, in graph editor select Y rotation, then under “key” select “bake sound to f-curves”. You might have to tweak the properties as well (read blender’s documentation about it).

Check the peaks and see how high they reach, remember the numbers above. In this case the audio it’s too low, and hence she will barely open her mount. Perhaps this is what you want, but if you want to make any changes then select “Key – Un-bake curve” now you can do all sort of changes, the main one is to scale in the Y axis.

Remember that if there is a silence or a pause between sentences the valley curves should be set to -30º (closed mount)

Now she will open and close her mount in each phoneme, you can use the peaks to know in which frame you need to animate the phoneme.

Video example:

(The system it’s from Mark VIII but the jaw opening controller is the same one)

Chest hair fluff.

For Eevee you need to set the curves to “strip”. Also, despite the fact she is fairly lightweight the fluff can be a little heavy when you pose her. At least it does on my Athlon FX -8370E (AM3+) Disabling it in viewport will lift any speed penalty. Just leave it off and it will appear only in the renders.

You can use her in any way you want. Just give me credit for the model. Also do not re-distribute her.

I know there might be several bugs here and there. However if I try to catch them all by myself it would take forever, so, I decided to release it in a "good enought-for-now" state.