Inner Circle Update for July 26 2018! (Patreon)

We’re still working on getting our first full character conversion over to Maya, but the good news is we’re nearly there. TK has put a ton of hours in this past week, and we even pulled AltairPL in to help script a solution to the big obstacle TK talked about in last week’s update. We’re just on the verge of doing the first full test conversion of Malise with all the clothing/props/morphs etc, and our tests over the last few days suggest it should work like a charm :D.

Since I can’t begin posing for the next battle test until after we’ve got our full conversions, I’ve been using one of the partial test conversions of Malise over the last few days to work on some things that will improve H artwork significantly.  With the characters coming to Maya, we have the potential to use physics simulation a lot more freely – it’s just a matter of practicing with it and figuring out how to best utilize it. I’ll talk about that more below. 

One last thing before we begin! I’ve picked up yet another artist who will be helping us out part time.  He’s a skilled concept artist -- something we don’t have right now, and something that’s becoming more and more important with the level of detail we’re striving for. Not only that, but he has hard surface design skills that match Ubercharge’s, and fit great with the cyberpunk aesthetic we’re going for. 

Maya Conversion Progress 

If you recall last week, TK ended his update explaining the major obstacle we’ve been dealing with. Basically, Daz was dumping out tons of empty morphs to the FBX file (the intermediary file that we import into Maya to rebuild a character). These empty morphs would get read in by Maya and eat up all our RAM (it blew through my 64 GB).  At the time, our only solution was to break down conversions into small chunks – like a piece of clothing at a time, which would mean it could take days to convert a character due to the added manual work involved (not practical when we need to make changes).  

Since it can be exported in plain-text, I managed to reverse engineer the FBX file a bit, and we figured out that the bogus data could indeed be cleaned out of the file before it gets imported into Maya. No small feat, considering these files can be nearly 2 GB. 2GB of text means it can’t even be opened in a text editor.  This is where we pulled AltairPL in, and after updating him on the problem he determined he could write an FBX cleaner that should work in all situations.  APL and TK spent the next few days on this. 

We’ve been using APL’s script now for a few days, and it’s working great. TK spent an evening teaching me the full procedure for converting a character, and I’ve been using a test conversion of Malise I did with no problems. Since our systems were previously getting bogged down by the above issue, we never actually got to see a conversion work with all the required morphs. Once we could, we found some issues with TK’s conversion script that needed some attention. I believe they are all cleared up now, as TK’s last test was very successful. Though it was just the body, bodysuit, and another prop, the entire import process only took 20 seconds :D. 

We still need to finalize the morph list for Malise, and I need to make a few last changes, but the next test is to do a full conversion and see if anything blows up. Hopefully nothing blows up o_O.

Syndicate Outfit Progress

Mr. Kittyhawk has made a ton of progress learning Marvelous Designer this past week. It took some effort to figure out the subtleties and workflow to produce good seams while maintaining bulk for thicker garments, but his results are looking promising. Below are some previews of the Syndicate guys’ coat he’s been working on.  Aside from a process to add thickness in ZBrush, everything here was done in Marvelous. Once the design is finalized he will begin adding details to the geometry in ZBrush, then we’ll work on a material. There are a ton of good ZBrush brushes out there for clothing, so we’ll need to start assembling a library since we will likely be making more and more of our own clothes from here on out.

Syndicate Coat WIP Front

Syndicate Coat WIP Front 2

Syndicate Coat WIP Back

Soft-Body and Hair Physics on Rigged Characters

Hopefully this one will make up for taking a while finalizing the Maya conversion stuff :D. 

Being able to do partial conversions has also allowed us to get things like hair rigging working in Maya. Utilizing that, I’m able to test some new things.  

A big benefit of using Maya is that we can use physics simulation on the fly. Two types that will really improve H artwork are hair physics and soft-body collisions (squishies!). I showed some soft body testing before when I first experimented with Maya’s nCloth a while back. I’m taking what I learned then and am now applying it to a rigged character – something we haven’t done before. 

Even though nCloth was designed as cloth simulation, it’s become very popular for both soft-body and hair physics. The past couple of days I’ve been experimenting with settings in an attempt to build presets that work in most situations.  I’m still dealing with some complications, but I’m already able to produce some pretty solid results for some use cases. The ones I wanted to tackle first were breast/butt squishes, and hair draping across a surface. Previously, haven’t been able to do either of these very reliably, and they come up often in H artwork.  The biggest thing I wanted to test though is if soft-body collisions will work *with a clothed figure*. The potential for clipping here is high since now we’re talking about multiple simulations running simultaneously, but it’s worked very well in my tests so far!

