MacGruber_Laboratory

Monthly Report: December

Added 2020-12-28 22:55:24 +0000 UTC

Hi! In the beginning of this month I had a poll and my patreons (you!!) voted for me building a fancy scene. So I'm working on that, but it will still be a while. Note that can't commit to any particular release date or feature set, it will be done when it is done.

The current plan is a Femdom POV handjob scene with 2 girls. Obviously this won't be a boring AnimationPattern moving a hand up and down....I want girls switching hands, using just one/two fingers, using toys, various caress movements, the girls tilting the chair (with the player!) back into the pose shown on the second screenshot. Of course, I want that all seamless and random/procedural, so the player does not know what crazy thing happens next, every scene run will be different. That will likely require at least one girl being able to actually walk 90deg around the chair, in both directions. Technically all this is kind of the use case IdlePosers and LogicBricks were made for. We will see if that actually works out and how much animation work I have time for ;)

I made a quick overview of what happened so far and what still needs doing:

What happened so far?

Building the AdjustableChair asset. This required lots of experimenting to get the right combination of joints and extender sizes so the thing should fit most characters in various poses.
Release of SecretRoom v4, which contains the chair asset. Required updated demo scenes, new screenshots and video.
2 new LogicBricks that will help with handjobs. A simple handjob can of course be done with IdlePoser by using a single state that is anchored to an animated anchor atom. But you want variation, so more states and anchors. Each state would need its own personal AnimPattern/AnimSteps...which get's messy with 10-15 of those all in almost the same place. It's also difficult to pause an AnimPattern exactly at the "up" position in order to achieve a smooth transition into a different pose. So I implemented two special LogicBricks that should help with this kind of thing.
New improvements for IdlePoser: Increase number of groups from 8 to 12, added ability to transition within same group to reduce amount of groups needed in some cases.
New room build, its based on SecretRoom scene 1.
Choosing two girl and one male looks. Thx @ VL_13 for allowing me to use his free bodysuit asset in paid scenes, although it is tagged "non-commercial". The girls are almost defaults, the male is Nat by JoyBoy with some AutoCock tweaks.
Various testing with AcidBubbles plugins: ImprovedPoV and Passenger. These will be needed to nicely transition to between poses shown on both screenshots while you possess the guy.
Experimenting with poses and positions to make it look good from PoV perspective and the limited field of view of VR headsets.
Vague planning of different poses/behaviors, how to blend between them and how to fit them into IdlePoser groups. Complexity is a bit frightening at this point, maybe it have to reduce things a bit.

What still needs doing?

Proper Light and SkyMagic setup. Possibly some PostMagic?
Improvements to Gaze plugin (part of Life) to properly handle cases where the character is not upright.
Some obscure issue causes Life to open the black girl's mouth, despite using nose breathing. Works fine for the other girl, haven't looked into it, yet. Maybe something wrong with the appearance preset I'm using.
Finding a solution for VaM's character face's seen from a upside down perspective looking awful. Have to experiment with poses some more?
Probably have to look into using Acid Bubbles Collider Editor plugin, otherwise placing character hands and animating them will be hell. Have not tried that plugin, yet.
All animation and state machine logic. This will likely take a long while to get it working and even longer to make transitions look good in any situation.
Update LogicBricks handjob demo to account for the new LogicBricks and improved method of smoothly switching hands.
Release new LogicBricks, IdlePoser and Life versions. Holding these back a bit in cases I need to additional changes for this project.
Probably lots of issues and things I don't know about, yet :)
Making screenshots and video.
Packaging & Release.