Inner Circle Update for August 9 2018! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

It’s been a pretty good week. We’ve checked a few things off our lists and nothing is on fire :D. I have a new character to show off that Limbo and I have been working on, as well as progress on some assets by Mr. Kittyhawk and Ubercharge.  

Exarch Nine

Let’s start off by introducing the new character :D. The color image shown at the top of the post is an overpaint I did of a photo by photographer Aku, and is the original mock-up I gave to Limbo. We started on this before the monthly, but I wanted to hold off on showing the early results until we got something closer to my vision. Here’s an uncropped image of Limbo’s actual concept art!

Exarch Nine Concept Art

This character is the 9th Exarch of the Babel Corporation, and is one of the remaining characters we’ve got to finish for the next major release. She plays a significant role in the game, so you’ll be seeing her in some other outfits eventually. The exarchs are meant to blur the lines of royalty, clergy icons, and futuristic corporate overlords, so I guess this look here is supposed to be her “business formal” o_O. 

There’s still some work to be done, but it’s certainly getting there. Here is the progression of Limbo’s designs up through to the latest one to show you how it’s come along!

Let us know what you think!

Concept Art Version of Malise

We had a couple days where Limbo was working on transitioning his line-art style to our female characters, and I helped out by converting Malise’s body over to his style (or as close as I could manage) using the 3D version as a reference. I tried my best to get a good style for faces going as well. I’m nowhere as good as Limbo, but I’ve learned a ton just from working with him in the past couple of weeks. I thought it came out pretty cool so I wanted to show it off ^-^.  

AltairPL’s URGE Engine Progress Report

The beginning of August was better than I've anticipated and I've managed to make a lot of solid progress.

Since testing archive stuff required me to jump some hoops at almost every change, I started with making archive creation and reading as user friendly as possible. In the middle of it, I started getting a bit antsy, so I decided to rush some more or less minor things and to make a push to finally interface my release building script with internal function used to create archive, which would result in release building automation, like we could do for RM builds. This required a lot of changes to ruby scripts and revealed some minor issues to address, but it went relatively smoothly and I could finally send prototype of URGE-only Battle Test build to the team for internal testing. The good news is that archive stuff is working great and there were no issues whatsoever related to it, even considering poor/rushed state of some of its components.

The bad news is that I had to make a detour due to two graphical issues revealed in the course of internal testing. First one was triggered by small omission related to Battle Test build, and resulted in some missing portraits not being properly reported via message box - it was easy to fix once I found the cause. Second problem was a return of the glitching caused by 3rd party library I thought I've fixed. It was working just fine on my AMD GPU, but the rest of the team uses Nvidia GPUs and I was pretty much flooded with complaints about the glitching. Since this issue first appeared I had a potential work-around on my mind, but I was sure it will impact performance dramatically. I had no other choice/idea though, so I went with it and fortunately performance hit was little to none.

Knowing that archive stuff works just fine, and fixing graphical problems, I could take a step back and properly implement everything that was rushed. At the same time, since I knew exactly what I need, I started to refine and optimize the code and archive structure. And since it was at least a bit related, I did some scripting work to disable some insanity required by RPG Maker version, fix some minor issues, etc.

The only major thing left on the archive TODO list (which I’m working on currently) was something I've completely forgotten when making the initial archive design. It's one of those things that was completely ignored by RPG Maker and jerry-rigged by me with scripts, even though they should be an integral part of the engine. I'm talking about the game version system, which is crucial for two features: patching/hot-fixing and save-game compatibility. Both those features are not required for the initial URGE-only Battle Test releases, but for many reasons I want to get them up and running ASAP.

Clothing Asset Progress

Mr. Kittyhawk is very nearly finished with his Syndicate coat model. It’s taken awhile, but a lot of the time was devoted to learning Marvelous Designer and just as much to figuring out the workflow between that, ZBrush, and Maya. This past week he’s been focused on the second major part of the process, which is cleaning the model and painting details in ZBrush. This super high poly version gets baked to a normal map that we can use to keep the details on a much lower polygon version to use on our character. Here are a bunch of images showing his progress there, and our first real example of the kind of detail we can expect in clothing from here on out :D.  Just try to the look past the fact that he’s missing pants!

• Syndicate Coat Details 1
• Syndicate Coat Details 2
• Syndicate Coat Details 3

Additionally, I took some time to work on a semi-procedural leather material for the coat – here it is on an earlier version of the coat (without the ZBrush details). Hopefully we’ll be able to utilize it on other stuff as well.  

Last but not least, Ubercharge spent a day working on one of the Splicer masks that you saw in the monthly update. It’s still an early work-in-progress, but it looks good in 3D!

Maya Conversion Progress

I have to do a round of testing, but I’m pretty certain we’ve successfully implemented joint rotation limits to our Maya character rig :D. This was the thing I added to our immediate to-do list at the end of the monthly update -- I didn’t think it’d come together this fast at all.  

Another area I started to focus on early is material scripting. Most material stuff can wait, but we really need the ability to transfer our finished materials over to newly imported versions of characters without spending hours of manual work on it. This script that I’m working on will allow for us to do it with a couple of clicks.  It’ll have the limitation of only being able to transfer materials between models with identical polygon ordering, but it’ll be just what we need while we perfect our rigs and are creating new versions of the characters every few days in Maya. So far, I have the proof of concept working, but it needs another couple days of work probably.

I’ll let TK talk more about Maya progress since the rest of the stuff is on his end :D. 

TK’s Rigging Update

Yay! Finally got the last of my todo list done for the rigging setup scripts. So now, we can transfer characters from Daz to Maya with nearly all the functionality that we have in Daz + Addons that Ero has bought over time. Maya's python implementation is... not really as easy to work with as I had hoped, but I learned a lot, and it's working at least! I've a few small tweaks to make now, and I may make a big alteration to the part that attaches the facial controls. We've discovered it's easy to lose them within the geometry while posing, and it might be better/worse on other characters later on. At the moment, I'm just using hardcoded values to place them, but it's not possible to move them afterward, easily at least. A routine that does initial placement, but lets us reposition the controls before clicking a button to wire them up would be better.

There's a chance we'll discover issues along the way once we really dig in and start using this new system, but fingers crossed there won't be any gamebreakers for us. Feeling pretty optimistic about this!

Eromancer has just started a script to assist with materials, which I may jump in to help with too. I also have some issues with a particular set of morphs not behaving as expected in Daz that needs examination. There's a particular set that makes the nipples inflate to comical effect, but not so great for production renders.