sgthale

Lots of Work on Exterior

Important note for Supporters at the bottom of this dev post!

Got a lot of work on the exterior and am wrapping up for an extra-early pre-release demo for next devblog. The past 4 days I spent my time sculpting cliff walls and dressing up the exterior with new props, among other things.

To start off, I modeled grass details so I could paint the scene with them:

I then deci...

Finished Interior Materials and Beginning Exterior

I finished making all the materials and shaders for the new props. This includes some exterior props as well. Current exterior:

The textures that I made are high resolution 2k images and it looks really nice for the cactus and plants. Image related:

   There were some minor changes to the...

Finished Base Living Room

I made a bunch of new props for the living room and added textures to them. This room will eventually fill up with stuff that you are meant to play around with. Again I am going for a very traditional Mexican esthetic while trying to stay away from Spanish architecture, which is difficult because the Spaniards conquered the hell out of Aztecs.

Some new models/textures:

2018-10-23 08:23:46 +0000 UTC View Post

New Textures and Finished Water Spilling

I made some new textures for the chairs, table, and 2 new pots. I'm not much of an artist myself but I do now my way very well around Googling and Photoshop. Occasionally I will make some patterns like the yellow wiggles on the chairs but anything involving textures is usually found online. I am reusing many of the props from my wedding video because they are still very good and I already have the textures for them. Like the cactus:

2018-10-19 08:57:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Continuing Realistic (fake) Water Physics

Major Annoyance: gfycat.com recently went through a giant purge and deleted some of my video links in my older posts. I will be going back and restoring them all slowly. Uggh. Going to upload to my Dropbox to ensure they live forever from now on.

From the previous post, the math between a cylinder (cup) and a plane (surface of water) was very easy to implement since a lot of it simplified away. The fact that the plane of the water will always be at a local (0,height...

Hotfix

+Fixed an issue with Oculus Rift Controllers constantly displaying "disconnected"

v0.2 introduction/controls/guide: https://www.patreon.com/posts/shinobu-project-21970116

New Props and Beginning Realistic Water Handling

Demo was a HUGE success bringing in a lot more people aboard than I thought. There is now a new tier:

If you are currently donating $5+, you can upgrade to this tier.

This tier will serve those who are not willing to wait for the version updates that roll out every 2+ months. I will begin to provide beta pre-release versions which will go out roughly 1~2 times per month. These pre-releases will ...

Shinobu Project v0.2 release

Download links on front of my patreon.

I had a lot of fun working on this release. Squashed and cleaned up many bugs. Everything should work robustly as I tested it extensively. The changelog covers the big new features. The game should work with Oculus Rift controllers but since I don't have an Oculus Rift, ...

Dawn Before v0.2

Furiously polishing all logic so everything is smoother, faster, and more elegant for the demo release. Today I polished the chopsticks game module which has become my favorite logic module in Shinobu so far. It's just really fun and you really do kind of get into the game with her. I love how I added random animations before she makes a move to make her feel like she is really thinking hard about her next move. And of course, the inverse kinematics beautifully mixed in. She now plays 100% fairl...

Demo v0.2 teaser

Progress with VR implementation is going very well. Video demonstrates the options menu which includes toggling teleportation/trackpad movement. The yellow ray for teleportation testing will be improved visually for the demo release since it isn't actually complete yet. Teleportation location identifiers (green/red circles on the floor) will be added. Switching from VR to keyboard is also pretty seamless. Pause menu buttons in VR are cycled with the trackpad(HTC Vive)/thumbstick(Oculus Rift). On...

What are your VR preferences?

I would like to know what kind of VR action you are more comfortable with  so I can better gauge the average comfort for the game. 

Beginning Virtual Reality Implementation

Very excited to share the first screens of the first pass at implementing VR.

I first attempted to setup my VR environment on my Linux laptop but that proved to be fruitless since my laptop is not that powerful and I didn't want to sear my leg from the heat. So I will be working on my desktop for the VR portion of the development. My current setup is the 2.1x1.8m dedicated Shinobu development living room with plenty of space for stand up VR.

2018-10-01 08:55:16 +0000 UTC View Post

Tip Toe Logic

I was a bit busy the past couple days but nevertheless made some progress. This weekend I will be starting implementing HTC Vive Controls.

Tiptoe logic was the last part of the donut module that needed to be implemented. So this completes the logic module. I had to do quiet a few things to make sure everything looks good. For starters, her body rotation logic needed to be disabled and enabled depending on when both feet are planted on the floor. This is because the tip toe animation has moment...

Beginning Angry Object Stealing Logic

Code for picking up objects is now far more robust and bug free. And so I had time to start the angry donut logic where she runs to you to steal your object. This means that when she is angry, she will not beg, she will steal. Video 1 shows the current unfinished implementation. As you can see I have not yet finished the logic for when she successful steals the object. If I were to say what my secret sauce is f...

75% Done With Pickup Logic

I got stuck in a rut solving some more pickup logic problems.

However it is finally starting to shape up and there are more new behaviors to show. There were A LOT of bugs I had to fix related to hold object permissions. Before I show a video of the new behaviors, the following images are the errors I had to work through:

Clipping arms and X pose. The Double Donut Jiu-Jitsu.

2018-09-21 09:02:23 +0000 UTC View Post

Bugfixing

Before I add more stuff, I need to ingest and digest the new logic into the codebase. There are lots of things that need to work with each other including a permissions system for handling if an animation or logic module is allowed to play. Permissions are just flags for "is left/right/both hand(s) available?".

