Monthly Report: November

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.

Audio-Sync Breathing

As announced in the previous report I have been working on an improved version of the breathing plugin. There was an issue with the planned audio recordings, though. During the negotiations with the actor we apparently made not clear enough what kind of crazy stuff people could do with the breath recordings and us having no control over that. VaM is a sandbox after all. It was one of the first sentences of a long description on what we wanted to do. Possibly she only skimmed it, we don't know. Anyway, we did not want to pressure her into doing this. I think that was the right decision.

However, we managed to find another actor who does professional recordings of this kind for a living with her own recording studio and she was able to accommodate us on very short notice. Actually the recordings arrived this morning. I asked for improvements on some of them, a different kind of moan, its a personal taste thing, not a quality issue. Overall I'm really happy how this turned out. Good $180 investment, I hope you will agree when you hear it. Still we reached this point 2 weeks after originally planned, so there was some time lost.

For the breathing morphs, I don't have them, yet. The stomach morph shouldn't be a problem, but for the chest its apparently not that simple as I assumed it to be. Especially if you want it to be compatible with other morphs. It's a rotating movement, which morphs don't really support that well. We are currently looking at a combination of rotating the chestControl and a lung inflating morph. Still in progress.

Also for myself there is still a lot of work ahead. Every single breath has to be cut, categorized and sorted, timings have to be measured. This will make the animation magic work later. I started on rewriting the old Breath plugin some two weeks back, with the goal of giving it a more flexible event system, which will allow better control of animations. This is about half done.

Currently I'm aiming for a plugin release in the week before Christmas. I hope you are looking forward to this as much as I am :)

SecretRoom

As you know, I released version 2 of the SecretRoom environment two and a half weeks ago. There has been a request of offering more different texture choices for the walls, ceiling and floor. Below are some textures I had been thinking of. The acoustic paneling has some issues with Unity's shaders, though. Not sure whats going on and if I can make it work in VaM. I might just go all rubber instead. The other textures should be fine. 

I guess I will release this at some point, but the Breathing plugin has priority at the moment, which I assume most people are waiting for.

Cheers,

MacGruber