Clothing system info! (Happy holidays!) (Patreon)

Hi all!

We hope you're still surviving out there!

This past month, we've been hard at work implementing a custom clothing system. This system is coming along well, but there have been significant bumps along the way. There were many times when we were almost ready to give up and go with a different approach, but luckily we persevered.

We wanted to write something sooner to keep you guys updated, but at the same time, we also wanted to be sure that our ideas actually worked before hyping anything up. Now, we have finally reached that point where we feel confident in our tech.

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When we set out to create a custom clothing system, there were five key points we were trying to achieve:

Simplicity

We wanted to create a system that is easy to understand and create clothes for. It should be possible to create clothes in any external 3D software of your choice and bring it into FurryVNE without significant effort. Making clothes should be fun and easy!

Customizability

We wanted a system that supports many different kinds of clothing, and those clothes should be possible to configure inside the app the same way you've come to expect of FurryVNE.

Adaptability

We wanted a system that properly adapts to the body as it is affected by bone deformation, blend shapes and soft body dynamics (or any other deformer), without having to apply the same stack of operations on the clothing. Rather, clothes should get all of those things "for free" as a direct result of the custom skinning method used.

Performance

We wanted a system that operates on the GPU and thus hooks into the rest of our character pipeline (which also operates on the GPU). By utilizing the GPU and by completely bypassing the CPU, we could achieve excellent framerates.

Unique features

We wanted a system that is much more than just clothing. We wanted something that facilitates story creation - something that enables you to tell the kind of stories you want (once we actually get to implementing interactions). Without a custom skinning implementation, what we have in mind regarding clothing simply wouldn't be possible!

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We are happy to say that we have been able to achieve all of the key points listed above. There's quite a bit of work remaining still, since this system interacts with so many others and is quite complicated. The majority of the tech hurdles have all been solved though. All that remains is peripheral systems (like handling how fur works together with clothing), optimization, presentation and general fluff and polish.

Great things are coming, and we can't wait to show it to you.

Stay tuned for more information!

Picture above is teaser of outfit that Dogson quickly threw together in Blender for testing purposes.

Also, a big Happy holidays from all of us on the FurryVNE Team!

- odes

(P.S.

I want to point out that this is not a physical clothing simulation system, but rather a custom skinning method and set of tools. This system may be extended with physical properties at some point, but that's not what this system is at the moment.)