One example is the alternate idle animation where she crosses her arms. This animation is now disabled when holding anything with her hands. It caused clipping with her right arm and le...

Beginning Donut Logic

It's never easy. Particularly because this eating logic added yet another level of complexity to the possibilities of what you can do with Shinobu combined with the other logic modules. My goal is to continue writing as neat as code as possible to reduce bugs and eventually trim away at some minor possibilities. Video 1 shows the current eating donuts implementation. Still not done with it.

A lot of things are at pl...

Completed Animation Batch and New Heel Rig

I finished the last body_angry_jealous and body_angry_tip_toe_reach. [alternate view] Videos hyperlinked.

Angry jealous was a good animation to work on because it made me practice my new paradigm for animating faster, "Animate with momentum...

More Animations and Preparations

I made 2 new animations recently: body_stand_happy_donut_last_bite and body_stand_happy_beg. Videos hyperlinked. The first animation will be used for the last bite that Shinobu takes before completely finishing the donut (or some other food). Beg will be used to make her, well, beg. It was actually split into a _begin and _loop so i...

New Animations and Formulating Donut Logic

The past few days I began planning out exactly how Shinobu's donut behavior will work and creating animation assets for it. I want to make sure that her mood affects her behavior. So this is how it's going to work: When she is angry and the user presents a donut (by holding it up to her or becoming visible), she will become jealous and glare at you from the distance. Eventually she will run at you in an attempt to nab it from you. When she gets near you she will check if the donut is within rang...

Bracelet and Hand Animations.

Still working on migrating and re-animating all hand animations with the new hands. I tweaked the hands a bit since they still looked off. Hands are kind of hard. Especially while trying to figure out topology. A great way to fix weird looking hands that I learned is "go for the fingernails". 9 times out of 10 it's the fingernails fault. And it did help. Also the fingers were a tad too skinny. Still tweaking the fat of the palm. 2018-08-30 08:03:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Donuts and New Hands

Covered a lot of work this weekend. To start off, I implemented donuts. I built the donut as shown below:

I made the golden chocolate because it's Shinobu's favorite second to a French Crueler. However, in the future I want to make Mexican style pastries as the setting of this simulation is in Mexico. The donut was split up into 4 pieces so she can eat the donut and slowly make it disappear. I created...

Realistic Object Holding, Code Restructuring, and Throwing Behaviors.

In most games, including AAA titles, characters usually pick up objects in an unrealistic fashion. That is, the object either disappears/teleports to  hands/or lerps towards their torso. I decided to give Shinobu a realistic way to pick up objects because I wanted her AI to feel smart. The brute force approach would be to raycast a million times to find proper finger placements but this is not only really hard, it wouldn't work well for objects that have context (some objects need to be pic...

New Logo and Rebranding

We have a logo now! And the icon .exe for all future free demo releases:

Additionally, the title of this project has been changed to Shinobu Project instead of Shinobu Project 2 because the first one was never (and would never) be released. Happy Sunday!

Finalized New Eyes and Beginning Pickup Behavior

Got a metric buttload of work done today (because it's Saturday). I put in about 9 hours of work today. I finalized her new eyes and began writing the pickup logic module yay!

At last the eyes are complete. Again going from bone based deformations for pupil rotations to a shader based animation was worth it but a lot more work than I thought. A quick recap of the issues that I had to face; original rig eye bone positions were not made with the shader solution in mind, all eye animations had to...

Improved Hair Physics

I spent some time fixing her hair as it needs to be poofy and flexible. The hair had physics already but it was too stiff to tell and glitchy as all hell. Gif below showing the glitch:

The first problem I found was that there were too few bones for each head hair strand. Originally each head hair strand had 1 bone that would dangle with physics but it needed more bones to not only look bett...

Massive Pipeline Improvements and Eye Shader Logic

The switch from using bones for eyes to using a shader was a lot more work than I thought. The problem was that the bone placement for the eyeballs before had placement optimized for that squashed eyeball bone placement. And I have 54 animations that need to have all the bone positions corrected. Blender does not offer a built in solution to mass edit and bulk export animations with specific blend shapes and end frame counts. So I spent a bit of time writing my own Python scripts to generate 2 p...

Beginning Head Mesh Rework

Demo day was a big success thank you all who participated. The majority of the short playthrough videos you guys shared involved throwing her off the map. Was amusing. I am back on development. Working on revamping Shinobu's head mesh.

Her current head mesh was cute but I don't think it had the right Shinobu feel. Namely she did not have enough of a Shinobu look when angry. The following image shows the current head mesh from demo day. The eyelashes were too round and didn't give out enough em...

IT BEGINS! Demo v 0.1

After an enormous amount of bugfixes and improvements I'm not even gonna go in depth for each because there were too many:

+Fixed legs and torso syncing at all

+Player can now make Shinobu move to location with space bar (demo purposes)

+Looking up her skirt now stops her in place

+Fixed headpat forces not being calculated by Time.deltaTime

+Added a few more textures to the map

+Added a few more props to house

+Fixed a few stuttering events in some animation...

Devblog before demo day #1. Bugfixing and improvements.

Fixed a bug with leg animations not syncing with the torso. Video 1 shows the fix in action. As she lowers her hands, her torso must sync with the legs, so the legs very minorly speeds up to catch up with the torso. This is not a trivial task because naturally we as thinking animals would 'time' when we move our arms down to match our legs. This on the other hand is just whenever the animation finishes playing. So the slight ble...