February Update!

Hey guys,

Wanted to give you a quick update on progress. And I've got some exciting news!

First, the next update I release will be the cum update!

I recently licensed ThiccWater, a nice looking fluid particle sim a lot of folks use in VRChat. I've been experimenting with it a lot over the last month to understand how it works, what its limitations are, and how best to integrate it into the game.  

What I learned is ThiccWater basically uses standard Unity particle systems, but with special shaders that write to the stencil buffer, and then process those stenciled regions in a second pass to allow the particles to blend smoothly with one another and have transparency that falls off towards the edge of the blobs.  

Also, when ThiccWater particles collide with the world, it emits a splat particle at that location, but these splats only look good when they land on flat surfaces, and they would not move with an avatar even if I added some code to align the surface normals. To get the splats to attach to an avatar would be pretty complicated and it would still look kinda janky. I've got a solution for that however which I'll get into in a moment.

Getting ThiccWater to look good both indoors and out has also been a challenge, but I've worked out some settings that look pretty good in both extremes, though I'm not sure yet what the final appearance for the cum will be. I may opt to allow you to select between a more realistic style or a more stylized white.

As for scaling, that's thankfully not a problem. The system is already set up with constraints and such which adjust the scale of the particle effects correctly, as you can see in the above screenshot where I scaled the horse up.

Now back on the subject of cum colliding with things, as I mentioned above, ThiccWater is pretty limited in that regard. It can make nice cumshots, but the puddles only look good on flat-ish surfaces, and don't work at all on moving avatars. So how do I solve this?

Well, for that, Paint in 3D to the rescue!

Paint in 3D is a system which can draw splats to a rendertexture. What this means is I can do a raycast against an avatar, or just use the location a particle hit, and I can draw a cum splat at that location in the texture, to whatever texture channels I want, and it can fade each of those hits back to the original texture over time. So I can write to the smoothness and albedo channels, or even the normal map and apply a 2D splat that will follow the avatar no matter how it moves.

I was really hoping I could have 3D cum though, so I ended up buying Poyomi Pro which supports hardware tessellation. I thought maybe I could have it generate extra polygons to make the heightmap for the cum on the surface actually create 3D geometry. Early tests with this were not very promising however. But after I get the cum working how I want I can go back to this and try some other things. For now just having the splats on the body with normal maps should look good enough.

I've also considered trying to merge this effect with the stencil buffering technique of ThiccWater to make the cube on the body render with the same shader as the ThiccWater uses. But that's going to be significantly more complicated than just adjusting the albedo and shininess, so I'll leave that for another time.

I've also been working out how I'm going to handle the arousal mechanics and swap between different size cumshots in code and trigger those particle emissions and I've been making good progress there. I figure I'll have 3-5 different size cumshots and randomly choose between them waiting until each completes before selecting the next spurt at random, and while this is going on I'll have an internal cum meter that's draining. This cum meter will fill more slowly than the arousal meter when you're jerking someone off, so if you want to increase their load size you'll have to edge them and then back off to keep building the cum meter up.

This arousal stuff won't be in the very next update btw, I still have to enable the player to grab the dick before I can start doing that. The cum will be tied to the animations for now.

Anyway, things are going well, and I've worked out how to make all this stuff work together how I need it to, so hopefully I'll be able to get an update out for you this month with it working!

Now for the exciting news!

I recently spoke with Zairiza Customs (aka SlapYouWithFish on Twitter) and they have graciously licensed four new avatars to me for use in the game!

Like the other models I've licensed, they're already rigged up for NSFW stuff. But they also have some vore related features like expanding bellies, slightly more detailed throats, and tongue blendshapes!

The new species from Zairiza, which will make their way into the game after the cum update, will be dragons, hyenas, snakes, and synths!

https://zairiza.gumroad.com

But that's not all!

My friend Kudalyn has also graciously licensed her bird avatars to me, along with several nice outfits and a variety of hairstyles!

https://kudalyn.gumroad.com

Sadly, Kudalyn's avatars aren't rigged for NSFW stuff by default, so I reached out to another friend Zarphus, who's made a great cock model called The Taper which would work well for an avian. Or a cetacean if I ever manage to find a good buff male orca model to license!

https://zarphus.gumroad.com

Anyway, that about covers it for this update!