The start into 2023! (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Welcome to the new year, and I hope that you're as excited as I am for all the things to come!

I want to recap the polls that were running for quite a while now, tell you which features were already there, will be implemented with the new version or might come later. I also want to show you how the new design of the customizer will look like, to get feedback from you, right during the development, where it's the easiest to change something.

Maybe let's start with the design: Many buttons were moved to the file menus, to make the tool really clean and only have the buttons you need available. The 4 main buttons on the top are the already known Show/Regenerate, Save and Generate buttons, together with the single vs two handed selection. You'll see a new small button, with 4 small arrows in all directions, this is the new button to pose a model. After clicking the button, 6 sliders and entries will appear on the right where you can edit the position and rotation in all 6 degrees of freedom - you can now pose everything (e.g. edit shoulder problems directly, ...). The sliders will be at the same position for all parts, so you can only work on one part at a time - this makes the user interface much smaller and not overloaded with that many sliders. Please be aware that this new option is still in progress and the text will probably change for images (X,Y,Z,AX,AY,AZ), but I did not get to that point yet.

Let me know what you think of the user interface update and what you feel is wrong or should still be included! I'm happy to hear your feedback!

For the poll results, I will split them in 3 categories:

The first one is the "Already implemented or available in the updated version" - these features you requested were probably already there or will be there in the user interface update.

The second category is the "Will be included (probably)". These things are on my ToDo-list and will probably be available with the user interface update, but are not there yet.

The third category is the "Might be included at some point, but not now", and that also depends on your feedback, so let me know what you would like to see from that list.

Already implemented / guaranteed features:
- Better user interface
- Tilt the backpack
- Live image/preview - you can simply check the "Auto-draw" button (available via the extras menu in the update)
- Direct input for numbers for the angles and positions, as you can see in the images above
- Libraries organised by army type: You can already add libraries to categories and then select/unselect a whole category. Simply click the "Move to category" button in the manage libraries dialogue
- Problems with voids: There is the fix cavities option that fills the joints with spheres to cover these voids
- Left and right legs: If the library allows it (e.g. the space bugs), you can move and select the left and right legs individually

To be implemented (probably) in the user interface update:
- Store the libraries at a selectable location
- A better tutorial, probably a new video introduction, and also probably a written tutorial
- Mix poses to create a new, unique pose from them
- Show all poses in the pose selection, even from not selected libraries

To be implemented in the future:
- Better selection window: Do not re-open the window on filter change, better thumbnails, more space-efficient
- Better feedback if the model cannot be generated
- Mirror everything except shoulders AND weapon, or mirror absolutely everything
- Include Bases
- Loading config files: Automatically search for the best fitting file if the exact one cannot be found
- Tie shoulder movement to either arms, torso or both
- Direct access to the legs generator
- Auto supports (currently not easily possible)

I also had a "rate the following features" list and I also want to show the ranking you gave them. I already included the most wanted options in the categories above. Here is the sorted list (from best wanted to least wanted):
- Slight movements: Move any part in all 6 dimensions (to fix smaller problems directly)
- Include bases (probably need to rotate them by hand, possibly save this to a base definition file for the legs)
- Tie shoulder movement to either arms or torso (or both)
- Move export, fix cavities and auto draw options to a menu
- Introducing menus to have less buttons (and prevent accidentially clicking update)
- Have a library path that can be specified
- Direct access to the legs generator if the current legs were created with it
- Auto supports
Not wanted that much, I did not include these options in the list above:
- Link the left and right arm upwards angle (to move both arms simultaneously)
- Only render the selected libraries
- Automatically reload last created file on startup
- Improve the thumbnails
- Backpack rotation (1 axis? 2 axes?)
- Improve the blender rendering option

If you feel like I left out your opinion, please come back to me, I tried to take everything into my list but maybe I skipped something?

I plan to release the new version within the next 1-2 weeks as a beta testing one, and update the customizer to the new version probably somewhere around the end of January, depending how fast I can make it a stable, working version.

Thank you all for your support and input, this really helps to make the tool be the exact thing YOU need! And please never hesitate to ask questions or suggest things, even if you feel like they would be stupid or impossible.