2020 Dev Update #04 - Pose Rig Progress (Patreon)

Hello,

I've been developing some features into the Naughty Sandbox rig to help make poses (and eventually user created animations when that's supported) easier and faster for players (and myself) to create.

The rig will be beneficial in multiple ways, for speeding up my own content creation, for players to be able to hopefully create nice poses with minimal work, and for VR possession. It will also open up opportunities for her to have more natural animation and motion in the future when she's AI controlled, since features are being designed into the rig that help her move quite naturally with minimal inputs.

I thought I'd do a lil breakdown of examples so peeps can see what I mean -

In the first part of the header clip, I spin her around while her vision is focused on the Naughty Sandbox logo on the wall. The vision aim system is a single point in space which she'll attempt to look at with her eyes (obviously!) but also her head, and she will even twist her upper body a little to try to look at the target when it's in range. If the vision target is too far behind her, she'll give up looking at it, as can be seen when she's spun around to have her back facing the wall. 

The body twist is more noticeable in the second part of the clip, where I grab the vision target and move it around her body. 

Next part of the clip where I'm grabbing her arms, you can see she will twist her upper body to accommodate where she's trying to "reach", and more superficially, her breasts will be slightly pulled up or pushed together depending on her arm position. If her arms are raised, her upper torso will twist to not only attempt to make the pose look more natural, but to help her reach higher. 

The idea is to have her mimic real life human movements so she looks natural, but also in some kind of way, to make it easier for her to actually do things effectively - such as in the future case where she can actually pick things up or touch things in the scene driven by her AI, she's not just limited by her arm's length, but will move her body to accommodate reaching for something, or looking at something, etc. 

These complex dynamic movements are still only driven by a single point in space. In the case of the arm, it's simply a target for the hand's position, since that's generally the thing we'll want to have full control over. The rest of her arm and her upper body will attempt to solve themselves in a way that makes the most sense to assist her hand in reaching the target position. 

A similar thing can be seen where I'm moving her leg around - her pelvis will rotate to make less work for the actual leg joint, so it doesn't have to rotate as much itself. When we walk or rotate our legs, our hips and lower spine will play a large part in assisting the legs, for the ultimate goal of having our feet reach the position that they need to in the most effective way. 

The last part of the clip I move her pelvis around quite dramatically, and to anyone who's familiar with IK rigs, this won't be too impressive. But the idea is that the feet, head and hands will still attempt to reach their target locations no matter what the rest of the body is doing, so developers using this system, and players playing with her, can reposition her in the way they'd expect to if it was a real life girl who for some reason has given you full control of posing her even though you're a complete weirdo. 

For testing, I did a couple of poses to see how fast I could do them and to see what problems I came across in a real scenario, which was quite valuable in finding problems and realizing where things could be made easier -

https://twitter.com/NaughtySandbox/status/1220452169247346688?s=20 

I'm using UE4's controls for this, but for players I'll have a custom system which will be much muuuch easier. In the engine, I must select the body part I want to modify from a list, and then on top of that the manipulators are kind of buggy when in simulation mode. 

(I posted a clip last month which includes VR posing - peeps who haven't seen that yet can check it out here for an idea of what it will be like)

So onto a lil apology, this technical stuff is taking me quite a bit longer than I expected because it's hard, and also because I haven't been able to put as many dev hours in this month. 

Development will speed up in Feb, and I've also decided (against some people's advice and my own personal way of dev'ing) to release builds way sooner than they'd usually be ready for play testing. My thoughts are that supporters then at least have some content to play with even if it's suuuper unpolished, and then I get people giving me bug reports and suggestions which will help improve the experience anyway.

So with that said, I'm aiming to have a super rudimentary version of this poseable girl released in the first week of February, but likely only with VR support for now, since I haven't developed a keyboard and mouse control scheme for grabbing and moving her yet. But the plan is to iterate on builds quite quickly, so it will get a bit nicer and more user friendly fast!

Thanks as usual to peeps sticking with the project. Since we've hit all the goals now, I'm going to make some more soon, and also give a rundown of how some of the moneys have been spent so far. Thanks sooo much to everyone who is supporting or has supported, and for being so patient.