Status Update - December 21

Happy holidays everyone! I hope you're having a safe comfortable end of the year.

First, a little life update, the last couple months have been very busy and hectic, but I'm doing okay and pushing through. In November, my partner and I had to say goodbye to our dog Cody, who passed away with a sudden illness. Later in November we also adopted a new dog, who is a ball of husky energy. We love him, but he does need lots of our time for training! I've also been chasing doctor appointments for various things, along with typical holiday stuff and family gatherings. It's a bitter-sweet December, kemorig progress has been slow, but I'm doing okay and continuing to get work done when I can.

Still, the current build of kemorig seems to be bug-free! And I hope the new Blender add-on is helpful for those of you getting your avatars into Unreal.

Here's what I'm working on now, and what you can expect soon:

• I'm shooting to get a new kemorig build out before the end of the year. This will be a smaller build with a couple features:

  • Auto Eye Movement. You will be able to make avatar eyes look at the camera, or look in the direction you turn your head. This is very useful for webcam tracking, which is not always the best at tracking eyes.

    • This has some complexity, because I want it to be toggle-able (in the app or blueprints) and key-bindable. You may only want this on sometimes, or in some stances.

    • I also want to let you set custom look-at targets in levels (this may or may not make it in the first version)

  • Better camera tools in blueprints. The current stuff is pretty basic, and I've run into limitations with my avatar. I want it to be easier to make great looking camera transitions between complicated stances.

• I'm working on a big collection of guides for making character models in Unreal.

  • See screenshot above.

  • Unreal's documentation is not good, and the educational resources on youtube are bad. It's hard to learn this stuff, so I'm making a one-stop-shop collection with all the info you need, whether you're a beginner, new to unreal, or an experienced dev that needs to look something up.

  • I realized when making kemorig docs, that there's a big overlap with general Unreal knowledge, and these new guides make sense on my personal site as general Unreal reference. This makes them useful to everyone, not just kemorig users.

  • As such, this collection has information about more than just making kemorig avatars -- it's more framed around a game character, which is more complicated. The kemorig docs will probably get some kemorig-tailored versions of these guides, and link out to my site when appropriate.

And that's what I'm working on.

By the way, you can always ask for help on our Discord server. I'm happy to help, and I really like seeing the progress on your avatars.

Happy holidays!
-PROTO