Vore Tournament 2.0 - New anthropomorphic character set now available on GIT!

Today I'm happy to announce a surprise feature for Vore Tournament. To be fair this was a total surprise for me as well... granted it was one of those things that suddenly pops to mind, and leads you to say "I have to do this straight away". It took a week of continuous work to achieve, but in the end I was very satisfied with the results. So, what is this all about:

Some of you might have seen my earlier post, in which I announced a set of anthropomorphic characters for TheDarkMod. They were a group of models based on the wolf published by UntiedVerbeger on Furaffinity (licensed under CC0) to which I also helped with a bunch of improvements at the time. I went ahead and divided it into a broader character set, which I retextured accordingly and successfully rigged to the game's armature.

It wasn't long before I realized that the models I came up with would make perfect characters for Vore Tournament. So I snatched up the blend I had, and embarked on a yet another editing journey; I rigged all characters to the Xonotic armature, created the belly states for each, generated colormap compatible textures... and after hours of stitching meshes and editing images, Vore Tournament got a brand new set of furries. The new characters contain numerous new features such as:

• A total of 5 different species are now present in the game: Wolf, fox, leopard, squirrel, rabbit. Each of them comes in 3 different genders: Male, herm, female. Each of those comes in 2 variations: One with hair and a hairless version, with each species using an unique hair style. In total there are 30 selectable characters.
• Higher quality model which is more realistic and relatable, compared to the unnatural looking fox based on the Gak. The texture of the body retains its original high resolution format (4096 x 4096). Both of the internal models contain extra detail too... such as a tongue and wrinkles for the mouth, and a throat you can see through at the top of the stomach.
• One mistake made with previous Vore Tournament characters was creating bloated stomachs without increasing their polygon count. The stretching resulted in low-polygon bellies with pointy edges. This practice was no longer repeated with the new model: The mesh was adaptively subdivided so that the polygon count remains constant... resulting in much smoother and higher quality vore bellies.
• The model uses a modified armature, which allows for more realistic movement compared to the previous player. For instance, the lower parts of the digitigrade legs are rigged to the foot bones, whereas the footpaws are rigged to the toe bones... allowing the leg to bend much more realistically during walk animations. The bloated belly versions were also weighted after having been created, instead of being edited after parenting the mesh to the armature... resulting in properly calculated bone weights for each and allowing bloated guts to wobble much more realistically, such as knees pushing on bulges as the legs bend.
• Different internal models for each species: Although the difference is subtle, the length of the muzzle and the shape of the stomach matches each individual race. The models and textures of the internals are based on the character mesh instead of being designed separately, making them much more consistent.
• Stomach and mouth models are now armature animated. The mouth will idly open and close while the tongue wriggles around, whereas the stomach will bend and pump around the player. The previous mouth and stomach were static models with no rig or animation.
• The colors of your character are fully customizable from the player settings menu, similarly to the previous model: The shirt defines your body color, whereas the glow defines your hair and eye color (eyes glow in the dark).

Below is a group of screenshots showcasing the models. As there is a lot of content, I tried to squeeze as much as possible into just a few images.

http://i.imgur.com/RcGrQvV.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/bsFi8oB.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/pjgrA6m.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/5U0xKUh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/kn7DwSX.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/xiATBVY.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ZmrK0aR.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/JxrVuYz.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/PKycNXl.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Uik2Xwg.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/IGD9nKQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/lBr2VIJ.jpg

The new players are available in GIT master, and you can use them by updating to the latest version of Vore Tournament. The old fox player has been removed, but I plan to make it available elsewhere as a mod that can be added to servers. Use the player settings menu to select a new appearance after issuing a "git pull".

Important: Given the amount of work that was put into editing and porting those models, I decided it's fair to charge Patreon with the arrival of this feature. Even if this isn't a VT release, it is perhaps one of the biggest improvements made for the project thus far, and I believe it's definitely in the spirit of what people are supporting me for. I may charge for major new features in the future as well, granted they are something important and exciting for the players.