DevBlog -Frost (Patreon)

Hi!

Let me tell you what i did and how my Projects are going, there is much to tell you!

Last week i got pretty sick and stuck in bed with my drawing tablet, i could not get out of bed so i decided to sculpt on a few characters on my todo list.

Art Stuff:

in kind off a feverdream i finished the Deermodels yay :3

WIP Image out of ZBrush,

https://ibb.co/C84VGqG 

The Deers are planned as Addon for Frost after it released, made a very fun little story for that featuring the Deerqueen and you as her prisoner.

The Outfit of the DeerQueen in 3ds max and showing the Rig/BoneStructure

https://ibb.co/3dm3f4v 

I also took the time and Retopologized her completly by hand,

The parts of her body where the Fur is is highly optimized, i learned many things with retopology while making my other characters, with her especially i learned how important manual Triangulation in some parts can be (its the process of making Triangles out of the quad polygons with four points) 

Will make the same changes to the Fox and Wolfmodels too, which is easy i need to triangulate them anyway, usually i let 3ds max do this automaticly but its not hard to do it by hand and well worth the extra work.

You see on the model some Triangles especially on the Ribcage and Mouth regions,

https://ibb.co/x3wjNS3 

I noticed that the fur shading on those parts look much better with higher polygon count, For the rest i made a Normal map for her body,

https://ibb.co/KGzyBz9 

If you look closely you can see her muscles being represented in the Fur lighting, this is the Normal map shading on my Fur shader (Especially good visible in the BellyButton :)

If you look, you will not see those features represented in the Modelgeometry,

https://ibb.co/mXX3zFp 

or Texture:

https://ibb.co/v1MFbS9 

Having this Details in the Normal channel basically means, that the fur will much more optimized and still have many little details especially with light touching it,

I am already on it to give EVERY character of mine (Maru the Fox, Bunnys, Wolfes and the SnowTigress) Normal map shading like the Deers.

This is 100% backwards compatible and all i have to do is baking out the texture from the High res models i already made when making these characters.

So you can be exited for having this kind of shading on your beloved Maru too :3

https://ibb.co/52ZYJ7s 

Also, 

I am always "Remastering" my older characters with all those things i learned,

Here have a look at Mirages outfit, its the bottom part.

https://ibb.co/M9G2qRn 

The Current/Old model uses a Baked texture+normal map, for the new outfit i plan on using a higher resolution model with the different parts (Gold, Satin and so on) spitted after material.

This gives much better resolution on the points where materials touch, also it removes the need for a Mesh normal map and allows me to use material normal maps wich all together will look much better than the current technique, even with 4k textures.

Technical Stuff:

i also like to thank you♥ for you awesome bug reporting, i am nearly done with the update for the frost minigame wich fixes those, only missing is a clipping bug in the sleeping bag scene where i got the perfect solution already.

New IK Method!

i finally solved a problem which i had from the early beginning, i really like to use not only the Head/Neck as "Look at IK" when a character looks at something but also the Ribcage/Spine

But there is a problem, the Arms are on the ribcage and when it rotates the Location for the hands changes because the arms are moving with it.

In many scenes i solve this with manual IK (Inverse Kinematic) Locations where the hands "Snap on" and the upper/forarm rotations get calculated in realtime by the engine.

I realized, i can use the original hand location+Rotation, i just create a Cached version of the animation currently playing inside the animation blueprint, lock on two helper bones which are not rigged on the character model, and later use them as target for the new hand locations after the Ribcage/spine look at.

You can see it in the video above, her Ribcage moves as you walk around her, but her hands are always perfectly on target, i did not create the old helper locations for that its all dynamic taking the cached animation technique.

Its really easy, and i feel stupid to not found it sooner..

https://ibb.co/LdHwPW1 

Copy Helper Transformation to Original Animation

https://ibb.co/7VpJwrJ 

Tell the IK system to get these Helper bones as target for the new Hand Locations.

I already added this "Feature" to the next Harem release, its a blessing especially with those four legged creatures, there was always the Breathing animation slightly moving the Frontlegs, now this is gone! 

Whats Next?

I continue working on The next harem release featuring the Ponys,

Now i feel much better and been back on my workstation!

But its hard to say wich will be first the Pony harem game or The Frost update, 

also after the very next Frost Update i make it aviable for all patrons, i believe (hope) after the next Bugfixupdate there won't be any big gamebreaking bugs left. 

For the Harem is still the Framework a thing i need to work on, to be precise the Event part of it that controls wich characters get added to what and how the move, i use a master animation blueprint to syncronize them and there is a lot of logic to make sure it controls dynamic.

its totally different from what you have seen in Harem 0.8, where it was basically a buggy mess :x

♥u

and i will be back soon, with more grapics card melting stuff! 

Your Furrier,

Video above Download Link:

https://vimeo.com/user143774380/download/607825708/ad0cc33aba 

https://ibb.co/52ZYJ7s