Development Update #89 (Patreon)

Just an FYI that I'll be cutting the frequency of these development updates back a bit (to every 2-3 weeks). Day-to-day is a regular pattern of trying new things, refining existing content in UE, watching some tutorials, and working hard to get the next release out. If you don't hear from me for a couple of weeks, fear not. As always, I'm pretty active in Discord most evenings and weekends.

With us halfway through June, there is very good progress to report at the five month mark since I began the Unreal Engine transition. I'm working on custom animations now, along with addressing other issues that I find. Animations and then sequencing those in Unreal Engine will be the final two big pieces. I've brought in another tool to help out with this process to hopefully yield more natural animations. That's going to be a process with training my eye (and learning the tool), but I'm looking forward to it.

Along with that animation work is the control rig for the characters. I'm working on that each evening a bit, and I'm adding things to it like expression selections and fine control of facial muscles. It is going to be a process, but this control rig will help me with setting things up in Unreal Engine sequences and will make small adjustments much easier.

Other than that, work continues in a fashion that I hope doesn't come back to bite me later. That's the "fun" of doing something like this. You can only hope that the mistakes you make are easily correctable later. In fact, I try to design my workflow to account for this, as there are always things that can be improved.

At this stage of development, I'm as ready as you are to get the next release out. It is now a time of pushing things that are not essential off into the future. The wonderful news is that all this preparation before all these wonderful new animations can be created and put together for Chapter 11's release is nearing an end. It's been an adventure, but there is a lot of the character and environment work completed.

A bit of good news is that I was able to get all several hundred of my custom Daz poses converted over to animation sequences in Unreal Engine. They are, of course, just a single frame animation, but this means setting up custom animations, or just transitions from something like sitting to standing, is going to be easier for me since I can use these as a base to start those. Very excited!

As if I didn't have enough on my plate, I've been working on getting To Be A King - Volume 1 ready to launch on another digital platform. More on that when I can announce it. Oh, and this month's special renders will be in UE. Not sure whether it will be an animation or not, but there will definitely be a handful of renders.

I'll end this five month anniversary post by quickly highlighting what's been accomplished thus far:

• Daz characters converted in Unreal Engine with all their morphs, expressions, poses, and clothing.
• Hair converted to the Unreal Engine groom system for high quality and realistic movement.
• Character eyebrows & skin textures converted for improved realism.
• Animation retargeting for the Unreal Engine 5 mannequin skeleton, UE4 mannequin skeleton, & Mixamo skeleton.
• Real time character physics implemented for the breasts, butt, and thighs (jiggle physics).
• Most environments converted into Unreal Engine and using Nanite meshes for higher quality when viewed close up.
• Basic lighting presets selected and configured for scenes.
• Custom animation testing started.
• Daz character genitals converted with morph support (e.g., the vagina can actually open).
• Custom shaders for the skin, eyes, hair, clothing, and most environments to provide easy changes.
• Clothing conversion process refined, and real time clothing physics added to existing Daz converted clothing.
• Initial scene setup testing completed.
• Character joint rotation correction morphs refined and implemented.
• Preset animations converted for testing.
• Model optimization to improve performance in future use cases.
• Character model conversion time decreased from about half a day to under 30 minutes.
• New background characters created with LOD support for improved performance in heavy crowd scenes.
• Cronut's model converted to a custom posable skeleton.
• Facial motion capture support for converted characters.