Update - New build!

Hey guys,

I've got a new build for ya!

Recap:

So, if you recall back in January, I updated the game to the latest version of Unity. But there wasn't any new content, so I didn't release a new build at that time.

Then in February, I continued work on the game, but had to get my covid booster shot before I went to ANE.  Thankfully I didn't get covid while at the con in spite of being unable to avoid the crowds!

Anyway, I got right back to work on the game as soon as I got back, and while I might have been able to release a build at the end of February, it wouldn't have shown much progress, so I continued to hack away at it, and I now have something worth showing off!

I did a ton of work on this build that may not be immediately apparent, but there's also some new stuff to look at as well!

The BORING stuff:

The first thing I did was fix the lighting. The upstairs lighting was completely overhauled. I added reflection probes to all the rooms to get rid of a lot of the ugly egde sheen you get when the wrong probes are used, and enabled some of the ceiling lights. I did this to fix some really ugly lighting artifacts that were on the ceiling. I also enabled the countertop lights in the kitchen because that was very dark and looked boring.

Another thing I did, related to the kitchen being dark, was I increased the bounced light multiplier, to get more light into the house. My goal here was to reduce how over exposed the ourside looked from inside the house,  and the only way to solve that is to get more light in the house.

Once I did that, I then played around with the post processing auto-exposure settings. But instead of adjusting them within Unity on my desktop, I went into VR and adjusted them while I could see exactly how it would look in-headset. I ended up making a few changes which I think improves the look of the game. It's subtle, but basically the average exposure of everything was a bit high, so I brought that down slightly, and adjusted the lighting curves a bit. I think the end result is a bit easier on the eyes and looks more realistic. Also the difference in brightness between outside and inside is reduced so the outside is not as over exposed as it was, and when you go inside you don't really notice as much when the auto exposure adjusts because it doesn't need to change as much.

While I was doing this, I was also making tons of adjustments to the materials, adjusting brightness and saturation as needed. For example, reducing the brightness of the white paint on the house a bit, so it doesn't scew with the auto exposure and make the blue wall right next to it really dark when you can't see the sky. I spent so many hours tweaking this stuff, you have no idea! And it's still not perfect, but that's what happens when you try to rely on reflection andl light probes instead of lightmapping everything. Which I could do, except it would mean I can't make stuff move and fall over if I want a character to get larger inside a room, so I decided from the start to do things the hard way so as not to set expecations too high in terms of how the game would look. Also all those props were crashing Bakery and it was taking an hour to bake the scene each time I made a change to the lighting.

Avatar lighting trick!

And speaking of lighting, as I was finishing up this week and tweaking the appearance of the avatars, adjusting their heights so different species are slightly taller or shorter to add variety, I noticed the texture of the shark lady in the shower was very bright when I brought her out into the living room to compare with the wolf. Correcting her texture there however resulted in her being very dark in the shower.

What was going on? Why was she so dark in the shower? Was she picking up the wrong reflection probe? No, that was fine. Then a bad light probe perhaps? The objects near her looked fine though.

It finally dawned on me that the pivot point of all the avatars... and this is true of VRChat as well... is located at their feet, NOT at their center of mass! And of course, the feet are close to the floor, where they may pick up any light probes that end up under the floor, which can happen if you automatically place them as I did, because there are thousands, or it can simply happen because they're not placed perfectly flush with the floor and if there's a room below, you will be in a light probe tetrahedon that includes the probes below the floor.

So what did I do? Well, I could have figured out which probes were causing the issue, and tried to move them to locations where the issue would go away, but that would never be a perfect solution since there's two floors in the house and characters upstairs will pick up some probes from downstairs if they're sampling from their feet. Thankfully, for each mesh on an avatar, Unity allows you to specify an object to serve as the position that the probes are to be sampled from. Sometimes you end up having to use this so the lighting across an avatar or object will be consistent if its made up of multiple meshes. But in this case, I realized that if I set all the meshes to reference the hip bone as the point to sample the lighting from, that would be roughly the center of mass of the avatar.

Now, I could have chosen the spine or the chest, but it occured to me that if I were in full body in VRChat, and I bent over at the waist, if I were using the spine or chest as the reference, my lighting might change in a way which would look weird. Whereas the hips will only move vertically if I crouch or I lie down, and I'd expect the lighting to change then.  

Anyway, it's not really that big a deal usually, and most of the time it doesn't change the avatar's lighting much, but it was just a eureka moment for me when I realized what was going on and how to solve it.

More BORING stuff:

So in addition to all those lighting changes, I also redecorated a bunch. The paintings are not final by any means I just threw a computer texture on there to have SOMETHING. I also deleted a bunch of props, and moved around others, and changed up the colors of some things.

And I fixed the mirrors in the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, and added some new rugs here and there.

Speaking of rugs, I enabled lightmapping on the rugs to see if it made any improvement in their appearance, and I had another eureka moment when the lighting in the living room became decidedly less orange and more pleasant looking. You see, because the rug wasn't there when calculating the lightmaps... from Bakery's point of view i mean... the floor was what was bouncing light around the room. And the floor, being wood, is rather orange. Of course there are some dark spots at the edge of the rugs because the light from the underside is leaking around the corner but I'll worry about how to fix that at some future point.

Outside, I tweaked the foliage. I'd noticed the bushes were changing color slightly as the LODs changed, so I fixed that. I also realized they and the grass were not swaying in the wind like the trees, so I fixed that as well. Then I added a few new trees here and there around the property. I added one big tree behnd the garage, because along with the plants moving in the wind, the dappled light coming through the leaves helps make the scene feel more alive, and more varied.

The pool water shader I had to disable. It does not currently work with Single Pass Instanced rendering and I didn't have time to examine the shader in Amplify to see if there was something I could change to make it work. So for now I just threw a transparent plane down with a water texture on it. I'll look into making that nice again at some future point.

And now on to the FUN stuff!

Of course, I couldn't release a build where all I'd done is tweak the appearance of things, so in addition to all that I outlined above, I've added two new characters: A male polar bear, and a male gray and white rabbit!

The bear can be found in the garage, which is now open and outfitted with some interesting props I won't spoil here. The bear is animated rubbing his shoulder, and features the new Zawoo peen model, which is much more detailed than the previous ones the game has featured.

The rabbit is upstairs in the guest room, sitting on the edge of the bed, swinging his feet. I thought the micros would appreciate this pose! I used the guest room because it has nicer lighting than the master bedroom.  Eventually I'll add a night mode to the game, which is where the master bedroom will likely see more use.

Our rabbit firiend uses the same Zawoo peen model as the bear, but using the blend shapes I was able to make it long and thin with a small knot and a taperd head, while the bear's is shorter and much thicker with a big knot. Both have dynamic bones so they swing a bit as the models animate. Hopefully I can re-enable hand colliders for those soon!

I'll post a video showing off the new stuff on Twitter and e621 in the next few days for those of you unable to play the game. I haven't had a chance to record one yet and I really don't wanna spoil it with screenshots!

A link to the build will be in another post for the higher tiers shortly!