This is a crosspost from my Substack Newsletter.

Welcome to the first Hydromonthly of 2025! Today we’ll be talking about 2024. Well, more specifically some of the stuff I was working on in December. As always, there’s a video version you can watch here for a quick rundown on the headlines:

Hydromodel - Inverse Kinematics

I finally got around to giving the Hydromecha model IK bones. The old version of the rig was just a bunch of FK bones with rotation limits to keep things looking all robotic (If you don’t know what IK/FK means there’s an explanation below). This was an okay setup but it quickly become a pain to try and pose things with how many pieces make up the limbs.

This new control scheme has the old FK rig copy the rotations of some IK bones (with the limits still intact) which lets me pose things much more easily. The arms each have two sets of IK bones: one for the actual arm and one for the shoulder pylon. Things can get kinda wonky depending on how the arms are moved but it’s a small (and slightly amusing) price to pay for convenience. I’ve got some ideas kicking around for a proper animated video with this model so stay tuned for that.

This video shows off how I would pose the model before with just FK bones:

These videos show off the IK rig:

If you’re unfamiliar with FK/IK, posing Forward Kinematics (FK) limbs has you start from the shoulder/hip and then move your way down each bone till you get to the hand/foot. With Inverse Kinematics (IK) you start with the hand/foot and then the computer figures out how the rest of the bones should move to get there. There’s more to it than that but that should cover the basics. Check out this video by Doodley for some more info:

Secret Santa Slayer

Now onto something a lot less technical. I did an art Secret Santa with some friends back in December and I ended up drawing Slayer from Guilty Gear for one of them.

I really like wacky perspective/focal length chicanery and wanted to do that for this drawing. I used Blender to create a rough reference image to help me figure that out.

Bugalo Breaks the Sound Barrier with Cigarettes

Yeah you read that right. Bugalo throws some cigarettes so hard it causes a sonic boom. This page includes even more funny perspective stuff. You can read Wonderful and Fancy High School Bait Club over on the Hydrosite by clicking the below image. If the new page doesn’t load, try clearing your browser’s cache.

Coming Attractions

I definitely wanna get back to working on the comic reader this month along with some other website updates. I also just got started on a new scratchbuild I teased a couple months ago. There are a few other things I have in the works but I’ll wait until they’re actually done before talking about them.

This’ll be a giant robot scorpion eventually.

As always, I’ll see you again next month with another update.

Have a good one,

-Hydro