Life is a collection of plugins intended to essentially awake a character, let him/her come to life. Central part so far is the audio-synchronized breathing, which can be used to drive complex animations.
This is an intermediate version I want to push for free to the community to get everyone onto VaM 1.19 as quickly as possible.
New features
- Support for male characters, including Futa.
- Support for pitch, which controls audio playback speed. You can use this to cause frequency shifts, e.g. making audio sound more male or older, etc.
- Support for custom Breathing-AudioBundles. Provide your own sounds! (Next version will include some quick guide on what is needed, but some people had already their own packages.)
- Changes needed for VaM 1.19+ to be able to ship as VAR package.
This does not yet include the new sounds I promised for end of this month. However, I got some vacation days lined up, so I expect to have those in a week or so. Life 6 will be again an EarlyAccess update, as usual.
Download
- MacGruber.Life.5.var (via MEGA)
- License: CC BY-SA. You are allowed to reference this package in your own packages, even if there are paid or use a different licence. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.
Credits
Contains audio by VoiceLikeCandy, Bluzz44 and FreeSFX.co.uk, as well as some audio extracted from VaM. Contains morphs by DDQuidam and TimelordToby. Full credits see MacGruber_Life_Credits.txt inside VAR.
2020-03-21 17:42:02 +0000 UTC
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PostMagic adds post-processing effects to VaM, partially also to VR. Some of the effects have issues or are even marked as experimental.
Before you get your hopes up, this release is identical to PostMagic v0.2, except for some necessary changes to make it work with the new VaM 1.19+ packages. I stopped working on PostMagic long ago, since it will be obsolete with VaM 2.xx. It would not be useful to make a heavy time investment in this.
This is using the 'Post Processing Stack' embedded in VaM, originally provided by Unity Technologies. Also includes a number of LUT textures made by Oeshii.
Effects
- UserLUT: Rather simple, but very powerful effect. It uses a LookUpTexture (LUT) to remap colors however you want. You can take a screenshot of the game and load it up in Photoshop, GIMP or whatever you use and apply any color filters and re-mappings you need to achieve what you like.
- Depth of Field: A common post-processing effect that simulates the focus properties of a camera lens. Foreground or background objects can be out of focus and appear blurred. I have also implemented an AutoFocus function, to auto-adjust the FocusDistance. For that you need to place an 'Empty' atom into the scene and name it 'AutoFocusPoint', and attach it to a person head, animate it or whatever.
- Bloom: Another very common effect is Bloom. It makes bright objects "glow".
- Grain: This effect adds some "film grain" noise to your scene. Maybe you want your scene look like some old analog movie?
- Anti-Aliasing: FXAA and TAA: Implements Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) and Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) algorithms. However, TAA is not supported in VR, I made it to automatically switch to FXAA when in VR. Both algorithms have trouble with VaM's hair, using VaM's own MSAA (at 8x) still produces best results. However, if GPU performance is an issue, you can try to combine some lower MSAA setting with FXAA to get similar results than 8x MSAA, but at higher framerates. TAA can not be combined with MSAA.
- Vignette: Very common effect used by basically any major game. It very slightly darkens (or colors) the corners of the screen, guiding the eyes toward the center. While Vignette technically also works in VR, it doesn't do too well with stereo rendering. In VR you also see this effect a bit in the center of your field of view.
- Chromatic Aberration: An effect resulting from a camera’s lens failing to converge all colors to the same point. It appears as “fringes” of color along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image. Works both in Desktop as well as VR.
- (Experimental) Ambient Occlusion: Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) darkens creases, holes, intersections and surfaces that are close to each other. Does not work correctly with characters, which makes it useless.
- (Experimental) MotionBlur: Blurs fast moving objects. Works okay'ish in Desktop mode, but apparently this effect was not implemented to work in VR. Get your barf bag ready.
- (Experimental) Dithering: This is supposed to intentionally apply noise as to randomize quantization error. The idea is to prevent large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. However, in this implementation I barely see any difference between turning this on or off.
Download
2020-03-21 12:55:00 +0000 UTC
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These are your most essential MacGruber tools in a convenient single VAR package, this requires VaM 1.19. All plugins got their info text updated to the style I use for my all newer plugins now.
- SuperResolution: Take ultra-high resolution screenshots using VaMs build-in screenshot tool. This improves image quality a LOT, especially shadows and hair. It is the de facto standard for VaM screenshots.
- FrameRateControl: This plugin allows more fine control over VaM's VSync settings and framerate. Especially recommended when recording video or you want to reduce power usage or fan noise when working with VaM.
- AudioAttenuation: Improves how audio volume fades over distance. It should be a lot easier to get the volume right with this. (Renamed from AudioDistanceAttenuation, the name was just too long)
- EditMode: Let VaM automatically switch to 'Edit Mode' on scene load. Just put this on your default scene. When in 'Desktop Mode', it also opens the MainMenu and enables 'Targets' (the green atom icons).
- MSAAToggle: Hotkeys to toggle VaM's MSAA settings, this helps with Reshade issues.
Download
2020-03-21 10:55:55 +0000 UTC
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After some people essentially begged me to do it, I spend several evenings this week and the this entire Saturday on writing a tutorial on Unity AssetBundles. It ended up to be an 13 page PDF of 2700 words. Lots of pictures, obviously.
This tutorial covers:
- Installing the correct Unity version
- Setup your Unity project. I have included an almost ready-to-go Unity project.
