Progress Update

Hey guys... and welcome new patreons!

So as promised, here's an update on what I was working on last month, and what made it into the latest build!

When last we left off, I was working on fluid sim stuff. I made a long technical blog post over on twitter about that, so if you want to know how that went in detail, you can read about it there. But the short version is I made a lot of progress, managed to get light probes and shadows working, got reflections mostly working, and I even managed to get it to be more opaque in the center than at the edges by applying inverted fresnel light to the alpha channel. There's still some more work to do though, and some more experiments to run, but I put it aside so I could finish up a bunch of other stuff that really needed to be done to get the demo out for you.

The first thing I needed to do was bring the house into Blender and seperate all the objects inside from the house itself. It would have been more convenient to keep them all in one FBX, but I'd been having a problem where Bakery would crash sometimes while baking the lighting and corrupt the model's metadata, and I thought seperating out the objects that don't need to be lightmapped might mitigate that issue and possibly speed up Bakery's  initialization phase.

Another reason I wanted to seperate the objects from the house is because every object in the house at the moment is its own mesh. There aren't any prefabs for things like the pillows or vases. And if I want to add physics to them, so they'll react appopriately when say, a giant avatar knocks them over, they need to be prefabs or else every change I make I'd have to manually copy to every other object!

After that, I got to work cutting apart the floor so each individual room and hallway would have its own mesh. I needed to do this because reflection probes work best when they represent a space that's approximately rectangular. If the floor throughout the house were one solid object it would have to use a single reflection probe, and that would lead to you seeing bright windows reflected in the floor even when you're in a the kitchen and there's cabinets and a wall between you and the living room. In the first video I released I'd just made the floors matte to avoid that problem, but shiny floors look much nicer!

Once that was done, I had to do a little more work carving up the house model because some interior walls were part of the exterior wall mesh, and the vent pipe on the roof was a single mesh that continued down into the laundry room, both of which would cause those objects to use the wrong reflection probes.

Finally it was time to re-bake the lighting and place the reflection probes around the scene. Each room, floor, and window required its own probes and I had to adjust the exposure of several of them so as to hide the seams in the floor between the rooms. Outdoor areas also required their own reflection probes.

You probably noticed in the demo that the lighting upstairs is a bit janky and that's because I didn't have time to finish placing all the reflection probes in those areas. You can see for yourself in those areas how important it is that objects in a room are picking up only local reflections!

After all the lighting was re-baked, it was time to add some more characters to the scene, pose them, and rig up their dynamic bones so you can interact with them. I had to manually set up the dynamic bone colliders for this build, and even with the bare minimum of 6 colliders in each hand, one in the tip of each finger and one for the palm, that was still a ton of colliders I had to assign to every dynamic bone script on each character. The full hand collision model however has something like 20 capsule colliders which would be a nightmare to manually add to every dynamic bone script on every character. And if I  update the VR plugin it'll undo all my hard work, so at some point soon I'm gonna need to edit the dynamic bone script to automatically search for the hand colliders instead. This is was a necessary step anyway if I ever want to allow you to import your own avatars, because you won't have any way to add the hand colliders to your dynamic bone components yourself!

Anyway, I think that about covers most of what I did last month... This month, among other things, I'll be working on the menus so I can add the ability to change your size!