October 2023

General

During the month of October I've been focusing on in-game character development and asset management.

Character Update

The character update is something I would have liked to have done for the Character Modding update vote, but I realized I had to do it now as it would have been too restrictive afterwards.

So I had to make a whole series of updates to my various tools to get everything working properly together.

BleuRaven Rig Tool

I've released an update of my Rig generator to include new features and optimize export time.

(I’ve talked about this with a lot more details in the September development diary).

BleuRaven Skinning Tool

Skinning is used to define which part of the mesh should follow the bones.

The traditional method is to paint the weight of the bone onto the mesh so that the software knows how to animate the geometry when the bone moves.

For my part, I use my addon and Blender's "auto parent" to generate the skinning, which works like the rig with layers of actions to do.
Now I can regenerate Talas’ entire rig with a single click.

MMVS Rig Layout

This part is not yet finished and I don't have a lot of new things to present for October.
Specifically, the Layout and the way the Rig is configured for MMVS and the various functionalities I decide to add.

This is also where I define the various layers to be added, the basic bones and their configuration.

For the moment, I'm focusing on the update linked to the changes in my tools. I still need to update the spline management for the tongue and the spine.

Blender For Unreal Engine Export Tool

I also had to update my export addon to Unreal Engine for my new workflow.

Being able to handle modular exports and the new bone orientation for Unreal Engine.

The tools I create are not only used for MMVS, but are also used in other product by other companies.

So I have to keep track and manage compatibility with previous versions. This also takes a lot of time.

MMVS Character Management

And finally, of course, I had to update the game and scripts to take advantage of the new workflow and asset management. (Assets)

Character assets are now split into several modular parts, and although this makes management a lot heavier, it makes it much easier for me to manage the code and functionalities linked to each part, such as collisions, animations, level of detail and so on. This was more or less the case before, especially with collisions, but it's much more advanced now.

At the same time, I can more easily optimize characters, especially macros, which can be cut into ten or so parts with a much higher maximum level of detail.

All these updates also save me time when I work on the character modding update.

Maw update

Linked to the Vore update, I'm working on the in-game rendering of the talas mouth. I've redone the tongue model and added slime filaments.

The slime is dynamic and animated, of course. I'll probably reuse the code for other things like sweat, blood or whatever.