Progress Overview (Patreon)

Hey all!

I'm working on a bunch of stuff simultaneously at the moment, so I don't have anything complete to show, but here's a general overview of what's being worked on:

Source Engine Particles / Particle Editor

Full support for Source Engine particles is currently the only major remaining SFM feature that I haven't fully replicated yet. I've already started working on that a while back, but there's still quite a bit of work left to do and I'd like to get it out of the way as soon as possible. Since Pragma's particle system works very similar to the one in the Source Engine, I mostly just have to replicate all of the initializers, operators, emitters and renderers, but the trick is to match the original behavior as precisely as possible, which is easier said than done for some of them. That being said, I'm taking the opportunity to also implement a particle editor (shown in the video) and a particle asset explorer (analogous to the model/material asset explorers).

The good news is, once all of that's out of the way I should be able to render the Meet the Soldier short in its entirety, hopefully later this month. (As well as the other shorts that are shipped with SFM, some time later.)

Depth of field options (Cycles only)

I've added physically accurate DOF options for rendering with Cycles. They're part of the camera and work exactly the same way as in Blender. SFM's DOF values don't translate 1:1, but the result should be a very close match for most cases.

I'm also working on adding motion blur support, however that's somewhat trickier to implement with Cycles, so no eta on that yet.

Material color/transparency options

Another minor addition are color and transparency/alpha options for materials. The alpha mode can be chosen between opaque (i.e. no transparency), masked (either fully transparent or fully opaque, depending on a user-defined alpha cutoff value) or blended (just regular alpha transparency blending).

Support for Gamebryo and Creation Engine assets

This is something I've already added a while back, I just fixed it up and integrated it into the interface now. It works the same way as for Source Engine / Source 2 assets; they are automatically mounted and ported (as long as the games are installed) and listed in the asset browsers. Animations and Fallout 4 assets are currently not supported.

IK Posing

https://pragma-engine.com/sharex/iktest0.mp4 

https://pragma-engine.com/sharex/iktest1.mp4 

This is also a fix-up of an old test-script of mine, just a little more fleshed out. For standard Valve rigs, some default IK chains will automatically be defined for arms and legs (as long as the model has joints), for other rigs they will have to be defined manually (there will be an easy way to do that through the interface though). The system also supports multiple effectors per IK chain.

Support for SFM math expressions 

I've added full support for SFM math expressions. This fixes a bunch of stuff for imported SFM sessions, like animated FOV or DOF values not working. PFM also uses Lua for the expressions, which makes it a lot more versatile.

As always, if you have any feedback/ideas/suggestions (especially for the particle editor), please let me know. It's always easier for me to integrate ideas while I'm still working on a system rather than when it's already complete.

Thank you! 😊