- Getting some Assets. This is not VaM specific and therefore only covered briefly. The project includes a sofa and matching ottoman asset, based on these two free Sketchfab assets by Visja Filip Rumin: Old Sofa and Old Leather Ottoman. Both are under CC-BY-4.0 license, which made it possible to include them in this tutorial.
- Adding collision
- Creating a material variation
- Creating Prefabs
- Creating the AssetBundle
- Using VaMExporter for faster iteration
- Loading in VaM with CustomUnityAsset
- Extracting assets from AssetBundles (with uTinyRipper)
- License considerations
- Quick introduction into tools included in the project
The project ZIP includes a version of ProBuilder and ProGrid! That's a simple modeling tool, mainly it is intended for quick prototyping. However, I build the entire SecretRoom environment with this. It is very easy to learn and especially the auto-stitch feature for texturing is awesome. Here is a link to a nice ProBuilder video tutorial that covers all the essentials in just 5 minutes.
Download
2 week EarlyAccess for Patreons. On March 21 this will become freely available to the community as usual. Download: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34679832
(Edit: It's now free!)
2020-03-07 18:53:51 +0000 UTC
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2020-03-07 18:53:23 +0000 UTC
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(This is old! Check the new version here!) As teasered a few days ago, this update includes a number of improvements to the plugin collection:
- I have added 3 different sound effects with multiple sounds each: wet lube, a fleshy slap of meat hitting meat and last but not least some light bed/mattress squeaking. Thanks to Bluzz44 for providing most of these! These are of course all separate sound effects, meaning they can be located at their correct position in 3D. VaM is (of course) using a spatializer instead of just lame 3D-stereo sound, meaning when in VR your brain can actually locate that the sound is coming from the bed below you and not from the girls mouth. As a side effect, having separate sound effects allows you to tweak timing and volume to your liking individually.
- Added Life04 demo, which is identical to Life03, except that it shows off the new sound effects. Check out this demo video! (Also: HQ version on MEGA)
- I have implemented an AudioDistanceAttenuation plugin. This is an attempt at an improved audio distance attenuation curve over the Unity default logarithm curve. There is also an attempt to compensate for the apparent distances differences when dealing with different camera FoV angles. To say it in simpler words: This improves how the volume decreases with distance from the source, which was always a hassle in VaM. The plugin will be shipped with this package for convenience, but can also be used separately and is offered as a free download.
- Additionally I spend the entire day yesterday improving how the DriverThrust sub-plugin syncs to the breathing, since it had really trouble with unregular (=normal) breathing. Often it made sudden speed changes to re-sync, which could look weird. The new sync code should improve this a lot, especially since part of the speed difference is caught by reducing or extending the range of motion instead of just speed alone. This is far less noticeable, If this is still not good enough, you can crank up the "Rhythm Damping" slider in the Breathing plugin, since that makes breathing more regular.
- Some of the breathing sounds accidentally used Vorbis/MP3 audio compression, which is the default for Unity. That was slightly lower quality and also had a minimally higher CPU drain. However, I doubt anyone will notice the difference ;)
- Audio pitch for the Person atom is now forced to 1.0 to avoid de-syncs.
- Tutorial: Creating Life03 received minor updates to reflect some v0.4 changes.
Download
2 week EarlyAccess for Patreons. On March 15, this will become freely available to the community as usual. Download: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34479934
(Edit: It's now free!)
2020-03-01 14:37:58 +0000 UTC
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Download: Life.v0.4-20200301.zip (via MEGA)
(Note: I actually forgot to include the AudioDistanceAttenuation plugin...reuploaded and link updated)
2020-03-01 14:36:24 +0000 UTC
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This plugin is an attempt at an improved audio distance attenuation curve over the Unity default logarithm curve. There is also an attempt to compensate for the apparent distance differences when dealing with different camera FoV angles. To say it in simpler words: This improves how the volume decreases with distance from the source, which was always a hassle in VaM. This plugin is included in the Life v0.4 release package for convenience as well, but can also be used separately. (And this is a free download, while Life is timed exclusive.)
Recommended install location is: Custom\Scripts\MacGruber\Tools
You can drop this on any AudioSource in VaM. That means Person, AudioSource, RhythmAudioSource or AptSpeaker atoms.
Download:
MacGruber_AudioDistanceAttenuation.cs (via MEGA)
2020-03-01 14:35:47 +0000 UTC
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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.
Life plugin series (incl. Breathing)
Last month I promised to implement the remaining audio recordings for mouth breathing (~50 sounds) as well as the more complicated orgasms (~8-10 multi-breath sounds). I will hopefully get to this in March. However, I decided to spend several vacation days last week improving some other things first:
- I have implemented an AudioDistanceAttenuation plugin. This is an attempt at an improved audio distance attenuation curve over the Unity default logarithm curve. There is also an attempt to compensate for the apparent distances differences when dealing with different camera FoV angles. To say it in simpler words: This improves how the volume decreases with distance from the source, which was always a hassle in VaM. The plugin will be shipped with the Life package but can also be used separately.
