Emotions + Navigation update (Patreon)

Hey guys.

We've been making some really great progress with our emotions system, thought we'd outline how it works behind the scenes, and how it's gonna be used in Virtual Novel!

We're using a series of Blendshapes to create variations of eyes, mouths, and eyebrows which can be combined to fine-tune faces for specific emotions. There will be around 30-40 of these, so we should be able to create a huge number of faces from all the different combinations!

Blendshape meshes in Maya:

In Virtual Novel, we tweak these Blendshapes using our Emotion System to create "custom" faces for the various moods of the character, using Emotion Maps which store the Blendshape's name and its value. As well as storing Blendshape information to change the physical features of the face, Emotion Maps also contain texture info and other variables, so that an NPC's blush amount, and other texture effects can be changed per emotion. 

An example of an Emotion Map and the values it contains:

Each NPC's Emotion Maps are unique, so as an example, we can fine tune how one character may look if she's happy, compared to another happy character, so that two characters who are in the same mood can still have some variation among them. This will create a nice amount of uniqueness among the NPCs, as well as allowing us to inject more personality into individuals - such as creating an NPC who might be shyer and more reserved about showing how she feels: her Emotion Maps may use milder values to create more muted facial expressions.

When an NPC's expression changes, all the values on their current Emotion Map will smoothly transition to the new emotion's values, creating organic looking facial changes.

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We've also begun working on navigation AI and basic pathfinding. It's still super early stages, but now we have characters that can walk around and find their way to specific locations. Our plan for Virtual Novel's story mode is to have NPCs walking around on routes determined by the time of day and other factors, to create an authentic school environment! There's a clip on our Twitter showing this off a little in the Dorm enviro.

We don't know exactly how we're going to expand this, but currently it looks as if it may be possible to go quite far, such as to have even non-story-mode NPC's live in persistent dorm rooms which they leave and return to for school, and to have individual NPC's have an internal schedule for where they may walk to depending on some personality stats (for example, more diligent NPCs may be more likely to go to the library.) Since there are only a handful of story-mode NPCs with their own arcs, it's one of our goals to make even the less interactable NPCs seem as if they are real characters with their own lives.

We have a little longer to go on interactions with NPCs before we do another build release - so please forgive the lack of a build this month! It should be early April if all goes well, hopefully within the first week. We've unfortunately also run into some issues with performance since upgrading to a new engine version, so hopefully we're not sidetracked with performance testing and optimization for too long. Features like the AI navigation for every character, like in clip above, may not be in the upcoming build, since it appears to be an intense CPU hit. but we're working on alternative methods to try get this to be cheaper.

Thanks for your support as always!