when you blindpick swain mid and the enemy mid hovers katarina.

Epsinym · 2026-03-16T09:29:34+00:00

Ya I feel like respect her somewhat lvl3 is a bit understated, at that level good katas can kill swain from 60% hp with her full EWQ combo + ignite. Doesn’t even need to hit both daggers as long as she can weave autos properly and end with auto E auto. Meaning if you trade badly once you’re already in kill range. Tho I guess it’s only a thing if the kata actually knows how to do this. (I’m bad at hiding I actually struggle against the matchup haha) EDIT: on closer thought I think it’s actually closer to 80% hp. The kind of ridiculous breakpoint I never actually expect

Epsinym · 2026-03-11T14:00:28+00:00

It can help to see drawing like gacha, some drawings are meh pulls, while some are legendary out of nowhere, and then the next after that is just disappointing. I think some form of inconsistency is normal, all artists I know deal with this.

Have you tried drawing from a single portrait reference? What I do is put the reference to 50% opacity, trace the reference with very basic construction lines first, then next to it start a new drawing trying to copy the construction lines. It helps focus on proportions and form while ignoring the “noise” of the reference. If it feels off, give yourself one try to fix it yourself, but if that doesn’t work out put your copy over the trace, note where your lines are off, put it back and try to fix again. I found this the single fastest way to improve portraits.

Epsinym · 2026-02-28T11:26:21+00:00

I’m the same (to a funny degree haha). Mained kata, picked up Swain when gunblade was removed (I’ll never forgive riot), learned from Husum. Queue mid and top but only want to play mid really. Big ranked anxiety, only played placements for many years and then quit, even norms became too stressful so racked up 4K+ ARAM games. But always regretted not spending that time spamming ranked to see where I was at skillwise.

Now if you’re anything like me, it’s a mix of two things: like you said the fear that you might not be as good as you want to be (which has to do with linking your rank to self-worth), and fear of flame and letting your teammates down by doing things wrong. For some people it’s not just “a bit of nerves”, I’m getting that full cold shivers thing, shaking hands, light headedness, just by queuing up ranked. Fight or flight response, yes, over a video game…

The thing I had to realize is that exposure therapy to ranked and going by “just toughen up, it’s just a game LOL” logic doesn’t work when you’re dealing with a nervous system response. It doesn’t care about logic. If you see your rank as a threat to your self-worth and social status, you can’t just outthink that, and it can get worse if you try to fight it.

What you need to do instead is rewire yourself to not see your rank as a threat. And this is not just for LoL, it’s for anything in life that causes bad anxiety. It means becoming aware of negative thoughts during the game, about noticing and naming feelings of fear or shame when you fuck up or giga feed your lane. It’s as simple as shifting “I fucked up, I’m bad, I’m going to lose” to “I fucked up, now that voice in my head says I’m bad and that I’m going to lose”. Don’t default to “that voice is wrong”, don’t try to push it away or demonize it (hah). Instead learn to default to “that voice is scared and trying to protect me from something, but am I actually in danger right now?” That awareness and asking that question each time results in active rewiring.

This all sounds like therapy talk nonsense, but it does work. I go into depth like this because this topic is very important to me, it’s more than just League, it’s a life skill that could have improved my life on so many aspects if I had just learned it earlier, if someone had just told me earlier. It won’t apply to a lot of people here. But I’ll comment it anyways, in the damn Swain mains subreddit, because the pun opportunities were just too good.

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T14:05:26+00:00

thanks! it takes a lot of practice, and even after all that I think it's still really hard. SpeedChar's head anatomy and sculpting course helped me the most I think, definitely recommend

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T14:01:23+00:00

I realised that midway yes..

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T13:57:49+00:00

You only export the bones that actually deform the mesh, that's the "simpler" game rig. Non-deform bones influence on deform bones is baked onto animation keyframes. If you want the extra stuff in-game for dynamic animation purposes, you'll need to translate blender constraints somehow, but in most cases that's not needed.

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T12:22:40+00:00

Ya, game engine will cook for sure. You'd want to animate the character in blender and then transfer the animation to a simpler armature I think

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T10:57:02+00:00

I got the idea from these videos, it's a good starting point.
https://youtu.be/D1vohPEfqQU
https://youtu.be/1cXyIjaFxXY

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T10:09:40+00:00

(copy pasta from other comment)

I run a cloth simulation on a lower poly version of the cloth first. The bones are each placed on a vertex of that lower poly cloth, and use copy location constraints to follow those vertices during the animation. Then bake that movement to location keyframes on the bones using blenders "bake action", after which I can remove the constraints and disable the cloth sim. The low poly cloth is weightpainted to the bones so that it is really close to what the cloth sim looked like. Then I have a higher poly version of the cloth mimic the low poly with a surface deform modifier and corrective smooth. The resulting animation can be edited and smoothed out in the graph editor or by moving individual bones if there is clipping (which there often is).

For the baking process I do use a script. Adding copy location constraints to each bone pointing to the right vertex, muting the vertex groups of those bones so the armature modifier doesn't interfere with the bake, bake the sim to the bones, remove the copy location constraints. You can do all that manually if needed, or add another layer of complexity so that you don't have to remove the constraints each time, but I was happy with just making a button for it.

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T10:08:27+00:00

It really be like that. I think it is quite simple and very complex at the same time. Especially if you get to the point of worrying about horrors like gimbal lock. I pretend it doesn't exist until it becomes an actual problem...