- I have added 3 different sound effects with multiple sounds each: wet lube, a fleshy slap of meat hitting meat and last but not least some light bed/mattress squeaking. Thanks to Bluzz44 for providing most of these! These are of course all separate sound effects, meaning they can be located at their correct position in 3D. VaM is (of course) using a spatializer instead of just lame 3D-stereo sound, meaning when in VR your brain can actually locate that the sound is coming from the bed below you and not from the girls mouth. As a side effect, having separate sound effects allows you to tweak timing and volume to your liking individually. I made a quick preview video so you can check for yourself.
- Additionally I would like to spend some time improving how the DriverThrust sub-plugin syncs to the breathing, since it has really trouble with unregular (=normal) breathing. Often it speeds up or slows down to re-sync, which can look weird. I have some ideas that could improve this....making the calculations even more complex....but hey, it's for a good cause. Meanwhile you can workaround the issue to some degree by cranking up the "Rhythm Damping" slider in the Breathing plugin, since that makes breathing more regular.
I'm planning for two separate EarlyAccess releases of the plugin for March. Probably some time next week I will push the mentioned improvements and a second release for the mouth breathing/orgasms end of March.
Tutorials
The first tutorial has been release this month. I got little feedback and few likes on this, so I assume it is not that many people being interested in this after all. Making tutorials is consuming time I can't spend on other VaM things and I also don't gain anything from it directly for myself. Nevertheless, I will try to push out at least that "ready-to-go" Unity Project I talked about, but this is low-prio. Meanwhile have a look at this VaM-template by ivansx.
Cheers,
MacGruber
2020-02-26 21:59:53 +0000 UTC
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This is just a minor release fixing two issues:
- Fixed the nose animation when breathing in. I have applied a 0.1 second offset, making the animation align better with audio. I made a new comparison video.
- Fixed the lips morph. It was somehow modifying some vertices of the nose as well.
Thx @ Robot_Rebellion for making me aware!
Download
2 week EarlyAccess for Patreons. On Feb 29, this will become freely available to the community as usual. Download: https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-synced-v0-3-34052264
2020-02-16 13:56:06 +0000 UTC
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As you might remember, back in January I posted a commission for improved breathing morphs. Both DDQuidam (Patreon page) and TimelordToby (Reddit profile) provided a number of morphs. Thanks especially to DDQuidam for suffering through my repeated improvement requests. In the end they produced together about 40 morph variations total. From these I selected 3 morphs and used MorphMerger to generate 2 additional ones that ended up in the plugin package. I'm quite satisfied with the result, I hope you agree it was worth the investment in time and money. You can find a comparison video here. (At the time of posting this, my video is waiting in the encoding queue for more than one hour for whatever reason. If anyone knows a better video hoster for this kind of thing, please shoot a comment.)
Most noticeably the lung is now actually inflating, instead of only applying rotational force on the chest control. The stomach morph is very similar to the old morph, but it makes sense to have the one breathing morph package and a clear legal situation. The nose animation now got dedicated morphs, meaning it won't ruin and looks that have been using the same morphs I have been using. Also it is now much closer to the movement of an actual nose during breathing. For mouth breathing there is now also a lips morph, which should improve things slightly.
Besides the morphs, there have also been general animation improvements on the script side as well as minor fixes to the Life01 and Life02 demo scenes. Life03 remained unchanged, but it gets the plugin improvements automatically.
Download
2 week EarlyAccess for Patreons. On Feb 29, this will become freely available to the community as usual. Download: https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-synced-v0-3-34052264
2020-02-15 14:11:22 +0000 UTC
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I got various requests for a walk-through of how to build a scene like the Life03 demo that featured the Breathing plugin and its Thrust driver. This presumes general knowledge on how to build scenes in VaM. I’m trying to share why I’m doing some things the way the I do, and of course it puts some detail on the Breathing and other plugins used. Hopefully you will find this helpful and can apply these ideas to your own VaM scenes. It ended up to be a 2300 word PDF of 11 pages, with lots of pictures. I hope you like the format.
Why is this no fancy video tutorial that are popular these days? First, text with images is FAR less time consuming to produce than a video. The time I can spend on VaM-things is limited. I'm already spending the maximum time I possibly can on VaM, at least when I want to keep my sanity. Producing more elaborate tutorials would be time I can't spend working on improving my plugins and other stuff I produce in VaM. Second, I personally don't like video tutorials. Text is searchable, you can more easily go back and forth, just skim through it and skip the boring parts. Maybe I'm just too old.
The reason I choose to do this particular tutorial first was because it was the easiest one to do. There have been other requests for a guides and I wanna do them at some point:
- How to export stuff from Unity. My plan would be to provide a ready-to-go Unity project for this, which would include AssetBundleBrowser, ProBuilder, ProGrid and my own little helper tools already setup correctly.
- How to extract AssetBundles back into Unity, modify them and re-export into VaM.
- Maybe some introduction guide into using ProBuilder to build your own custom environment.
Download
2 week EarlyAccess for Patreons. On Feb 29, this will become freely available to the community as usual. Download: https://www.patreon.com/posts/tutorial-life03-34034038
2020-02-15 13:49:41 +0000 UTC
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Download:
2020-02-15 13:48:44 +0000 UTC
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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.
Life plugin series (incl. Breathing)
Plans for the Life plugin series continue unchanged, especially of course the Breathing sub-plugin. The commission for specialized breathing morphs has been successful, actually I had two people working on this. Although I still need some time tweaking values and coding to integrate them in the best possible way, I'm satisfied with the results already. I think it was worth spending some money on this, hope you agree when you see it. I'm aiming to get this out within the next two weeks or so as an EarlyAccess release.
