yiffalicious

Extra Head: Cartoon Mink

Still have some bugs and adjustments to go through before release. Here's a extra content for your pantience: Cartoon Mink head. Was first done as a concept of what the mink should look like, but it has been prepped now to work

Mink WIP and some update

I'm starting to belive the Mink is coming along now, took a while, mostly because it looked a lot like a otter for a long time.

Some skinning to improve and it should be good to go but I will regretably have to ask You all for another week before a release can be made. I've hade some RL issues bleeding over that has robbed time and energy but that is hopefully gone for now.

Still I'm excited for this release as We're going to start work on the Croc/Alligator head after this which won the head poll, it's been a while sinse we had a proper scaley, haven't it?

- Dogson

Next Head Poll after Otter.

You all know the drill; vote for next head after Otter.

( Vote for one option proved to be quite impopular so we won't be touching that option again ^^; )

Otter.

Hey everyone, Dogson here with a sneak peak at the Otter head.

Mink head is still being tinkered with as I have to admit I that the early one looked very otter-like, mustelids tend to look quite similar and I feel I need to make them distintive enough as they both are to be released for this month, along side with some additional goodies.

- Dogson

Video dev log

Hi all!

Decided to do a video dev log to speed things up a bit (I can do a video log in 1 day whereas a text usually takes multiple days).

Link to video 

Mirror

SDF Link (mentioned in video)

Bug link (Mentioned in video) <---- PLEASE VOTE!

Let me know how this format works for you guys.

All the best.

- odes

FurryVNE - Build 2022-06-15

Hi all!

A small patch build fixing some issues. Click the link to the release notes (further down) for full details.

As always, you can find the build at our download page:

>>> CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD <<<

Download instructions

The app comes in a self-extracting archive. You can either run the exe to let it extract itself, or extract it with 7-zip if that makes you feel better.

Windows doesn't seem to like unknown EXEs, so it may block you from running the self-extractor. To unblock it, simply follow these instructions:

Release notes

>>> CLICK HERE TO READ THE RELEASE NOTES <<< 

We hope you all have a nice day!

All the best.

- FurryVNE Team

Part Alphas

Alphas for the new parts so far.

-Dogson

Next Head After Mink?

Ok, another round of sticking our finger up in the air determining where the wind is heading for what kind of head you all would like to see after the Mink is done!

- Dogson

FurryVNE - Release notes 2022-05-30

Hi all!

We're proud to present yet another content release. This one brings fennec parts and templates, as well as new parts in general. Be sure to check them out! We've also made some bug fixes.

As you may know, we're in the process of implementing animation/interaction systems for FurryVNE. While we're developing these systems, we're providing new content builds such as this in the meantime (that are being worked on in parallel w/o affecting the progress of the interaction systems).

>>> CLICK HERE TO READ THE RELEASE NOTES <<< 

>>> CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD <<< (for patrons)

All the best.

- FurryVNE Team

FurryVNE - Build 2022-05-30

Hi all!

As always, you can find the build at our download page:

>>> CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD <<<

Download instructions

The app comes in a self-extracting archive. You can either run the exe to let it extract itself, or extract it with 7-zip if that makes you feel better.

Windows doesn't seem to like unknown EXEs, so it may block you from running the self-extractor. To unblock it, simply follow these instructions:

Release notes

>>> CLICK HERE TO READ THE RELEASE NOTES <<< 

We hope you all have a nice day!

All the best.

- FurryVNE Team

Teeth making a comeback (in a slightly different form)

After some discussion with user Vandred where they expressed big frustration over making custom offsetted expression as a lot of heads lacks teeth as the plan was to have users themselfs pin out either the teeth parts that comes with the package or own custom modelled ones I have now descided that I will have to admit defeat on the plan of just having a sort of a blank slate row of stylized teeth I will now add teeth to both new and old heads as we will go on.

The old system with the teeth being modeled directly in had its problems too so We will try to have them as so called floaters, mesh that isn't directly merged on to the gums. I think this will allow for both custom offsets of various stylez such as saberttoothed cats and the likes and IF you would still like to have the stylized teeth row you can use the teeth mask and use an Alpha to mask them off completely in the texture builder.

