Fur & appendage improvements + question (Patreon)

The amazing work of Blacky has made me aware of several shortcomings in the implementation of fur map baking and appendage covering.

What is fur map baking?

In order to prevent fur from sticking out of clothing, we offer the option to bake something we call a "fur map" or "cover map". It's simply a map that represents where and how much to cut off fur so it doesn't stick out of clothing.

This setting can be reached in the clothing options:

Our previous implementation didn't quite work properly though, so fur could still stick out in places:

(Fur sticking out of clothing. This is problematic.)

Now we have refined our implementation so it should cover a wider range of scenarios:

Appendage covering

Appendages can also be configured to be covered by clothing. We have this setting for it:

Our previous implementation used the fur map for deciding whether or not to hide appendages. However, that came with limitations, namely:

1. Fur map would only be present if you had fur enabled.

Technically you could still do it by enabling fur but making it short everywhere, but that would waste performance and furthermore it would also disable tessellation.

2. If appendages and fur pointed in different directions, it wouldn't be considered.

The fur map was based off the directions of the fur, so even if appendages pointed in another direction and wouldn't be hidden by clothing, they could still be hidden since the fur was hidden.

We have now created a new implementation where appendage covering is completely separate from fur covering. You don't need fur to be present, and directions will always be based off the appendages themselves rather than the fur map.

Here you can see before and after screenshots regarding appendages.

Before:

After:

These improvements are currently only implemented in the future interactions build. I could spend a few days backporting it into the old build. It would delay the upcoming build and the interactions build a bit, but you would get access to these improvements sooner.

Would you guys like that?

All the best.

- odes