After that, the plan calls for getting the remaining recorded audio into the game. There is a set of mouth breathing (~50 sounds) and two sets of orgasms (~4-5 each). The difficulty on the orgasms is that these are not a single breath, but a series of several intertwined breaths. That makes them more awesome, but also more complicated to handle. I build the plugin from the ground up to support this kind of thing, still I expect issues. Here I'm aiming for another EarlyAccess release for end of February. I have some vacation days lined up there I want to spend on this, but if something comes up I might have to shift into into March. No guarantees.
Tutorials
There have been some requests for a tutorial on how to use Unity / ProBuilder to build scenes like the SecretRoom. The plan there is to also include a ready-to-go Unity Project. Also I had a request for a tutorial on how to make scenes like the Life03 scene. (That scene was included as demo in the latest release of the Life plugin.) If you are interested in those kind of tutorials, please comment, I will try to make it happen sooner.
Long-term plans
Long term future plan is still the integration of voice lines matching the breathing/animation spoken by Candy. This will be some kind of interactive Femdom / JOI scene, probably using the SecretRoom environment I build for this. Also I have been thinking about an idle motion plugin as well as a VaMConnect interface to the Breathing plugin. Both would be part of the Life plugin series.
Cheers,
MacGruber
2020-01-30 16:48:51 +0000 UTC
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This plugin allows more fine control over VaM's VSync setting and as an alternative you can set a TargetFrameRate. Additionally you can make the game pause automatically when VaM you are working in other applications to reduce CPU/GPU load to almost zero.
Especially for video recordings I recommend this plugin. When you want to record at 30fps, you want your game to run at precisely 30fps (Half VSync) to have smoother motion.
More details in the original release post. There is also a comparison video :)
Changes for 0.2
- Fixed issues with VaM 1.18.1.6.
- Fixed issues with not applying settings on load.
- Reduced log spam.
2020-01-15 19:31:50 +0000 UTC
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A while back I mentioned that I would like to have a proper inflating lung for my breathing plugin. So far I have not been able to find anyone who could make proper morphs that are of better quality than the ones that exist already. If you feel up to the task, contact me and make some $$$. If you are seriously interested, make sure to read the requirements below.
Tech Requirements
- I recommend taking a look at this nice reference video. Especially the linked time, but you can also watch the whole video. It's not that long and there are also shots from different perspectives in there.
- The morph should only contain localized movement of the bodypart in question. I don't need full body movement of shoulders and arms like in the video. Movement like that would be done by moving the joint controls, not with morphs. (And I think that is exaggerated anyway, at least I don't breathe like that)
- As you might know, I have a quality fetish. So quality first, and yes, I know that takes time. I hope you know that, too.
- Prio1: Chest: Currently I'm still applying rotational force to the chest joint instead of actually inflating the lung. Note this is a kind of rotating movement. Possibly it needs two script controlled morphs for separate forward and up movement to achieve the rotation? If needed I can provide you with a VaM plugin that helps you testing your morphs and/or a custom version of the Breathing plugin for this purpose. Basically tell me what you need.
- Prio2: Stomach: The stomach morph I'm using is actually kind of good. However, the legal situation is a bit unclear, as it is from the Reloaded-Lite pack. And maybe it can be improved? (And it would be nice to have "THE breathing morph set")
- Prio3: Nose: For now I'm abusing two of the nose morphs, "Nose Pinch" and "Nostrils Flare". Maybe we can do better? Also people might be using those morphs for their Looks.
- Prio4: Mouth: Can we do better than using opening/closing the mouth?
- Prio5: Something else? Maybe you have ideas?
Legal Requirements
- I will credit your work, of course, except if you explicitly don't want that for some reason.
- If you like, I can link to your Patreon page or whatever you have.
- Obviously I intend to ship your morphs together with my Breathing plugin, or whatever future thing that evolves into.
- I need your permission to release your morphs under the conditions I use for content released on my Patreon. Please read them. That especially includes the condition that OTHERS can use your work commercially, if they credit us both as stated. However, this is limited to content within the context of VaM. Essentially your are giving your work to the VaM community.
- Price can be negotiated. Payment preferably via Patreon.
Teamwork Requirements
- Please contact me before you start working. There might be multiple people, etc.
- You can set your own deadline, but please stick to it. I don't care if your stuff is late a few days, quality first. But I don't like running after people and then eventually having to give up empty handed, having wasted weeks or months where I could have found someone else to do the work. If it turns out you can't do it, for whatever reason, life happens, that's fine, but at least tell me early.
2020-01-15 19:17:43 +0000 UTC
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I spend some significant time in the recent weeks to keep improving the Breathing plugin as well as the connected DriverThrust sub-plugin, which are both part of the "Life" plugin set. This is a free maintenance release. The next release, probably in February, will include more sounds and be 2-week Early-Access again.
Improvements
- Implemented RhythmDamping to allow you control how regular you want your breathing.
- Implemented "DriverThrust" sub-plugin which drives AnimationPatterns and/or VariableTriggers so you can have synchronized 'action'. Compared to the original plugin this got improved synchronization and has a multiplier for multiple thrusts per breath.
- Implemented separate volume for VR and Desktop. Also re-balanced audio volume between recordings.
- Implemented audio-interrupt feature which allows faster transition between IO/OI modes.
