*June Update* (Patreon)

Hey Gearheads!

It's update time! Wooo!

Things have been crazy in VRA lately.  We've got the new model conversion workflow in full swing, so now we can start testing new models regardless of their initial format.  That means we can lock onto some of those sweet SFM and Blender gals with the more realistic style, but not quite into the uncanny valley territory of the DAZ Studio models.

Though we haven't gotten much feedback we hope the VR videos have been a nice addition to the release schedule to help keep up with the consistency of our releases.  As the projects get more complex we'll be needing to use the videos, supplemental content like the model releases and behind the scenes content more so to fill in the gaps between major releases.  We'll be running polls more frequently to help tailor the release schedule more to the communities preferences.

We successfully got the 3rd iteration of POV off the ground, which allows us the freedom to add more animations and work more dynamically with them. Before we were limited by what audio was available since we have 3 choices for the main 5, but only 1 choice for some of the others.  The new system allows for mixing and matching, so we can continue to gradually get more and more scenes voiced, which at this rate is about one a month.

With the new workflow in place animated models are handled quite a bit differently now.  There are at least 3 additional systems to the underlying POV system in place to handle positioning the new character, matching alignment with the player character, character physics (i.e. bouncing boobs) and lip sync.  These are still very much a work in progress, but already provide better results than before and get better with every release.  The new lip sync manager is especially exciting and it'll help add that extra bit of immersion.

We've moved the RWBY Trainer back to it's own separate experience in order to better align with the new vision of the space station.  That being said, we've run into some issues with porting over animation to the trainer.  A lot of the ones we were planning to use were heavily customized for their previous format, meaning in a lot of cases we'd have to rebuild them from scratch.  Since this is a community favorite though, that is exactly what we'll do.

The upcoming RWBY Trainer animations will be a combination of rebuilt animations and from scratch animations.  Since the funding has dropped down quite a bit, we'll have to do the majority of this in house, meaning it'll take a while for updates, but the animations will look a lot cleaner in the long run.

A light bulb has gone off as to a great way to make use of the space station.  We're planning out the demo for a visual novel style / dating game experience.  Only in premise though.  We're talking fully 3D characters, full dialogue and full immersion.

Right now we're working on a demo of the experience that will include one character introduction, one date mini game and one sex scene.  We already have a writer and up to 3 voice actresses lined up.

This would be a huge undertaking and monopolize a huge chunk of VRAs time and focus, but we think this could have HuniePop level potential.  Once the demo is ready we'll shoot it out to you guys and have a community vote to see if this should become a main focus of VRA or if it'd be something we need to split off to a separate team.

We've been testing the 2019 version of Unity and the new 4.0 version of VRTK.  Those combined should give us some cool VR features and help us find the best looking shaders to apply to the models aka graphics boost leading to better looking models, lighting and effects.

We're also really excited to announce our deep dive in AI.  It'll start with simpler things like background character behavior, but expand out into main character interactions and dialogue.  Keep an eye out for some cool stuff in AI to start rolling out soon.

All in all May was a strong month with lots of changes for the better and very enlightening for the journey ahead.  We're so grateful to you guys for being a part of VRA and we're looking forward to another great month.  If you've been on the fence about upgrading to the main content tier, now is a great time to do so as we have some really amazing content coming out over the next couple of months and it'll really help us take things to the next level.

Thanks again guys!