- Dogson

Next generation penetration dynamics - Sneak peek

Hi all!

Sorry for the lack of updates as of late.

As with all things in FurryVNE, we're trying to improve every aspect of the program compared to its predecessor. While we could have used already established technology from before, we really want to push ourselves and our app to the limit, trying to achieve something new and ground breaking.

For this purpose, I've been very busy working on a brand new orifice engine. This has proven very challenging, but I think I finally made a major break through and reached a milestone.

Let me show you:

https://gyazo.com/cf4a0243dad9467f84cf03516c28e0de

NOTE!

THIS IS VERY MUCH SUPER EARLY FOOTAGE AND IT WILL BE IMPROVED UPON.

What you see above is the culmination of years of experience and planning and a month of implementation. It feels great finally putting all my ideas together to form this unique solution. While there has been bumps along the way, I think I finally managed to get it working!

It's absolutely beautiful to see the algorithm you've had in mind for such a long time finally come to fruition and it works wonderfully. At first I was distraught as I couldn't get my ideas to work the way I wanted, but with more tweaking of the algorithm I finally managed to get something more akin to what I had imagined.

I will be making more tweaks and continue to work on this, but once all that is done I intend to share more information and details about our system.

Here are some quick facts I can share though:

• GPU based.
• Higher refresh rate than before.
• "Real" dynamics.
• Less performance impact than before.
• Artist friendly. NO RIGGING REQUIRED.

Usually I don't like showing sneak peeks like this. I'd rather have the technology ready and then show it to you. But in this case, it was quite a while ago since I wrote something and I was so excited to reach this milestone that I wanted to show you the progress.

Talk to you all soon again.

All the best.

- odes

Fennec and General Canine Parts WIPs

Hey, Dogson here, recovering from a minor coldspell to show work in progress of the fennec head and other canine parts that is underway.

I've also started to design a second canine shaft as you can see in this dropbox link, as the text says - the mesh is still subject for change but I think it's on the right path and this can act as a nice, more realistic counterpart to the one we have at the moment.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7m1gt1110sae749/CanineShaft.png?dl=0

There will be a release later this month and I will then go over to the Mink head!

- Dogson

Shameless hype

ngl, always felt weird about promoting something that isn't finished. But maybe the time has come to finally start trying to make more people notice our project? The character editor is fully usable and the interaction systems are making great progress.

I made a e621 submission here regarding our latest update:

https://e621.net/posts/3279411

Feel free to upvote! (Or not. We will continue to work on this project to the best of our ability regardless.)

We're very excited about the future!

All the best.

- odes

Next gen collision system - Animation progress part 4

Hi all!

We're proud to present our new automatic collision system for FurryVNE that will go along with the new interaction systems coming later this year.

Motivation

When we implemented physical tails/ears/shafts/balls, we were challenged to figure out how these things are supposed to collide with the character. In our initial implementation that we demonstrated for the physical tails/ears, we simply offloaded this responsibility to the user, who then would be forced to set up colliders manually for these things to collide with the character. However, this was something that never really sat well with me. It felt like a very technical thing that the program should figure out for itself.

Coming up with an automatic system that can provide a reasonable degree of accuracy is challenging. Usually, when adding colliders to a character manually (in any engine), you use crude shapes such as spheres, boxes and capsules. While these shapes are very performant (hence their prevalence in realtime physics engines), they don't approximate the shape of characters that well. For most use cases this is OK, as you don't need them to be that precise in order for the physical simulation to be believable. But, when you're dealing with characters that are supposed to interact with eachother more delicately (such as in our app), it is our opinion that these crude shapes are simply not good enough.

(Example of how other physics engines use crude shapes to approximate body.)

If we were using shapes such as this for the entire body, you wouldn't be able to, lets say, stroke a shaft (or balls, for that matter) along the body of another character, without it either noticeably colliding with invisible objects (the crude colliders), or noticeably clipping through the model, breaking the immersion. While clipping is challenging to deal with regardless of what implementation you choose to go for, it is especially prominent when relying solely on these crude shapes.

