MacGruber_Laboratory

Monthly Report: June

Added 2020-06-28 09:10:39 +0000 UTC

Hi! I'm posting a report like this near the end of each month, reporting on what I worked on behind the scenes and what the vague plans for the next months are. It is intended to help you decide if you want buy-in on the coming month or not.

As indicated in the release of IdlePoser v3 last week, I will continue working on that. There are various improvements I have in mind. Probably only one or maybe two of those will make it in the next version:

Arc-Length-Parameterization. Yesterday I started on implementing Arc-Length-Parameterization. Once finished that should improve animation quality as it normalizes the velocity while blending between poses. On top of the normalized velocity I can then add a proper SmoothStep for ease in/out. Its something that always annoyed me when using VaM's AnimationPatterns.
Vertex Anchoring system. Currently you can only anchor against bones or control nodes. However, I have an idea how to anchor against a specific mesh vertex. This would be far more precise as it also takes morphs into account. E.g. the photo shooting demo scene could be independent of boob size. Not sure if this is actually gonna work and how much performance it's gonna eat.
Gaze integration. When combining the Gaze plugin with IdlePoser you will have the issue that both want to drive the headControl. The demo scene solves this by just not moving the head with IdlePoser. If you want your character to move around, this will be an issue. I need to figure out how to make this work. Possibly there will be a "Gaze-Anchor".
Micro-idle layer. I'm planning to add some micro-idle animations that would be applied on top of the pose. These would be very tiny random animations you could scale and tweak for each capture node in each pose.
Interacting IdlePosers! Possibly it makes sense to let IdlePosers interact with each other directly. Like simultaneously triggering state transitions, possibly with restrictions on which states to select. If hands move independently like in the demo scene you want to make sure that can't unintentionally collide.
Improved debug rendering. While the current path rendering (blue lines) is very neat, it could use improvement. Right now its quite easy to loose track of what's connected to what. I will see if I can color the various state groups as well as highlight actual transitions, not just the resulting path. The main issue is to find a shader suited for colored line rendering among those included in VaM. As you know there is no VaM documentation at all, so its time consuming trail&error to try all the build-in shaders.
Commission for more poses! I plan to put out a commission for a selection of some hopefully reusable poses that will be shipped with the Life plugin suite. Facial animation and more like the demo scene comes to mind, we will see what else makes sense. The issue here is that I'm a bit unsure when its good time for that as IdlePoser has only half of its features at this point and the quality of the commissioned poses could be better when those features are implemented.