It's gonna be May!

Hey guys,

So it looks like the first build I release will be this month. I've got a bunch of things to update you on, and if you haven't been following my Twitter you should check that out because I've released a video with some of the progress so far!

https://twitter.com/FuroticVR

I posted it on twitter because I can't put NSFW in public posts on Patreon and I want those who haven't joined the Patreon yet to be able to see some of the content that will be available. In the future I'll be posting the videos here as well in private posts, but I may occasionally post small updates to Twitter that don't make it here, so I just want to make sure you don't miss out on any content!

Anyway, on to the update!

These past two weeks since I launched the Patreon, I've been working on a bunch of things.

First I did some additonal tweaking to the post processing, because it looks a bit different in-headset than it does in the Unity editor.

Then I added a couple of Ghostly's models to the scene, and made them gigantic because I'd like to include a shrink / growth ray in the game, and I was curious how big was realistic to have the characters in a fenced in yard like this.

After that, I created a new tan body texture for the female bear which you can see in the video, and purchased Poiyomi Pro to see if it was suitable for use or not. I was hoping if I used Poiyomi's standard-ish shader model with subsurface scattering that I might get improved visuals over the normal standard shader, but in the end, the standard shader won out, looking more realistic and softer than what Poiyomi could achieve. I may still use Poiyomi for some objects in the scene however, because Standard has some issues with reflections indoors that create a rim-lighting effect on some objects that should be matte, and create shiny metallic reflections in shadowed regions on objects like porcelain plates. Perhaps more reflection probes would reduce that effect, but I don't want to have to place hundreds of the things in the scenes.

I then added eye tracking to the avatars. In the demo video, it's only enabled for the male shark, but you can see him notice me when I approach, and then follow me with his eyes and head as I move around. The plugin I used for this is really powerful and you can specify points of interest in the scene using game objects. The plugin will automatically look at the eyes and mouth, but with the points of interest feature I can not only have the characters randomly look around the room, but also at different parts of your body.

Next, I purchased some SpeedTree models to populate the yard with foliage that looks great, runs fast, and is affected by wind. 

I also purchased a grass shader during Unity's 50% off sale to try to give the yard a nice lawn that would look good even if you're tiny, but sadly it was unsuitable. I'll look into other options for this later, but grass isn't a very high priority.

Speaking of the Unity sale, during that I also picked up:

1. A plugin to allow me to do fluid simulation.
2. Amplify Shader Editor, which may come in handy for the previously mentioned issue with reflections, or with some issues I discuss below regarding fluid simulation.
3. A plugin and assets to help with the creation of the user interface.
4. A utility which allows me to modify pre-existing animations using IK within Unity.
5. A decal system which will allow me to dynamically apply material splats to skinned and non-skinned meshes, which in my case will be used to create the apperance of wetness where the fluid particles collide with surfaces.
6. And something called PuppetMaster, which is by the makers of FinalIK, and which allows one to blend between animations and IK in realtime as needed. I don't know if this will actually be useful to me or not, but it along with many of the other assets I bought were 50% off last month, so I figured it was worth picking up.

Fluid simulation ended up being a far bigger pain in the ass than I'd hoped. I could just use lots of mesh particles, but I want it to look as realistic as possible! Unfortunately it turns out the fluid sim package I'm testing doesn't normally support light probes, occlusion probes, or reflection probes because it renders metaballs as a procedural mesh on your graphics card, and so doesn't get the full lighting setup that meshes in Unity typically receive. I dug way down into Unity's undocumented code base trying to find a solution for this, because without all this lighting info the stuff looks great outside in the sun, but is so bright indoors that it messes with the auto-exposure. I did manage to get light probes working, but reflection probes have proved a tough nut to crack, and I haven't even tried to get the occlusion probes functioning yet.

But there is some good news, I think, which I got today on the fluid sim front. The creator of the plugin informed me that it is possible to force it to copy the mesh from the card back into memory and then render it with the usual Unity methods, which should enable all those lighting features I need, even though it will be less performant. I'll be working on that this week to see how it looks, and how it performs, to see if I can still make use of it or not.

Now, if it turns out it's too slow to render the fluids in realtime using this method, I can still use it to make static meshes that I can animate in other ways. For example, I could model smaller spurts with it, and then use those like particles. Or I could use the auto-rigging feature of the system to add bones to strings of saliva and attach those bones to the roof of the mouth and jaw, for example.  

Anyway, I think that about covers everything I got done these last two weeks.

The next things I'll be working on, aside from fluid sim stuff, will be adding mesh colliders to the avatars so you can touch them, and fixing up the house in Blender. All the windows are one sided, I need to subdivide some parts and seperate the house from all the objects inside it, and the normals need fixing in some places. I also need to make all the objects dynamic instead of static and give them colliders so when I do implement a growth ray, characters can push the furniture out of the way! I'll probably also add another character or two to the scene for you to see.

And once I have that stuff ready, I'll release the first build so you can walk around and check the place out!