One possible solution to this could simply be to add many, many more colliders but smaller in size (rather than relying on a single collider per limb), better approximating the body. This, however, costs performance, and if we were to update the character (through inflation, for example), many of these colliders would have to be recomputed. Furthermore, coming up with an algorithm that can fill a character with such shapes most efficiently is a little bit of a science of its own, where there are countless solutions, none necessarily capable of providing an ideal result, as in the end you're working with crude shapes rather than the actual shape of the body itself.

Another approach could have been use a mesh collider for the entire character, but computing mesh colliders is extremely expensive to do. If we were doing it every frame (as we would have to do for it to be aligned with the character animation), framerates would dwindle to sub 10 frames on many systems. I suppose it would be possible to slice the mesh up in smaller sections, baking each one separately and then only update the ones in need of refreshing. While that would remove the need to update the mesh collider(s) every frame, any collider that would eventually need to be updated (because of inflation, lets say) would still require the re-computation, which would cause a noticeable performance hit.

Lastly, since years back, using rigid bodies (which would be required to actually get physical behavior) together with mesh colliders is not supported in Unity anymore (since they simply cost too much performance), unless you use the convex option for the mesh collider, which would remove the benefit of using them in the first place as they would no longer approximate the surface precisely.

(Example of convex mesh collider in green. As you can see, it hardly approximates the actual surface of this example bunny model anymore.)

Given all these problems, we decided to create our own system for collision with the body.

Our method - Part 1

Signed distance functions (shortened SDF)  are methods that define a boundary in space. They take inputs in the form of coordinates and other data, and output a distance to the boundary. The function itself would look different depending on what object it describes. In the case of a sphere, it would simply take a point and a radius. Given these data, a distance field could be generated using simple vector mathematics.

SDFs don't even need to be ordinary euclidean objects but the point is that this function, whatever SDF it is, takes inputs, and you get a distance from the defined boundary as the output.

These functions have been around for a long time, and they have been used in 3D for decades. The earliest use cases for it in 3D go back as far as the 1980s.

If you have an SDF, you can render it using a technique known as raymarching. The idea behind raymarching is simple - given a ray (usually generated from the pixel of the camera's viewplane), you keep moving along that ray until it hits a surface according to the SDF. In sphere tracing (a specific optimized implementation of raymarching), the distance you move along the ray is determined by the return value of the SDFs, which you loop through and query at each step of the way, until a reasonable minimum threshold has been reached.

(A visual explanation of sphere tracing, a form of ray marching. The black line is the ray, the black points the time of sampling of the SDF, and the red lines the SDF boundary itself.)

SDFs don't need to be mathematical equations describing shapes, they can also be a pre-baked textures, where each texel (2D pixel, or voxel if it's 3D) represents the distance that index has from the defined shape. Using techniques such as marching cubes, you can pre-bake any 3D model into a 3D texture. This texture, then, could be used as the SDF, meaning you can render it using raymarching.

(Example of objects baked into 3D textures and then rendered using raymarching, borrowed from this blog. NOTE! These objects are not polygonal! The actual shape of each object is actually a box, but thanks to raymarching, when rendering the box's surface in the shader, we can get these amazing shapes from the 3D texture.)

GPUs are well suited to run operations on 3D textures, meaning generating a 3D texture from a mesh is something that can be done fast and efficiently utilizing the GPUs vast parallel computation power.

