Sunday Progress Report (Patreon)

EDIT: appended fixed versions of the Tiger with a Toy animation, re rendered with better texture that shows the pink against the orange I also did a little bit of color grading.  

This week I've been working on the joint ventures of rebuilding the fox so he supports the Automated Stretching System and getting the skin tension effect implemented on the fox and the yeen. I spent Monday and Tuesday doing some R+D to see if I could get a full tension map system working. This is a heatmap generated by the amount of compression/expansion a mesh goes through compared to a rest state. The generated map can be used to mask textures or blending between meshes. The plugins out there that do this either have not been updated in years (so not compatible with my environment) or are too janky to get running reliably, after attempting to build one myself I decided to go with a slight extension to the manually animated one I showed off last time. (will revisit this when I've put some more time into low level api code)

Wednesday saw me applying this manually animated one to both the fox and the yeen, along with adding the needed animation to the last camera angle, and re-rendering (see atttached), also I'm down from 4min30 to 3m30 per frame from the GPU upgrade. ^_^

Thursday I wanted to finalize a chunk of work I'd done so I could show off maybe a quick playblast featuring the fox and a toy to the Executive Producers. An issue came up, when characters are on/ very near to the world origin (0,0,0) the stretch system worked fine, however things break if moved any distance from it. The tiger was made and demoed all in one spot. This meant Thursday was spent re jigging the rig now everything that should happily move wherever the rig goes (and I also optimized some other systems). The rewite ate a chunk of time and I decided to just go all in on getting the tiger (who already had a test animation done) up to a standard where I could show off this system in action fully rendered. Below is a demo rendered loop showing the Automated Stretching System on the tiger. =^_^= (the fox is now also done and at some point will get his own toy and animation)  

As the two side activities kinda blurred together and took up a good chunk of the week, next week is going to be all about the SIEO p3 animation. Time will be spent with further animation polishing (and I might have time to get it to sim)  

Let me know what you think of the tiger and the toy. and if you like the new skin tension effects in SIEO p3 ^_^