Everyone’s Girlfriend Evelyn - Update 004, Evelyn’s Outfits

This is something of a mini-update to fill you all in on some work I just completed. A mini-update, but an exciting one. 😃

Last month, I completed the preliminary work on Evelyn’s body. I provided her with a variety of arm and hand configurations, and built her file with a variety of outfit changes in mind.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about how Spine handles skins, linked meshes, and other attachments. It was a lot, and I was left a little stumped as to how to proceed! I need to be able to provide Evelyn with a lot of outfit changes to bring the virtual girlfriend experience to life, but if each outfit would require individual animations, then the workload becomes unrealistic!

I went into some detail regarding why this might be an issue on Discord, and I’m not sure anybody wants to read over the technical stuff, but suffice it to say, the solution has been to provide Evelyn with pre-arranged outfits rather than providing the player with individual clothing items like I originally wanted. It’s a compromise, but a necessary one for now so that we can keep moving forward.

With that decision made, I was able to sit down and really think about how to accommodate all of her moving, interchangeable parts, and after some effort, I’ve successfully put together three different outfits for Evelyn which, counting for various stages of undress (including nude Evelyn), has resulted in 10 individual skins to choose from!

More importantly, adding new skins (outfits) or modifying existing ones is incredibly easy! Since skins work in a similar way to video games, where her appearance will change and will apply to all existing animations, expanding Evelyn’s outfits going forward via skins is a fairly simple matter.

The work has paid off, and Evelyn’s assets have been prepared. It’s time to import Evelyn and her many adorable assets into Spine and prepare her for animation!

The next step is to export her skeleton file into Spine, and then the real work begins…

If you’re on Discord, expect to see a lot of little updates in the R&D channel over the next couple of weeks. As soon as a basic rig is functional, I’ll be posting about my progress here as well 🥰

We’re getting closer to a fully animated Evelyn!

Unrelated note to close out on… I think it’s time to design a real logo for this project!