Our method - Part 2

Ok, so you have signed distance fields, you can pre-bake any 3D model into a 3D texture to be used as the SDF, and you can render them using raymarching. That's great. But what does any of this have to do with collisions? Well, that's the thing - since these 3D textures contain the distance to the boundary, we can query them using solely 1 texture lookup to find out whether or not a point is inside or outside of the geometry, and at what distance. Then, if that point is intersecting with the geometry, and if we want to move it away from the geometry, we simply move the point according to the distance returned by the SDF along the gradient of the SDF. For further optimization, this SDF gradient can be pre-computed and baked into the SDF texture itself along with the distance, meaning we essentially require no computation at runtime. We simply just do this 1 texture lookup to acquire all the relevant information to handle the collision properly. Now, that is AMAZING! We get all the information we need from simply 1 texture lookup! NO COMPLEX OR PERFORMANCE DEMANDING COMPUTATIONS, while also offering far higher fidelity for the physical shape than using simple, crude shapes!

Overview

Demonstration

(A visualization of the SDF shapes in Maya by using raymarching for the rendering. The shapes approximate the body mesh much better than simple boxes and spheres.)

(Turn-around of the shapes.)

(Closeup of the SDF in Maya's butt area.)

(Closeup of the SDF in Maya's chest area.)

(Closeup of the SDF in Maya's hand area.)

(Closeup of the SDF in Maya's hoof area.)

(Doing shaft collision against another character.)

(More shaft collisions against another character.)

(Colliders follow limbs as demonstrated here.)

(Balls collision against another character's torso.)

(Updating SDF in realtime to adapt to inflation. Low performance cost. This would absolutely not be possible to do using mesh colliders with such a low cost.)

(Stroking shaft, self collision.)

(More self collisions.)

Limitations

I might point out that this is a system designed for collisions with shafts, balls and physical bone chains (tails, hair etc). It is not a system for doing limb to limb collisions. However, the SDFs could be used to make the posing easier, since we can query them with low performance impact, meaning we could design our systems to "feel" along another character, placing the nodes accordingly to not intersect. This will be a future challenge.

Public video demonstration

https://twitter.com/furryodes/status/1514640916782456838

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/46777613/

https://mega.nz/file/Jp4QAawB#DAi6Tk6WtPxL2HtyJmkoYeKLo1JtRL934P2pXdRhHPQ

Summary

We've explained problems that exist with existing collision systems, and reasons why we chose to implement our own. Our system offers far higher fidelity than default systems while retaining excellent performance.

- odes

Head Poll Winner and Soon To Come Progress-report

Ok, so to at least my big surprise ; Mink won the last head vote for May!
Anyone have a folder of BNA's Marie Itami?  

Also stay tuned for a progress-report of Odes' work on interactions later today - really exciting stuff!

Please keep an eye out at his FA and Twitter for the public video demonstrating the new tech.

https://www.furaffinity.net/user/odes/
https://twitter.com/furryodes

-Dogson

Fennec and Canine part WIPs

Hello, just gonna post some work in progress for the Fennec Head and some canine parts, I'm also planning atleast a set of hands also with pawpads.

Edit: I want to try to make return of the more detailed nose on this one also, for those that wants the loose nose part that will still be possible.

All parts are still subject to change.

- Dogson

Next Head After Fennec Cont.

So apparently there's a hard limit on how many tick-boxes there were and after a valid complain that some others were missing I'm making a continuation on various heads here.


- Dogson

Next Head After Fennec.

Okay, new round off finding out what you would wish to see after the Fennec head has been released.

We've read some critique from the last poll of some people asking why more canines and we'll abide, we will definitely chill with that for a quite a while now ^^;

So there won't be any canines in the for the coming polls as of now.

- Dogson

FurryVNE - Release notes 2022-04-03

Hi all!

We're proud to present yet another content release. This one introduces Aria, our new official bird character, as well as new bird templates and parts. Additionally, there are some bug fixes. Check out the release notes for a full description of the changes.

As you may know, we're in the process of implementing animation/interaction systems for FurryVNE. While we're developing these systems, we're providing new content builds such as this in the meantime (that are being worked on in parallel w/o affecting the progress of the interaction systems).

Our next interactions progress report will very likely land within 10 days. We are super excited about this stuff! We'll be sharing a detailed text and lots of media. Will also make video for Twitter and FurAffinity. Stay tuned!

>>> CLICK HERE TO READ THE RELEASE NOTES <<<  

>>> CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD <<< (for patrons)

All the best.

