Weekly update 3 (Patreon)

Whoops, forgot to make a post after yesterday's stream! Here's what I got-

What's being worked on?

Simplifying bones, assets

Removing a hundred-ish bones on the rigs means re-assembling them in a new way, which has been a pretty grueling process. I thought re-weighting body parts to follow the new bone structure would be really difficult, but the rig improvements and prior experience have actually made that go easily, and I'm not too worried about jankiness. 

Something that's taken a bit of time is fixing a lot of nagging problems of symmetrical bones being misaligned. E.g. the left and right leg bones being placed differently. Since the assets are placed relative to the bone, it can look correct without the bones being exactly symmetrical. Originally, I didn't realize how important the symmetry would end up being. If it's done right, I can copy and paste transformations on symmetrical bones, meaning I only have to animate one side and then just copy it.

Also, been adjusting the animations to the new bone structure. So, all good stuff, but hella tedious. 

Automation of rig assembly.

During this, I've been standardizing all the naming conventions better, so rigs can be put together in the code more automatically. So in the long term, hopefully all it takes to make a new character work is just name things properly, and the game will automatically assemble and assign any unique animations, body parts, etc. This goes in line with the work on automating toy creation I mentioned in a previous post.

I'm trying my hardest to pick the best path forward- improving and automating tasks, but not spending so much time doing it that the task itself never gets done. It's kinda hard to know beforehand, so I've ended up picking the slower option quite a few times now. It's good for long-term stability and all, but I want to be putting out content again >.<'

Q&A

When will this be done? Well... I'm expecting to be testing the new rig stuff in the game engine quite a bit this week. Depending on how that goes, I'll have a much better idea of when the next functioning build will be ready, since that's the main barrier to the current version being playable. That's the best I got for now.

That's all for now! Been piecing together some good content ideas during this long haul of an update, and I'm anxious to get to try some of them out. But for now, back to rigging. :3