Here’s a set of images showing some of the various results I achieved with soft-body physics. Keep in mind that gravity isn’t on until the simulation starts, so the breasts fall into place at the start. 

Boob Press GIF 1

Boob Press GIF 2 (nekkid and clothed)

And here are some different results I got with hair physics. Ignore the floaty bits around the ears, I didn’t do a great job painting the physics parameters since I’ll have to do it again later :D. Also, the hair material looks kind of messed up due to that Redshift opacity issue I keep mentioning. It will look more like hair and less like a bird’s nest once Redshift 3.0 is out.

Hair Simulation Test 1

Hair Simulation Test 2

Hair Simulation Test 3

There’s a whole lot of opportunity to expand on this, and one idea that Uber has suggested is using a low poly physics rig to drive the high poly models.  I actually spent part of today doing some testing with it, and the concept appears to work, but it’s a pretty advanced undertaking that requires some meticulous weight painting. The benefit though is that once it’s set up it’s done, and in my tests the performance was great -- I was getting 60 FPS physics n’ jiggles while posing. It’s hard to say whether the quality is comparable yet to what I have shown above, but it’s worth considering.  

Onyx’s Weapon Shop Progress

Uber has made fantastic progress on Onyx’s weapon shop :D. Aside from a few important props and some materials to be added, the interior itself is just about done, and Mr. Kittyhawk will probably go in and start placing all the props like merchandise and weapons before the monthly update.  Here’s a full-scale preview render of the progress (zoom)!

AltairPL’s URGE Engine Progress

Real life problems are still... well, a problem, but fortunately not as big as before the previous IC update, so I managed to do much more this time around.

All things considered, the archive stuff is progressing relatively well. Not only I can make the archive(s), which was done before the previous IC, but now I can also read them as well, at least the most relevant parts of them at the moment. When doing this, I've identified few problems with the whole system - omissions, miscalculations, etc. I've fixed most critical ones on the spot, but some of them I have to leave for later. Two of those will be fixed before the first URGE-only BattleTest is released. Considering that the BattleTest releases are relatively small in size, I can leave the remaining one for much later, since it will be required by the patch/hotfix part of the system, which in URGE will be an integral part of the engine, instead of a hack I had to do to implement this functionality in RPG Maker via a Ruby script. Though, I would love to deal with it ASAP and be done with this archive stuff once and for all (yeah, right).

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the speed of the archive(s) creation. I did a test using most/all of the 0.05 data that would go to the archive, and it was created in about 34 seconds, which is way better than 240 seconds I got from my Ruby implementation for 0.05 release. It's hard to compare it to the vanilla RPG Maker archive creation time, since the archive creation is immediately followed by making the .zip archive of the entire game.

Last thing related to archive(s) I did was a bit of a side-track, but I was thinking about it with the archive(s) creation in mind, when someone commented on something similar in a completely unrelated context. I'm talking about an ASCII/text progress bar, similar to what you can see mainly in Linux/Unix console apps like package managers or few Windows console apps like boot-time checkdisk. Best thing about progress bar like this is that it's a clear indication whether long process, like archive(s) creation, is actually doing something or hanging. Another nice thing is that it's using only one line of the debug console, instead one line for every file or something, so it's easier to sift through the console contents. Anyway, it required some research and cursing on my IDE and Windows, but I finally managed to make it work... excluding IDE console, which is seriously stupid.

Testing the ASCII/text progress bar reminded me of a series of console issues I was having in some circumstances, so I decided to fix it as well. Another bit of research and curses and I finally got it under control - there's still one minor issue left, but it's so insignificant, that I won't even try to figure out why it happens or how to fix it.

Last thing I did since the last IC update, which was actually one of the first, was to help out TK with some insanity he was facing. The problem he was having is that stuff exported from Daz had a lot of weird crap included, which was causing some weird behavior when those files were imported in Maya. Ero probably included gory details in his part of the update, and I don't know them all, so I'm not gonna say more. Anyway, he needed something to clean up files exported from Daz before importing them in Maya. Example file was relatively small, so I made a quick and dirty regular expression to use in notepad++ search function. But after seeing another example file which was much more complex and learning that one regular expression was not enough, I've decided to take a break from the archive stuff, and make a not so quick and dirty Ruby script for TK to use. Well, TK wasn't very happy that he has to install Ruby, but I think he was pretty happy with how the script worked, so mission accomplished.

I think that's all for this "week".