Ultimate Fusion Generator / Character Maker - News & Updates

Thank you everyone for their patience!
We have made a lot of progress towards the Ultimate Fusion Generator/Character Maker.

This post will details the progress we have made and what we have been up to in the last few months.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently, the majority of progress has been on the back-end (see below) so there hasn't been much to really show front-end wise.

CHANGES TO THE GENERATOR/CHARACTER EDITOR

Improvements

*Feet Ratio:  a lot of fusions looked strange with small feet and big hands etc.

so we added this core improvement to resize the feet to match the hand size.
(this was particularly a problem with characters like Sonic or Megaman)

*New texture/stamp method: before stamps were above the character and on a separate layer but now they are in the part itself and under the shadow and highlights so tattoos, scars etc blend very naturally

*Predetermined part limitations: parts were originally checked an calculated using the fusion algorithm but that would take a long time.
So now a characters available parts are predetermined mainly for the purpose of the character editor but it also speeds up the fusion generator.

Additions

*Part adjustment box (for position / size / rotation of parts):  now you can do fine adjustments to perfect your creations this extends to almost every part of the character.

(design for testing purposes only)

Here is an example of adjusting parts using the new adjustment box (below) 

*Ratio adjustment box (size of legs / upper body / head / feet):  now you will be able to chibify characters and fine tune their head size / body length / leg length and feet size.
(see a big head example below)

*Undo & Redo buttons - Color and Texture :  you will now be able to undo and redo color and texture selections 

*Undo & Redo buttons - Fusions :  want to see that fusion you did a few fusions ago? now you can with an undo and redo button!

*Undo & Redo buttons - Parts :  in the Character Editor you can now Undo and Redo parts you have changed "no actually I liked their hair the way it was before" now you just have to click a button. (see an example below)

*NEW PARTS :  (parts we found need to be added in order to make satisfactory fusions)

• Middle horn.
• Sideburns/Side hair.
• Shoulder hair (required for ssj4).
• Clipping masks for the belt.
• Horn crop; horns etc need to blend with any hair type so we have designed the optimal crop mask to look good on any length hair.

*Master Outline :  fusions are made from all sorts of character so when resized, line width doesn't always match and cartoon characters often have thicker lines. 

To make fusions look more solid and less a mixture of parts, we have added the "master outline"
It's a relatively thick line that changes based on the character an resize amount making fusions look A LOT better! (the functionality has not been added just yet but now all characters have the outline done ready and waiting).

It would be easy for us to add a option to select line width in the future too.
(see concept example below)

Notice the lines match the thickest line (the feet)

FIXES

• A LOT of the color palette issues have been fixed.
• Layering issues
• Small head bug
• Double loading bug
• Countless others along the way

PATRON CHARACTER POLL

Expect us to be opening the character polls soon and asking you who you want to seen in the generator!

BACK-END - MASSIVE IMPROVEMENTS

IN SHORT: Full character processing time per character was 5hrs and is now just 30min!

Comments

The majority of the time since our last post has been improving the back-end or the creation, exporting and uploading of the characters, also including the masking and coloring control panels.

Warning the following information may be boring to some and interesting to others.

The reason we have been working so much on the back-end is to reduce the time from the canvas to the generator.
We found this was massively decreasing the progress speed of the generator.
So have been spending time now to reduce the time needed in the future.

New way to convert the characters: we completely changed the method we use to convert the characters
OLD:  avg 2hrs per character - fail rate 50%
NEW:  avg 6min per character - fail rate 0%

Re-masking after every changed/tweak: this would extend the time of each tweak to each part and was irritatingly time consuming. So we have removed the need to use masks!
OLD: un-mask > Edit > re-mask (avg 2min (excluding edit time))
NEW: Edit (avg 0sec, (excluding edit time))

Processing:
OLD: all files are created small for faster loading but the offset mask was a large file that made processing slow
NEW: the new file is 20% the size, so processing is faster (although we have a new outline part now, but still faster! ^_^b)

Monitoring missing files - this has caused hours of lost time checking manually.
Now it automatically checks for missing files, old files and unprocessed files and converts uploads and processes them with one click!
OLD: 3hrs+ per character
NEW: 7min per character

Total Auto Mode: that goes through each character and checks for these problems and runs the necessary process.
(this seems like over kill, checking manually for 1 character is fine but doing that for 100s would slow down progress)

Masker Improvements: originally all masks were an option, zoomed too far in or out, speed was slow but now only the masks relevant to the character are an option, zooms freely, speed is 2X as fast.
OLD 1hr+
NEW 20min

Color Selector improvements
originally we would search through 100s of colors many similar to find which is the t-shirt etc but now we can just click on the t-shirt to select the color
OLD 40min+
NEW <10min

Now we will use these improvements to up the gear on this project and get everyone creating and fusing soon!

Thank you and look after yourself

We appreciate your support and incredible enthusiasm.
Remember you can always PM us to talk about any ideas, requests, and questions (anything really)
We love your input and look forward to seeing what amazing things we can create together.
YOU ROCK! d==(^_^)==b