- FurryVNE Team

FurryVNE - Build 2022-04-03

Hi all!

As always, you can find the build at our download page:

>>> CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD <<<

Download instructions

The app comes in a self-extracting archive. You can either run the exe to let it extract itself, or extract it with 7-zip if that makes you feel better.

Windows doesn't seem to like unknown EXEs, so it may block you from running the self-extractor. To unblock it, simply follow these instructions:

Release notes

>>> CLICK HERE TO READ THE RELEASE NOTES <<< 

We hope you all have a nice day!

All the best.

- FurryVNE Team

Aria Octiavia sneak peek

Soon..

Bird head and part set for the coming days.

Hello, Dogson here to say that the pending content release of stylized bird head and the wing like bird hands are set to come in either tomorrow or the weekend because of some issues that had to be ironed out with the hands. They've now been resolved and there's some day of polish and sweeping up to do.

Q:Does this mean that the Fennec head will be pushed to May?

A:No, the fennec head and parts are still set for a late April release as of now.

- Dogson

Bird Hands Sneak Peak

After long toil how to make this work we're finaly seeing that we can use these big, wing like hands for bird characters

Small animation progress update

After implementing physical bones and shafts, it felt natural to move on to physical balls. So that's what I've been working on this past week. Finally got to the point where I could test things out.

Here (in the linked/attached video) I'm playing around with some settings, seeing how the parameters affect the simulation.

This time around, we're using a more complex setup than in our previous project. Here, each ball is simulated individually, with a spring attached between them to limit the distance (rather than having a single sphere represent them both), leading to more physically correct behaviour.

The inflated state is user configured, so you could configure something else if you want. (The default state is also user configurable.)

Will definitely do more tweaking but I think it's looking rather promising so far!

All the best.

- odes

Head Poll winner and a question to our patrons.

Okay, so Fennec won with a big margin, I guess little cute canines are still quite popular, huh?

Which also segues in to a question I have for you all if you guys feel like getting back to more conventional heads and parts ASAP?

The reception of the eagle head went over my expectations and the reception so far for the stylized bird has been pretty good but a long necked bird head does feel a bit quite specific and not really broad that appeals to a lot of our users?

My initial plan was to work on that specific head in April but I'm starting to feel doubt about it that it may not be the most anticipated and rather niche head that can wait a bit?

So I would like to hear what You, our patreons would say about this? Should we push it forwards to after interactions has been released or do we want a long necked bird in April?

- Dogson

Stylized Bird Head With Big Ara Parrot Beak

One thing I would like to explore with this head is the possibilities with various modular beak parts, like this big beak here styled after the striking looking Ara parrot.

- Dogson

Stylized Bird Head WIP

Just dropping off two wips of the Stylized bird head. I'm starting to get there I belive.

Still Work In Progress - Mesh is still subject to change.

- Dogson

Poll For Next Non-Avian Head Later.

Hey, Dogson writing and we're throwing another poll to see where you, the users want to see for the next non-avian head we'll jump back in to once March and April has passed.

Are you still working on bird content?

Yes. There's still a couple of bird heads I want to complete - atleast one stylized bird head for cartoony bird characters and one long-necked bird head alongside a large bird hand, atleast one more pair of feet (perhaps duck/goose webbed feet) beak parts and feather parts so for those that are fans of the certain avian variety will have a acceptable base once interactions are released.

Anyways, here's the poll of what we believe are the most popular type of anthros

- Dogson

Animation/interactions progress part 3

As the poll requested, I'm doing a video rather than a text for this month.

If you haven't checked out the trailer I suppose you do that. You can find it on my Twitter and FurAffinity.

Video update (walkthrough for patrons):

>>> CLICK TO ACCESS WALKTHROUGH <<< 

I forgot to mention in the video that the animation is placeholder solely for the purpose of getting a feel for the physical behavior. I'm aware there are some issues with heads/tongue for Maya. (We're essentially playing human animation on an anthro giraffe which is not what it was made for.)

Enjoy your evening!

All the best.

- odes