- Implemented PostMagic-style info text to explain all the sliders.
- Fixed potential silent crash during scene load.
- Fixed issue with some Breathing settings not surviving loading another Person look.
- Tweaked some default values.
- New demo scene "Life03". Finally some proper action going on. There is a scene controller running a state machine randomly transitioning between different plugin settings. Very similar to the old "OnTheSofa" scene, except its on a bed and uses only standard VaM assets. Well, except hair (see dependencies below), as we can't do without some hair physics in 2020, right?
Screenshot/Video
- Due to Patreons policy I can't post the video here, but it is linked in my Reddit post. And imagine above screenshot with a lot less clothing :P
Dependencies (not included)
- You will need the "Breath1" morph from the Upperbody-Reloaded-Lite pack. Very likely you have it already, but just in case, find it here for example.
- For the new demo scene I got friendly permission from Roac to use one of his glorious hair packages. Very likely you have it too already, but just in case: Roac Hairs 1
Known issues
- Due to VaM bug/weirdness, if you load a Look onto the girl Person atom, that might change the name of the atom, if the Look was saved with a different name. Since the plugin is searching for AnimationPatterns to control based on that name, it might cause the Thrust animation to stop. However, you can just rename the atom back to "Person", it automatically reconnects.
- There are occasional hiccups where the animation suddenly goes faster for a moment. Usually after a scene load or after changing settings. Have not figured out what the issue is, yet.
2020-01-14 21:44:31 +0000 UTC
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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.
This was pretty much detailed already in the release post of the Breathing plugin. Obviously I plan to continue working on that.
Right now I'm not at home due to the holidays, visiting family and friends. However, last weekend I managed to get some work done on improving the transition between BreathOut-BreathIn and BreathIn-BreathOut type recordings. Basically I allow the audio to be interrupted exactly between the breaths, meaning I can play just a BreathIn or just a BreathOut. This is still causing some trouble, as my animation system requires pre-planned breaths to some degree to be nice and smooth. The response time of the plugin, e.g. if you change the intensity, is also tied into this.
Another topic is the volume balancing. I want the volume to be "just right". However, that requires a lot of testing. Also volume appears to differ between VR and desktop mode, possibly simply because the spatial audio and it being a bit difficult to judge the exact distance to something in desktop mode.
I'm planning on releasing this together with some general tweaks, like an improved AnimationPattern Driver in January. There also appear to be some reported issues with PostMagic, SuperRes and FrameRateControl in the most recent VaM version, which need looking into.
The plan for February is to add the remaining recorded audio. There is a set of mouth breathing (~50 sounds) and two sets of orgasms (~4-5 each). The difficulty on the orgasms is that these are not a single breath, but a series of several intertwined breaths. That makes them more awesome, but also more complicated to handle. I build the plugin from the ground up to support this kind of thing, still I expect issues.
Long term future plan is still the integration of voice lines matching the breathing/animation spoken by Candy. This will be some kind of interactive Femdom / JOI scene, probably using the SecretRoom environment I build for this. This will require preparation work, like figuring out what voice-lines to request and nailing down how I need to integrate them properly.
I wishing you all a belated merry Christmas as well as a good start into the new year!
Keep VaM'ing!
2019-12-26 14:29:42 +0000 UTC
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(This is an old version, new version here!)
This is a work-in-progress release of the Breathing plugin I had been advertising for a long time. I'm aiming to make some more tweaks on the weekend, but I can't guarantee it will finish before I disappear into the holiday season. Below you find a list of what further steps are planned.
For those not familiar with my old breathing plugin from a year ago: This is a plugin that plays breathing audio recordings while playing synchronized animations. The first plugin just used audio extracted from VaM. However, thanks to YOU (my patrons!) I was able to commission $180 (incl. VAT) worth of professional breathing audio recordings from VoiceLikeCandy.
Not all of these recordings could be included yet, since every single breath needs to be cut and measured precisely. That just takes a LOT of time. Anyway, the plugin now contains 4 datasets:
- "Candy-Nose" (55 new sounds)
- "Candy-Sensual" (46 new sounds)
- "Original" / "Original-Moan" (40 original sounds ported from old plugin)
The code has been rewritten from scratch, now featuring a far better event and blending system. Also it is modular now, meaning you can implement your own "driver" sub-plugins to do you own animations or control external devices (e-stim, suckers, ...)
Sounds as well as all the timing information is now loaded from an AssetBundle, which loads WAY faster than before, despite having more than tripled the amount of data.
The package includes:
- Breathing plugin
- Gaze plugin
- Eyes plugin
- 2 simple demo scenes
Due to Patreon's policy I can't post a video here. However, I linked it in the reddit post.
Download
2-week EarlyAccess for Patrons. Will be public on 01/01/2020: https://www.patreon.com/posts/life-synced-32456960
You will also need the "Breath1" morph from the Upperbody-Reloaded-Lite pack. Very likely you have it already, but just in case, find it here for example.
Future Plans
- General tweaking (ETA: January)
- More reasonable volume balance of the recordings against each other (ETA: January)
- Smooth transition between BreathOut-BreathIn and BreathIn-BreathOut formats. Currently there is a hiccup of the animation because either a breath-out or breath-in is missing and the plugin gets confused. Sounds like a needless complication, but it's just how human breathing works at different intensities. (ETA: January)
- Better Chest/Stomach/Nose morphs would be great? Currently I'm still turning the chest control instead of inflating the lung. Chest: Note this is a rotating movement. Possibly it needs two script controlled morphs for separate forward and up movement to achieve the rotation? Stomach: Currently using a morph from the Reloaded-Lite pack. Nose: For now I'm abusing two of the nose morphs, maybe we can make this look better?
