More Modular (Patreon)

As I said in the other update, one big change I wanted to do was make things more modular.  When I started this project, I mostly wanted to focus on the characters themselves being self-contained, but it became clear to me people wanted at least a little bit more customization.  This requires a total shift from the process I was doing, but I think in the long run it will be a little better.

THE OLD WAY.

Before I made every mesh a FULL VARIANT.  Example, I had Sivana nude, but when I moved over to Sivana in her outfit, it was the whole model again + outfit, then model again plus outfit B, etc.  This was done because I heard it got better performance at the expense of size, but it had a lot of down sides, like it was a bitch to make adjustments and it was a lot of data I had to worry about.  If I decided to say, down the line, add some adjustable body morphs, I would have to add those morphs to EVERY SINGLE VARIANT.

THE NEW WAY.

Have streamed down the character models as much as possible, so for example I now only have three body models so far.  Female, Female with Tail, and Male Orc.  Instead of loading each character and outfit as their own FBX like before, I made each of their shapes into a morph on this core model.  When the character is loaded the script looks for the name of the character then applies the proper character shape, and then adjusts the materials to match on this singular model.  Outfits and hair and such are now retargeted over the singular models and I can easily bulk transfer morphs from the body to the outfits as I go.

While I hope to add more options later, this has already opened up these possible toggle options.

Hair

Outfit

Body Shape

Body Texture

Eye Texture

As I get better at setting up the system, I hope to expand on this further, but for now I am happy with what it has allowed me to do.  Here is a image of Sivana with Lakuu's hair and Anuu's outfit.