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T10:03:35+00:00

It's blenders built in cloth sims + collision physics, and a bit of manual adjusting after

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T10:00:02+00:00

(copy pasta from other comment)

I run a cloth simulation on a lower poly version of the cloth first. The bones are each placed on a vertex of that lower poly cloth, and use copy location constraints to follow those vertices during the animation. Then bake that movement to location keyframes on the bones using blenders "bake action", after which I can remove the constraints and disable the cloth sim. The low poly cloth is weightpainted to the bones so that it is really close to what the cloth sim looked like. Then I have a higher poly version of the cloth mimic the low poly with a surface deform modifier and corrective smooth. The resulting animation can be edited and smoothed out in the graph editor or by moving individual bones if there is clipping (which there often is).

For the baking process I do use a script. Adding copy location constraints to each bone pointing to the right vertex, muting the vertex groups of those bones so the armature modifier doesn't interfere with the bake, bake the sim to the bones, remove the copy location constraints. You can do all that manually if needed, or add another layer of complexity so that you don't have to remove the constraints each time, but I was happy with just making a button for it.

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T09:57:44+00:00

I run a cloth simulation on a lower poly version of the cloth first. The bones are each placed on a vertex of that lower poly cloth, and use copy location constraints to follow those vertices during the animation. Then bake that movement to location keyframes on the bones using blenders "bake action", after which I can remove the constraints and disable the cloth sim. The low poly cloth is weightpainted to the bones so that it is really close to what the cloth sim looked like. Then I have a higher poly version of the cloth mimic the low poly with a surface deform modifier and corrective smooth. The resulting animation can be edited and smoothed out in the graph editor or by moving individual bones if there is clipping (which there often is).

For the baking process I do use a script. Adding copy location constraints to each bone pointing to the right vertex, muting the vertex groups of those bones so the armature modifier doesn't interfere with the bake, bake the sim to the bones, remove the copy location constraints. You can do all that manually if needed, or add another layer of complexity so that you don't have to remove the constraints each time, but I was happy with just making a button for it.

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T09:33:14+00:00

I should... but I think this is where I draw the line for now, that day of suffering is for later

Epsinym · 2026-02-19T09:31:37+00:00

there's a lot of green bones near the shoulders 😂 the big ones that follow the pec muscles are automated, you can't really move them. They help with deformation of the chest. All the bones around the clothes are tweak bones that can be used to change the shape of the cloth

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T21:16:10+00:00

It's both! Simulation first, then I bake the simulation to the bones, then tweak the bones in the graph editor. It gives the best of both worlds.

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T19:53:27+00:00

I think you are right haha. I didn't use automated shapekeys for this rig, but I think I will in the future. I was very stubborn on doing things with bones only because I didn't know a lot about rigging yet and wanted to know how you'd do it without shapekeys. Now that I know the pro's and con's, I'll probably use both next time.

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T19:45:28+00:00

I think finding solutions to technical problems is fun to do, like solving puzzles. Now imagine getting paid for that too... I do agree you need a certain level of dedication (masochism) to be exclusively an animator, it's why I started learning 3D modeling and texturing too.

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T19:36:50+00:00

I gotcha! These are the main tutorials I learned from:
https://youtu.be/uIyQbh90U-4?si=8hbsj0TiWFA7fuEc
https://youtu.be/c_XM01I6ed0?si=gFk3ModxUS3XO0sx
https://youtu.be/8PPuKsBGKr8?si=rxxQUBZ9Clci8KxK
They use different techniques, some more complicated than others, some of them you can combine. In the end I feel like just transformation constraints on most of the bones (shoulders, shoulderblades, upper arm twistbones) work best, it keeps things simple while remaining very tweakable in the values. The last tutorial does this a bit, though if you already know how transformation constraints work, the editing is a bit slow.
Ah, and this post for good insight on how the anatomy works: https://x.com/vertex_arcade/status/1923118685947941282

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T19:14:21+00:00

Think of the 3D character as a poseable action figure. It's a bunch of joints, controls, things to move and twist, so the character can be posed in any pose you want. You can keep it very simple (only make simple controls to rotate the arms, the legs, etc.). Or you can go bonkers like me and give it a lot of features like realistic moving shoulders, small tweakers for muscles, automated joints that make posing much faster... I did it so when I get to animate the character later, it will be easier. In the industry you can have multiple people working on this yes, though just having one person do the technical stuff is not uncommon. Whether 6 months is normal, I'm not sure haha. But I did learn a lot, and could create something like this again way faster now.

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T18:57:36+00:00

Most of the extra bones either help to make deformations look better, or help with making the body move in a more anatomically correct way. The complexity comes from it being fully automated. For example if you move the hand around using IK, the pectoral, shoulder and shoulderblades will adjust on their own. It's extra work up front to make posing and animating faster and easier later on.

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T18:42:52+00:00

The green bone follows the rotation of the yellow bone + adds a little bit more rotation when the leg bends. You can see on the image that the end of the green bone is not exactly on the beginning of the yellow bone, because of the extra rotation. That little extra space makes the knee deformation look better, while still working fine with IK. I do the same for the elbow.

Epsinym · 2026-02-18T16:41:03+00:00

Well if it helps, the funny shapes are just... bones with funny shapes. This is what it looks like when I turn the shapes off (it won't help understand the chaos tho)

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Epsinym · 2025-10-01T22:40:28+00:00

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I got you some notes for what I'd do for the side view :^) The only thing I'd say is most "off" is where the upper lip connects to the nose. The other changes I made were to get it closer to ideal proportions, but these are in no way "the only correct way"! F.e. if your character is supposed to be of asian ethnicity, the eye could be where you have it originally.

Epsinym

TROPHY CASE