Character tools are done!

Greetings! I've been up to a lot of different things lately, stuff that needed to be done for a long time, but something kept getting in the way of me doing them.

Character System

After yet another total overhaul, I think I have my character system at the point when I can say "I'm happy with it". I even planned Taur and Naga skeleton support in the future, introduced support of obscure kinky things like tailmaws, improved full-tour internal anatomy, spreadable urethras, and worked more on my specialty dish, the seamless transition between anthro and feral.

Why did I need to spend that much time on this modular rig again? Answer is simple, I plan to make a very advanced character customization toolset, and this is the most important step of getting there. From now on, every model that I make will be added to a library of interchangeable character parts, stuff that I can re-use in the future, remix, insert into different games and experiences, render in pictures and animations, combine into bundles to sell as VR avatars, take commissions, and even make a dedicated character customization software for people to play with and export the resulting models.

Since everything I do revolves around sexy scaly/furry/feathery characters, it made perfect sense to invest into a robust system of creating and re-using them across all my projects. It will now dramatically speed up my character modeling process in the future.

And I'm relieved to say that it is, for the most part, done now, at least my personal toolset for it. Oh and by the way, I called it Dynamic Interspecies Customizable Skeleton, but you can call it DICS!

This synthetic fella, while not designed to be sexy, acts as a standard preview skeleton or a mannequin for my newly established character standard. 

Using the characters

So, after the Deform Rig was done for my characters, I passed it onto Hopfel, who quickly made an animation Control Rig in Unreal Engine 5 for it.

If you don't know the difference between the two, think about puppets. The deform rig is the armature of a puppet, and the control rig are the strings attached to the puppet, which the puppeteer (animator in this case) uses to create motion. The puppeteer does not interact with the armature directly because… Well, you don’t want your hands to be seen and it's way too many joints to move at once!

Hopfel is now animating something that even I don't know much about besides it's something egg-related. I think the idea was to make it for the Easter, but, well, we all know it's never late to make some eggs!

However, I, personally don't feel comfortable animating in Unreal Engine 5 (too slow for me), and it looks like I will need to make a control rig of my own in Blender. The good thing from that, is that I will be able to distribute the rig as a Blender file, when I eventually package this model (and many others) as an avatar for VR.

❗ I NEED YOUR POSE IDEAS ❗
It is easy to pose the character now, thanks to the rig... But I worked so hard on technical things so I'm all out of ideas for lewd pictures! Perhaps some of you could suggest a couple ideas, and I can make those poses and renders for everyone to enjoy? That would be awesome!

Project planning

Aside from working on models, I've been busy to get the game part of my work moving again. It is still an ongoing process - it involves prototyping, project planning, trying (and failing) new things, coming up and testing new ideas and workflows.

I'm purposefully keeping the description abstract for now, as I'm not yet ready to announce anything, besides that I'm looking for ways to use my new flexible character system. Something exciting, something playable, and something small enough to provide small, but regular build updates for Patrons.

A lot of factors are pressing on me, hindering my ability to re-achieve that game-making state still, but I'm trying to solve them each day and night (seriously, I've been thinking about that in my dreams already). I even wrote a detailed post explaining what exactly is hindering me and what are my attempts to solve it, but it turned out very long and technical - I'm not even sure people would be interested in reading it (but let me know if you are).

Learning new skills

I haven't done any gameplay-related programming since my earliest demo. While I learned plethora of skills over time after, such as shaders, technical art, improved my modeling and design skills, rigging, effects - I never touched that side of programming until recently, it was exclusively Hopfel's area. Now, with him having much less time to work on the project, I need to figure a solution where I would be able to affect what was only his part of development.

The first game demos were done only on Blueprints (the internal scripting language Unreal Engine 4 and 5 uses), and using it helped me get more comfortable with programming. But the world isn't standing in place… Back then, one could make a game on Unreal Engine 4 programming on Blueprints only. But nowadays you're just out of luck if you don't know C++, even despite that Blueprints are still there, and much better than they were before.

I've been dedicating a lot of time to learn and explore new opportunities so I can get the control over programming my game back to myself. And while C++ is way too complicated for me still, I've been looking for alternatives on how I could use other, less complicated programming languages to achieve my goals.

Just like with the project planning, this is an on-going process that I can't talk much about yet. But oh my, I'm dedicating so much of my effort there. And it upsets me that all this effort is mostly invisible unless I tell you about it - well, hence I'm writing this.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading!
I already have the next post written, I plan on posting it soon.

With lots of Dragon Love,

- Salireths