Next Update Forecast

It's going to be, I'd say about a month until the next update arrives. So rather than keep you all in the dark, I'd like to keep you abreast of what I'm doing.

Re-rigging

I brought this up in the previous post, but "Soft Engine", or rather the process of enabling dormant functions in the game's physics, allows for more dynamic breast deformation, and as a result this can cause some strange looking shapes. Rigging/Weighting works in tandem with the engine that drives it, and since I hadn't dealt with this level of deformation before, none of the models are configured for it.

The main problem is that there isn't enough weighting to the sides/bottom of the breast. The weights mostly covers the top half of the breast, making it so that aggressive deformation causes the bottom half to look welded to the ribcage. I posted a small example of this in the last post.

The weighting is largely modeled after the vanilla weights, and I suspect the reason they're rigid on the lower half is that they're designed to emulate clothed/supported breasts. Keeping this in mind I'm keeping the supported/"skindented" weights about the same. As you can imagine I don't think Team Ninja was considering nude, free breasts when weighting their models.

Since I'm revisiting the weights, I'm also revisiting the general weighting of the midriff as well, which had some sharp intersections that caused the torso to look a bit too stiff. This is probably gobbledygook to a lot of you so just understand that things will look better.

Surprise Body Improvements

Since I'm revisiting the base bodies, it stands to reason that I should improve some other things other than just the weights. However, since the next update is a little ways out, about a month as I forecasted, I'd like it to be a surprise... although I'm sure you can probably guess. All I can say is look forward to it!

Post Processing Improvements

Every once in a while, I'm delighted by a user turned contributor who can help me improve GS/BP, and in this case he helped me resolve something that has been the cause of many headaches! He seems to wish to remain anonymous so I will simply say that you will be pleased with this unnamed figures' contribution.

Workload

A significant obstacle of reweighting the bodies is that, alongside them, the costumes must also be reweighted. That's like, 200 costumes! Wowza! Needless to say that puts a lot on my plate, which is why I expect this update will be a while. However it's not for nothing, as the models certainly had some clipping issues before the soft engine change, so this'll let me do a bit of housekeeping that I've been putting off!