Anduo Report January 12th, 2024

Anduo Report January 12th, 2024

 Welcome, cleanse thyselves with thy news from the creators! 12 moons have passed - our vigils still prevail. 

 Let's begin.

Less.:

 Here are Less early concepts of the possible elemental butt plugs screen:

Bear:

Heya!

After taking a few days off after releasing the 0.3 version for Christmas, I got right back to work.

The first thing I investigated was a crash that some of you unfortunately experienced. It turns out to be limited to AMD rx500’s graphics cards. Luckily someone in the dev team was able to reproduce the issue and we found the root cause: Transparent Materials. I filed a bug report but haven’t heard back from epic yet: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/drawing-translucent-material-using-a-rx580-crashes-unreal-5-3-2/1591279

We’ll see if they fix this. For now, we have a workaround by using Vulkan instead of DirectX11.

After that, I focussed on performance. In the 0.3 build, there is only a single loading zone. Either the entire interior of the city is loaded or it is not loaded. The obvious first step was to split this up further. Doing so boosted my fps from 20 to 60 at 4k with a 3070 gpu. Next, I used the ui that Zanzo is currently working on and implemented a few graphics settings, including DLSS 3.

The next order of business was the transition from the Alda you see in 0.3 to the new Alda model that JuggerDown has worked on. By now, the first Alda model is not up to the standards we have for our character models anymore.

The biggest change we made was to the face. Here you can see the faces next to each other. The new face is much closer to the original concept art of Alda.

With the new model, I decided to redo the skeleton/rig we use to animate her as well. The new rig has improvements all over, most notably the face though.

There’s also improvements with how joints work when they get pressed together tightly. Lots of more controls and improvements all over.

However… Because of all of these upgrades, the animations from the aldav1 rig do not directly work on the aldav2 rig. Bones aren’t perfectly in the same position, rotation or don’t even have the same setup.

To fix this, there are a lot of approaches. First, I tried to use the tool we use in Blender, Autorig Pro. This kinda worked but because of how complicated our setups tend to be when animating, each animation changes the rig a little bit with things called constraints. These constraints would make translating from aldav1 to aldav2 quite difficult.

My next attempt was to take the baked animation we get after exporting with Autorig Pro and use unreals built-in tools to remap the animations from aldav1 to aldav2.

On the right you can see the list of bones that are translated from v1 to v2. As this is intended to specifically work with rigs that are different, this gets us very close to a working translation. However, it’s not perfect.

Especially in sex scenes, where very precise positioning of bones is crucial (if the mouth is not perfectly on the dick, it is immediately obvious) this isn’t quite good enough yet.

To fix this I first attempted to use the unreal Control Rig feature. This essentially gives us what Autorig Pro gives us in blender but in unreal. The intention behind the feature is to make it so you can animate directly inside of Unreal Engine. This is really powerful and we might look into this more in the future.

Sadly though, it is not possible to change animations using this control rig. While it’s possible to bake an animation to this rig and then add an additive animation layer on top of that, this introduces even more inprecision.

Right now it seems that the only way to fix the animations in unreal is to use a full fk rig. Essentially it’s just moving the bones directly, without a fancy control rig. Here’s a before and after:

That’s where I’m at right now. I’m going to fix up all the existing aldav1 animations and then we’ll move on to more new content! C:

Other than that, I’ve just sent off a ton of voice acting for Limar, Alda, Cura and Dala. I’m excited to see what comes of it!

Lenchi:

Often concept artists work is not seen in the game, you usually get to see the finished models that were based off the concept.

So Bear has added Lenchi’s concept arts to the game for everyone to observe:

PMPerfect:

PMPerfect sketching out ideas for the area outside of Gateston:

Here is some steps taken in to the works

Jugger:

 Jugger has been diligently preparing Alda to be fully reborn in to Unreal

PacKing:

 PacKing's early possible concepts for Alda's armour breaking:

Also, observe, gobbo peen:

Who put so much bubblegum in this chest? Sheesh. 🥵🍬  :

Nerada:

Nerada channeling his inner scene director in to Erokin:

Swurst:

Swurst reworking some of the previous scenes from the Unity build and adding more to it:

Zanzo:

Zanzo is continuing his work on the UI and developing a global Settings System which is now as good as finished in terms of functionality, while the graphical elements being placeholders for now.

Desva:

Desva helped out with the luscious landscapes outside the castle walls:

Thank you for attending the first vigil this year. We are honored to have your attendance again this year.

Have a splendid rest of the year of the dragon!