Hey guys, I think it will benefit both me and the community for me to share more about the work that goes into each of these updates. If you just want to track the progress of the next update, you can view the public ClickUp board:https://sharing.clickup.com/90171009265/b/h/6-901711785760-2/4774670512bb3b7
Please note that I cannot guarantee its accuracy 100% at any particular moment in time. Things may be in progress that aren't marked as such, and things may be completed that haven't yet been marked. But I'll do my best to keep it as updated as I can while I finish things off.One of the features I'm most proud of in the 3.0 version is the addition of a brand new facial rig for female characters. Epic introduced a feature for their own Metahuman characters called Metahuman performances. This feature allows for the creation of high-quality lip sync animations directly from an audio asset. Naturally, I really wanted to use this feature on my own characters. But since I use Daz characters (specifically Genesis 8.1), it lacks the necessary morphs in order to use the required facial rig. But thanks to the help of a very smart friend, I was able to create the required morphs and reproduce the rig for my Daz characters. This allowed me to use the MH facial rig directly on my female characters:https://streamable.com/c43025
But I haven't yet implemented this feature on my male characters. In order to have high quality, consistent lip sync usable by both sexes, I will need to transfer the facial morphs from my female characters to the male characters. Since they have identical head+face topology, this should be a simple process in Blender. And since I've already created the rig for females, I can simply duplicate it for males. So the hard work is essentially done.
You may have noticed the lack of male characters in the game. That's due to them lacking the facial rig. Once I have this solved, I intend to add many more male NPCs into the game, in areas that are currently dominated by female characters only.
In addition to that, I want to refine schedules for all existing NPCs so that they have more freedom to travel between individual locations. The distance between locations is currently too great to have them walk, so instead they will simply spawn into the new location at the specified time, with a tracker in the inventory showing their current location. I feel this is the simplest solution for now, since I have no plans to introduce alternative travel mechanics for NPCs in the next few updates.If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope to share a lot more technical insights about my work with subscribers in the future as well :)