Dragon Creator (part 2)

Around two and a half months ago I wrote a post on the plans for the dragon creator, and this week that plan was set in motion. It has progressed much faster than I anticipated, things just kind of worked out really well. Probably close to 80% of the technical challenges were resolved this week despite it being harder than in the original plan because of the new physics-based model that complicates things. It's also a very clean solution that is super optimized thanks to a recent engine plugin that is perfect for this sort of system, all the individual pieces are merged, deformations are baked, the physics is adapted to the new proportions (including for example making the head heavier if you added big horns) and a new skeleton is generated based on what pieces are chosen, so after the customization is done the dragon is about as performant as if it had been created and optimized as a regular model.

The main change from the original plan is that we won't be making multiple base head meshes that you can swap between since the deformations work so well already. We'll just have an archetype head that can be morphed into all kinds of dragon head shapes, any additional geometry that is needed will just be added as separate pieces on top, and variations in scales and details will be done using textures. The main benefit of having the archetype head is that we can author all customizations for just this head, and most of them will seamlessly morph together with the head into the desired shape because of how the system works. This makes it much faster and easier to create new customizations. We may do something similar for the body as well depending on how much it can be morphed without breaking, but there will need to be at least 2 different bodies for when 4 legged dragons are added.