Anduo Report - August 1st, 2022

Heya all! Vils here with the lewdy lewds for the week!

pmperfect:

"Hello everyone! This week started with Bear's discovery of a totally new system for baking light in engine, and it is so much better as the one we used previously, there are a lot of variable you can play with and it is sooo much faster to bake, so I started with testing how night lighting in town can look." 

"... and evening one, also couldn't help myself, but play with god rays on the street :)"

"Reworked some old heavy small details and combine them together Modelled a new tower, still plan to detail them a little more, but I'm already quite like them better."

"And lastly started the process of creating our own modules and building in Blender for importing them as a whole into the engine, atm we have a building that were assembled in engine and they have a lot of small imperfections that were bothering my, so I finally get to rework it based on our new concepts, still in earlier stages, but its getting there."

"I will take a week off to recharge and will get back to it a week after and make those building awesome:)  That's all from me for this week! Cya!"

bearcore:

"For Erokin, on monday we ended up talking about lighting and how we are unhappy with the solution we were using so far. We had been using unity's integrated progressive lightmapper. A lightmapper essentially wraps every surface that you declare as "static" (aka it won't move during gameplay) with a huuuuuuuge texture that contains lighting data. The problem is, that we have many incredibly large surfaces but also very small surfaces (the huge walls and stuff like steps of stairs.) This lead to us needing both a high density and a large quantity of "texels", aka lighting information point on the lightmap texture."

"It ended up with 300mb of lightmap on very low settings that didn't look that good, which completely blew our webgl budget of 200mb maximum filesize."

"On monday we were discussing potential solutions to this issue and I remembered that I had used the store asset called Bakery before. Bakery is it's own lightmapper, separate from unity's. It's actually used by call of duty mobile and that game manages to look great in a small file size. So I decided to give Bakery another go and BOY did it immediately change the game for us. The baking results it creates somehow manage to be both super high quality AND small in file size. We get crisp shadows and beautiful raytraced baked lighting. It's kind of a miracle."

"On top of being small in size, it comes with a volumetric probing map."

"Light probes are usually used to light non-static objects. Essentially you take a bunch of arbitrary points all around your level and bake directional lighting onto them. Then during gameplay, you cast that directional light back out again and light the characters with it. The magic that Bakery pulls here which is new, is that instead of having to manually place these light probes, it completely automates this step by using a probe volume. Essentially a bunch of automatically placed light probes on steroids."

"Here is Alda being lit by the volumetric probe-map."

"Tldr: friendship with progressive lightmapper has ended. Bakery is our new best friend now!"

Guard Model

Here's a look at a new model for Gatestons guards that'll be added in soon (TM)!

New Detailed Hairstyle

This is a more detailed hairstyle for Alda that now features a ponytail!

Status

This week was another sprint of progress for RaR's writing! I've made a good amount of progress on one of the final scenes. This scene gets a little meta, but I think it'll be fun to play through! Still a bunch more work to do, but we're so close to the finish!

========== SPOILERS BELOW =========

bearcore:

"This week I've finished the Karen x Jenna animation. A lot of time was also spent on researching new ways to automate some of the very laborious work. Specifically I've looked into automating the boob and hair jiggle. I've tried many different approaches: precalculating physics for each frame of the animation, averaging the position offset over multiple frames and creating a movement vector from there and I've ended on using the DynamicBone addon for unity. It's meant for 3d and there were some issues in making it work for 2d, but I was able to work around them. With this, we now have an "Add Jiggle" button, which automates all the lovely boob jiggle and it also handles hair physics." 

"I've used it in this karen x jenna cg. While it's not perfect, it takes care of SO much manual work, that I think it's a very good solution for now!"

FULL VIDEO 

Jewel Military Uniform

Here's one of Jewel's new outfits in all its operator glory! We had a ton of fun putting this one together.

PINUPS!

The pinup spree continues with tons of lewds flowing through our doors from a bunch of awesome artists!

That's all for this week! We'll see you all next time for another Anduo Report!