Live2D Character Demo v0.1 Public Release!

About a week ago I released a demo to patrons to show off some of the progress I had been making with my Live2D work. This is that demo, now being released to the public so that everyone who is even a little bit interested in the new tech can take a look! The demo is a short walkthrough of the new tech, using a single character and pose to show how the model can be manipulated and animated using this new technique. It's quick-and-dirty, but I hope it highlights the potential of the new system as I work to get it set up in LR2.

Demo v0.1 Downloads:
PC
Mac
Android (If you're on Android please let me know what the experience is like, I haven't been able to find much information about Ren'pys Live2D support for Android)

If you're a patron you've already had a chance to look at this demo. I had hoped to have enough new material to expand it, but most of my work has been on the rendering and organization side of things rather than anything in-engine. Here's a quick rundown of the things I've been working on:

• Higher resolution renders - When warped to be larger the limited resolution of the render (1080 pixels high) became a little too obvious for my liking. I'm bumping the base resolution up to 1440 for the render area. Characters will be scaled down to the appropriate screen size inside of Ren'py, and the result should be crisper images even when bodies are scaled to be much larger.
• Better tiny breasts - A common piece of feedback for this demo was that people wanted the smallest breast option to be smaller. Much of that sense of size was coming from the shadows baked into the boob render. To address that I'm now rendering out a "small_breast" and "large_breast" render. Live2D will swap between the two images at as breast size is reduced, which should help.
• Shadow experimentation - One of the rendering options in Daz allows for me to render out shadows as a separate image (as well as other bits of information, but I'll play around with those later). I'm hoping I can merge these shadow pass layers inside Live2D and eliminate the hard shadow renders. This would allow for warped body parts to properly self-shadow the character. Very large breasts could shadow the entire torso, for example, while small breasts have their shadow region shrink completely. This would also help with the experience for tiny breasts (or allow me to go back to using a single render). This is still very experimental and may not fit cleanly into the workflow.
• Better automation and organization - I've reworked my daz automation scripts to output files in a much more reasonable way. File outputs are now arranged by pose and clothing item, which makes it easier to keep track of what all the files are and how they need to be arranged inside of Live2D. While I was at it I also updated the rendering script to use file references local to Daz's own file storage, rather than file paths hard coded for my machine. That will be very important when I share the automation script so modders can render out their own poses/clothing items.
• Easier Live2D gluing - "Gluing" is the Live2D term for joining the edges of textures together so that they stay in contact when they are warped and distorted. Getting this right is critical for having pieces of clothing stay together when bits of it at are being moved around (keeping shoulders in contact with sleeves, for example). My early demos had all of the glue done by hand, which took a good amount of time and often produced "meh" results. I'm now experimenting with a new technique using a full body render to generate a set of mesh points that can be shared for every image in the pose, which should make gluing faster for me to do and produce more consistent results.

So there's been some good progress going on behind the scenes! There are still some core problems to solve (how to handle expressions, streamlining pattern creation, detail work for eyes, eyebrows, etc.) but I'm confident I can work all of those out with some more time and effort. Thank you all for your understanding about the delays as I try and chug my way through this - it's turning out to be a touch more complex than I envisioned when I got started!