- A reasonable commission for those morphs is obviously possible, Patreon preferred. If you can provide quality (!) morphs, contact me. (That means you actually deliver on an agreed date...I don't like to run after people for several weeks and still not getting something usable) (ETA: As soon as I find someone...)
- "Candy-Mouth" recordings. Very similar to the nose breathing, just mouth breathing. (ETA: February)
- 2 different sets of orgasm sounds! Likely to be integrated into the Candy-Sensual set. I think it would make sense to have a button to trigger an orgasm as well as a way to trigger it by script. (ETA: February)
- Vague future plan: Integration of voice lines matching the breathing/animation spoken by Candy. (ETA: March?)
2019-12-18 22:18:09 +0000 UTC
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This is an old version, you likely want the new version here.
You will also need the "Breath1" morph from the Upperbody-Reloaded-Lite pack. Very likely you have it already, but just in case, find it here for example.
2019-12-18 22:17:27 +0000 UTC
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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
2019-11-27 20:21:39 +0000 UTC
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I rebuild the original SecretRoom environment from the ground up. This is much more flexible now, almost a construction kit for your perfect play room.
Overview
- Two basic rooms: The old 4x4 meter and a new 6x6 meter. Each come in a red and black leather version. I discontinued the white leather version, as the number of variations would have exploded and all the screenshots posted by people I saw where using the red version anyway.
- All the beams except the corners are prefabs now. That means you can move everything around as CustomUnityAsset as you like. Its designed to work in a 10cm grid. If you stick to that, everything should align nicely.
- I made a heavy and a light version of a bondage bed. Each come with red and black leather versions.
- The bondage thingy you see on the first screenshot. No idea how to call it, I called it "Bars". The height of the bars can of course be adjusted by script.
- The door is also a prefab now and can be moved. For those who love tiny details: The keypad got LEDs now, indicating the door being locked.
- There is also a matching wall table and hanger now to store all your toys and other utilities. Hey, anyone would like to quality make toys and utilities? I would be happy to include them.
- As with the first release it comes with scripts that allow you to customize things. SecretRoom2.cs is only needed once in the scene and can be used to modified the "Hooks" of all the prefabs you added to the scene. ChainSwing.cs and Spotlight.cs pretty much work like in the first release.
- Package includes three scenes: The first is pretty much a rebuild of the first SecretRoom. The second one features the bed, the third one the "Bars" device.
- The latex outfit depicted in the screenshots could sadly not be included for legal reasons. However, you can get it in the Daz store.
ProBuilder Tutorial?
All the new stuff was modeled in Unity using ProBuilder and ProGrid, which are both freely available in the AssetStore/PackageManager. If there is interest in that kind of thing I could provide a "ready to go" Unity scene and maybe a short VaM specific ProBuilder tutorial at a later point. ProBuilder has it's quirks and limitations, but the entry hurdle is a LOT lower than for example Blender. At the same time the workflow is a LOT faster since it is integrated into Unity. Please comment if you would like that, I don't want to waste a weekend on this if only few are interested.
Download
This release actually turned out to be more substantial than anticipated. Nevertheless, I promised releases in November to be for free...so it's free, enjoy :)
Edit: Taken offline due to licencing issues, get the updated version instead: https://www.patreon.com/posts/secretroom-3-36382992
2019-11-10 17:45:35 +0000 UTC
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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.
TL;DR: Due to real-life reasons they will likely be no major releases in November. There will be no releases for the rest of October either. If there will be anything during this time, it will be public. If you choose to unsubscribe, you can do so safely the moment you read this. You won't miss anything that way. However, you might want to stay as follower and come back for a major release planned for December.
The coming few weeks I will be busy with my real-life job. Our project is approaching a major milestone and I will likely have to clock some overtime. Thankfully my company has a rather good overtime policy, so there won't be 100h crunch weeks like in some other game companies. Still, I won't have time to do much VaM stuff.
PostMagic
This month I released my PostMagic plugin, which allows post-processing effects within VaM. I would very much like to get AmbientOcclusion to work properly. I'm not fully out of ideas yet, but the chances are slim. It would likely require a major time investment. Since there is the possibility that Meshed decides to activate PostEffects in native VaM in the near future, there is a chance that work might be wasted. Assuming I'm not struck by lightning with some new crazy idea how to do it, I will probably not continue working on PostMagic for the moment.
Audio-Sync Breathing
You might remember my audio-synced breathing plugin I released early this year. For December I'm planning an new version with major improvements:
- I got a deal with someone with access to a proper recording studio. We will be able to do high quality recording of actual breathing in the exact way we need for this. We will start with recording one girl only, but the long-term plan is to have 2 girls and one male to choose from. The original plugin had just 40 different sounds extracted from VaM. Now we will be able to have 100+ different breaths per character! At least that's the plan, we will see how much effort that will actually turn out to be.
- I would also like to match the quality audio with appropriate animation. For this I have another someone on the line who provides proper breathing morphs. No more turning of the chest joint! The lungs should inflate with air! The plan is to have separate chest and stomach morph animation based on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CRMgPcgKp4
- For slow idle breathing you will be able to choose from nose and mouth breathing.
