Fitting Room Progress Update #1! (Patreon)

At the beginning of the week we announced Virtual Novel's character creator mode, and since then we've been busy finalizing our environment and discussing the kind of features we want to put in, so here's a blog-style update with some screenshots and info (●ᴗ●✿)

The enviro design of the Fitting Room is inspired by elements of home dressing rooms, walk-in closets, high end outfitters, and fashion consultants, since we wanted something a little more away from exposed store changing room feeling, and more towards a comfortable, private and exclusive area where you can relax and spend a long time playing.

Fitting Room, as with most of Virtual Novel's environments, uses precalculated lighting built with UnrealEngine's Lightmass renderer. We thought we'd take the opportunity to push Lightmass to the extreme with this enviro, and so each of Fitting Room's lights uses IES profiles to emulate the way that light interacts with refractive glass, diffusers, reflectors and lamp shades on its way out of the filament and into the scene. 

Each light uses physically based attributes for color temperature and intensity to represent the type of bulb and its use in the scene; neutral white lights in the dressing room to create a bright and softly lit area, and a more relaxing, lower temperature light in the main room.

Lighting is rendered in a white, neutral environment first to allow us to evaluate how the colors are interacting with eachother and bouncing around the scene, to let us direct the light and shadows more easily to achieve specific effects (such as the nice looking color contrasts between different areas of the scene) and to more easily spot any lighting errors that might come up.

Before blocking out the environment, we put together a list of features that we'd want which might influence some design choices we'd have later - such as the ability to wheel around clothing racks - making it necessary to have minimum width for floorspace and doorways, and the ability to physically interact with clothes - meaning a large dressing unit would be needed.

In Fitting Room, pants, tops, skirts, full dresses and costumes, accessories, socks and tights, and shoes each have their own physical space where items will appear on hangers or in drawers for the player to literally pick out in VR, for the character that they're creating. 

Most categories of clothing will have an associated drawer with more options for modding customizable elements of that garment, such as primary and secondary colors for most tops, and customizable attributes for things like color, pattern, and even opacity for garments like socks and tights.

(More screenshots here!)

Look out for another post next week with more screenshots of textured architecture and props along with elaboration on some features, and hopefully we'll have a date for the first demo build of Fitting Room soon enough (which will be exclusive to Patrons!).

Thanks for your support everyone, if anyone has any suggestions or ideas for Fitting Room feel free to comment or email. 

Have a great weekend, love,

devs