Dragonkin, Part 2.9 (Patreon)

Greetings, Kin!

First up, I wish you very merry holidays: Yule, Christmas, New Year.

Yet another year draws to a close soon, and I'm still working my tail off chasing my dreams of bringing more scaly love into this world. What's changed, what's new? Although there's been plenty of setbacks, I'm now more experienced than ever, and my new character model style brings me (and hopefully you as well) a lot of joy and eagerness for the future that I'm working towards every day.

For this occasion I prepared another quick turntable animation, please check it out! (This GIF is only a low-quality preview of it)

• Imgur ( https://imgur.com/j0ATo2U )
• Or as an attached file to this post.
• (will post it later publicly on Twitter)

I'm painfully-aware that animation videos, flythroughs or turntables simply aren't enough to show off my models. To experience it properly it requires something far more immersive and tactile - like some sort of a game build specifically designed for that purpose. It still remains as my most immediate goal to achieve again after I complete all the visuals required, just meanwhile I wanted to make a teaser, to give you a taste of what's to come!

Also, this little turnaround animation required me two days to make - way too slow! The reason for that slowness is that I haven't completed my tools yet, even though I've been working on them for an entire month. But, it is steadily getting there, and once my pipeline is fully assembled, making something like this will take about an hour, maybe two at maximum. Crazy difference, don't you think? I will explain why it is so in this post, but first, let me brag about a couple features I'm sure you'll appreciate!

X-Ray Shader

At the half-way in that animation I show off a little blue bubble on screen, a window inside the characters - this is how I can make internal views possible during in-game animations. Player would be able to hold a button and hover their mouse over areas they wish to see inside of.

I can't make it look exactly like it is drawn on many furry images due to many limitations of the real-time engine VFX capabilities… But, what do you think of this effect so far?

New Organs (again)

I have listened to your feedback, and I realized that I was wrong about my original innards plan. With me just making it a simple tube, while it may make some sense for mechanics or rigging simplicity, I would be robbing a lot of people of an ability to realize their fantasies… For that I apologize, and I bring good news that I have re-made the internal organs yet again to correct it.

It was a difficult (and long) task to figure out - imagine all the possible configurations, for reptilian and mammal characters, for males and females, for those who have different anatomy (such as cloaca) - all multiplied together in a mess of possible combinations that I had to keep ALL in my head as I was designing this.

My results are somewhat in-between real and fantasy anatomy still: the intestines aren't exactly long enough to be realistic, but they aren't a straight tube either anymore (it's one loop); though they can align if one is getting railed by a large Dragon (It is a must-have survival trait in my world, one can never know when a horny male Dragon lands up nearby!). And the digestive passage is fully split from the womb/egg chamber now as well, except if it meets inside the cloaca. Everything now can stretch from a simple flesh tunnel into a more complex, bulging shape.

Pipeline, scripts and automation

Pipeline I want to talk about has nothing to do with organs, although I could make a pun out of it… Anyway, this is the part that of work that is the most invisible - for the majority of the month I spent refining my workflows for producing models, I was writing a Blender plugin with tools to help me automate many tasks.

My new characters are modular, they are made out of dozens of individual body-parts that users can pick and choose, and each part is made out of at least 3 separate models (sometimes more), each needed to be exported out of Blender, and then each imported into engine. Additionally I need to make sure there is no issues, like no seams between any possible bodypart combination. This all quickly turns into hundreds of individual files that I have to push-and pull daily. It is no longer creative work, it is just file-management. So something had to be done about it…

My solution is extremely technical, but it is akin to building a big production assembly line for creating models. I'm making "robots" to help me paint, bake, and package the art for my game projects (I imagine it like a big conveyor belt from Factorio game). Once it's fully complete it will automate some tasks that otherwise would require me multiple days to do manually, all in a SINGLE CLICK. Without this assembly pipeline nothing that I set my goals for would be possible - it would be simply too much work for one person, and too prone to errors and bugs.

So I hope you understand the importance of this - even if scripts aren't sexy, they can't be shown off on Patreon, they have to be in place in order for everything to be possible in the end.

Control Rig

I have just finally started Control Rig phase. Control Rig is yet another set of tools that will allow me to move and animate models effortlessly. I did already encounter some setbacks, not everything went according to plan - namely Blender and Unreal not agreeing on my proportion-transformation system I shown a prototype of in the previous post. But I already found workarounds, it will just take a little bit longer to build.

Conclusion

Overall the work is going well, although I hoped to complete it before the end of the year. Well, since I don't let myself to have a luxury of Christmas breaks, I will continue to work on it meanwhile! Let's see how far I can get before 2023.

With lots of Dragon Love.
       Salireths.