- The old plugin had a rather quirky way of connecting it to a VariableTrigger that in turn could drive an AnimationPattern. That was what allowed "the action" to be in sync with the breathing in the Sofa scene. For the new version I would like to try a more modular approach. Non-programmers will be able to add one or more "Driver plugins" that connect to the Breathing plugin and can either drive an AnimationPattern or a VariableTrigger. More advanced users will be able to implement their own Driver plugin that could control more complex setups or even external devices....all to be in sync to the breathing.
- Since we have a recording studio and hire a girl we technically could also do voice recordings that match the breathing! I was thinking about short sentences ("Ahw, yes!", "OMG!") that would be played at random during the action. The challenge here is mostly on how to make it lip-sync while doing all the breathing stuff at the same time. The solutions we had so far in the community did not really convince me. Yes, I know my problem is a quality fetish ;) Anyway, for now its a stretch-goal for some time next year.
Modular Life Plugin
Actually the breathing plugin could be just another part in a series of inter-compatible "life plugins". Of course breathing would be the most complex, but basically the idea is that you can drop a single *.cslist onto any character and you get Breathing, Gaze, Idle-Motion and Expressions without any further setup. There could even be different *.cslist's with different default settings.
So far this is only a vague idea in my head. My goal would be that this were used by other creators to release their looks and scenes. No more dead people, please!
(Remember: My usage policy allows even limited commercial usage after the EarlyAccess ended. Check my "Overview" page and ping me if you have questions.)
Another environment?
I was also thinking about another environment that would be used for a demo scene of the breathing stuff? Maybe a living room similar to the old sofa scene or a larger version of the SecretRoom? I'm not sure yet on how much time I can spend on this.
Cheers, MacGruber
2019-10-23 19:01:18 +0000 UTC
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I usually don't do requests, but is was just a super quick tool requested by Alter3go. It allows you to toggle VaM's MSAA setting by hotkey. Press L to toggle between "off" and "8x", press K to toggle twice with some delay in between. Apparently this helps making Reshade's magic work. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrx6SMjPMRg for more details. I don't have Reshade, but Alter3go confirmed this works. You might have to tweak the delay time ("refreshWaitTime") in the script code to make it work for your specific machine. If you want different hotkeys, you can also change them in the code.
2019-10-20 14:23:04 +0000 UTC
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PostMagic adds post-processing effects to VaM, also to VR. Original post with more infos here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/postmagic-post-30542789
This version brings some minor improvements and additions:
Anti-Aliasing: FXAA and TAA
By popular request I have added support for Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) and Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) algorithms. However, TAA is not supported in VR, I made it to automatically switch to FXAA when in VR. Both algorithms have trouble with VaM's hair, using VaM's own MSAA (at 8x) still produces best results. However, if GPU performance is an issue, you can try to combine some lower MSAA setting with FXAA to get similar results than 8x MSAA, but at higher framerates. TAA can not be combined with MSAA.
Vignette
Very common effect used by basically any major game. It very slightly darkens (or colors) the corners of the screen, guiding the eyes toward the center. Also this is commonly used to indicate damage to the player, by coloring the screen corners red for half a second. Since almost all parameters in PostMagic can be animated using regular VaM mechanisms, you could build something similar now.
While Vignette technically also works in VR, it doesn't do too well with stereo rendering. In VR you also see this effect a bit in the center of your field of view.
Chromatic Aberration
From the Unity manual pages: "In photography, chromatic aberration is an effect resulting from a camera’s lens failing to converge all colors to the same point. It appears as “fringes” of color along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image.
The Chromatic Aberration effect is used to replicate this camera defect, it is also often used to artistic effect such as part of camera impact or intoxication effects. This implementation provides support for red/blue and green/purple fringing as well as user defined color fringing via an input texture."
Works both in Desktop as well as VR.
DepthOfField AutoFocus improvements
DepthOfField AutoFocus does now detect when you try to take a screenshot or thumbnail and adjusts accordingly. Also I have added automatic blending of the FocalLength based on a Near and Far setting. Slightly complicated to setup, but should produce better results. Additionally there is now some tweak-able damping for the AutoFocus adjustment.
Other changes
I made MotionBlur auto-disable itself when in VR. It's been moved out of the "experimental" effects.
SuperResolution is now officially compatible with PostMagic.
Download
EarlyAccess for Patrons remains unchanged from version v0.1 last week. So this will still become available for free on Oct 20 around 8:00am CEST. https://www.patreon.com/posts/postmagic-post-30544153
(Edit: Download is now public.)
2019-10-12 12:43:26 +0000 UTC
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Some more small improvements:
- Fixed FoV issue with the preview camera.
- Compatibility with PostMagic plugin.
- Added override for MSAA setting applied to screenshots (by request).
If you put this plugin into your scene, for example as a session plugin, the VaM internal screenshot tool will do screenshots in super high resolution (e.g. 8K UHD) instead of just lame FullHD (1920x1080). This improves the grainy shadow quality quite a lot, but also improves hair slightly and edges in general. Some comparison pictures: https://imgur.com/a/u4wFOSc
More details here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/superresolution-30128655
2019-10-12 12:05:57 +0000 UTC
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(This is old, new version here!) Success! At least partial. This is still very experimental, but I manged to get various post effects working in VaM. Yes, you read correctly...VaM post effects in VR!
