Finalized New Eyes and Beginning Pickup Behavior (Patreon)

Got a metric buttload of work done today (because it's Saturday). I put in about 9 hours of work today. I finalized her new eyes and began writing the pickup logic module yay!

At last the eyes are complete. Again going from bone based deformations for pupil rotations to a shader based animation was worth it but a lot more work than I thought. A quick recap of the issues that I had to face; original rig eye bone positions were not made with the shader solution in mind, all eye animations had to be remade to fit the new eye rig bone positions, had to get rid of old rig and helper bones in the animation rig, had to remake eyelid clamps, and I had to tweak and test lots of variables to get the rotations just right  on the shape of her sclera. However, Shinobu now looks at you way more accurately, pupils are now perfectly on her unusual anime shaped eyeball, and overall looks much better. Final new eyes demonstration below:

In the gif she is following me around. Of course everything is still subject to tweaks.

The last hard part about migrating to the new eyes was rerigging the model's eyes. As in, since I wouldn't be using bone based deformations, I can't animate her eyes in Blender anymore because the logic for the shaders and what not is only in Unity. So I brute forced a solution where I very carefully calibrated bone rotation limits in Blender to match the eyeball limits in Unity, and then I made drivers to move around custom blendshapes in Blender. Thereby making a fake shader to match the eye's in Unity. Worked pretty well. Gif below shows off all 4 drivers (2 for each eye, 1 for up and 1 for right pupil offsets).

From there I just remade all the pupil animations using this eye rig and re-exported all 54 animations (58 now) using my cool auto export tool. And was back in business in 4 hours.

So now that all the grunt work was out of the way, I began the pickup logic module. Video 3 shows what it is so far. There is no logic yet to make her hands properly cup her fingers around objects. But that's coming next. The pickup animation is half procedural for her arm and the logic plays on top of this raw animation:

This logic module was made in a modular way so it can go on top of other behaviors like headpats, kissing and what not. As you can see in the video it's still a bit glitchy. I will be spending some time catching exceptions in behaviors and allowing/disallowing certain actions while her hand is busy holding something. If you can think of anything interesting like "she should drop the item if you scare her!", leave a comment below and I'll consider implementing it!