From the tech-side I'm exposing and messing with one off the deactivated post-processing systems hidden in VaM, actually I discovered are at least three independent systems in MeshedVR's code. In particular this is an old version of the Post Processing Stack provided by Unity Technologies.
My plugin is divided into sub-plugins for each effect and a manager. The package includes a standard version (MacGruber_PostMagic.cslist) and an experimental version (MacGruber_PostMagicExperimental.cslist) which adds additional effects that are not yet working correctly. Note that all parameters that are float or bool values can be animated, for example using an AnimationPattern, if you fancy so.
UserLUT
UserLUT is a rather simple, but very powerful effect. It uses a LookUpTexture (LUT) to remap colors however you want. You can take a screenshot of the game and load it up in Photoshop, GIMP or whatever you use and apply any color filters and re-mappings you need to achieve what you like.
All you have to do is apply all the same filters in the exact same way to one of the neutral lookup textures included in the package (e.g. NeutralLUT32.png), save it in PNG format and load it into VaM in the UserLUT settings. The only limitation is that you can't do anything that depends somehow on the value of neighboring pixels, blur would be a classic example.
In my package I have included some simple examples: Desaturate for a bit of black and white movie look, Toon for a reduction in colors to achieve a simple cartoon look, a combination of the two and a Mars effect (red-tint). Someone with actual artistic skill can probably achieve much better ;)
Depth of Field
Next effect is DepthOfField (DoF), a common post-processing effect that simulates the focus properties of a camera lens. Foreground or background objects can be out of focus and appear blurred. I have also implemented an AutoFocus function, to auto-adjust the FocusDistance. For that you need to place an 'Empty' atom into the scene and name it 'AutoFocusPoint', and attach it to a person head, animate it or whatever.
Bloom
Another very common effect is Bloom. It makes bright objects "glow". Actually VaM already had an effect for this which made some special objects glow, like the lamp in the background. However, this works for all objects and allows far more control. If using this version of Bloom, you should disable 'Glow' in the VaM UserPreferences.
Grain
This effect adds some "film grain" noise to your scene. Maybe you want your scene look like some old analog movie?
Experimental: Ambient Occlusion
Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) darkens creases, holes, intersections and surfaces that are close to each other. In real life, such areas tend to block out or occlude ambient light, hence they appear darker. Very subtle effect, but it makes a scene appear much more realistic.
Sadly in VaM there is a rendering issue with characters. I suspect characters are not present in the depth buffer somehow. Whatever the issue, the ambient occlusion of objects behind characters is rendered on top of them, which makes this pretty much useless for the moment until someone figures out what is going on. However, you can already try this and dream how cool your scene would look like.
See those artifacts here: https://imgur.com/a/jCi1g8m
Experimental: MotionBlur
Another common effect which blurs fast moving objects. Especially racing games use this a lot when rendering at low frame rates.
Works okay'ish in Desktop mode, but apparently this effect was not implemented to work in VR. Get your barf bag ready.
Experimental: Dithering
Dithering is the process of intentionally applying noise as to randomize quantization error. This prevents large-scale patterns such as color banding in images.
In this implementation I don't see any difference between turning this on or off. Most likely this is not doing anything.
Known Issues
Besides the mentioned issues for the effects marked as experimental, there are further issues. There is a reason Meshed has all these effects embedded in the code base without actually using them.
- DepthOfField can produce some bleeding of focused objects into things in the background. I would assume a newer version of the PostProcessingStack would fix this. At least I can't find anyone having a similar problem so I assume it was fixed.
- Various default assets in VaM have dead pixels with NaN values in their color or depth. Could be caused by degenerate geometry or bad shaders. This is causing trouble for Bloom and DoF. Instead for a single black pixel you won't notice, this basically explodes in your face, causing huge black or white artifacts. PostProcessingStack v2 has added a "Stop-NaN-Propagation" filter for this. However, it is hard to add this with just a VaM plugin.
- PostMagic supports post effects for the thumbnail and screenshot camera. However, note that DoF auto-focus is relative to the player, not the screenshot camera. For the 'WindowCamera' atom I have added a checkbox in the DoF settings.
- My SuperResolution Screenshot plugin is mostly compatible with PostMagic, if it is loaded AFTER loading PostMagic. You can also just disable and re-enable SuperResolution once to make the preview camera use post effects.
- There is probably more.
Download
2-week EarlyAccess for Patrons: https://www.patreon.com/posts/postmagic-post-30544153
(Edit: Download is now public.)
2019-10-06 16:00:58 +0000 UTC
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Note that this is an old version, get the newest version here.
(This was an 14-day early access, now made public on October 20, 2019.)
- v0.2-20191012
- v0.1-20191006
2019-10-06 16:00:22 +0000 UTC
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(This is old, new version here!) This quick update that fixes VR mode screenshots again, some changes in VaM 1.18 caused them to break.
If you put this plugin into your scene, for example as a session plugin, the VaM internal screenshot tool will do screenshots in super high resolution (e.g. 8K UHD) instead of just lame FullHD (1920x1080). This improves the grainy shadow quality quite a lot, but also improves hair slightly and edges in general. Some comparison pictures: https://imgur.com/a/u4wFOSc
More details here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/superresolution-30128655
2019-10-04 11:04:03 +0000 UTC
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