New build ready!

Hey guys,

The new build is ready!

The link will be available in a seperate post right after this post goes live.

As I mentioned in the previous update, this build adds a new female fennec, who can be found in the garage, and dynamic bone colliders have been enabled for everything, so you can now look AND touch!

I ended up changing some other stuff too though. I redecorated a bit here and there, tweaked some materials, and enabled snap-turning because some had said the smooth turning was making them sick. I will soon add a toggle for that so you can choose which you want to use, but for now it'll just default to snap.

I also spent a couple hours experimenting with and tweaking the post-processing some more. I was unhappy with the sky being overexposed when indoors, and with the sun looking under-exposed when you stared directly at it. The sky also seemed a little over-exposed in general, and white objects outdoors in direct sunlight like the railings on the porch in the backyard, or the doors to the sunroom were also overexposed and you couldn't really see any variation in the shading on them.

So, into VR I went, where I could see exactly what the changes I was making would look like, and I tried a bunch of things until I found some new settings which I think are about as good as I'm gonna get it. The new settings pull down the brightness of only the brightest things in the scene, like the sky and white paint, and there's a slight reduction in contrast to bring up the darker parts of the scene. But a further adjustment at the low end makes sure that black is still black. So now, the skies are bluer, and not quite as blown out when you're in the garage looking over at the pool. And when you look at the sun it's the max brightness like it's supposed to be. The kitchen is also more well lit now. Overall the effect is that the total exposure has been reduced slightly, which reduces eye fatigue, and the result looks more realistic! You might find it's hard to notice a difference unless you can compare A and B versions as I did, but trust me, it's improved. Heh!

Let's see, what else...  

Oh yeah. I added a new idle to the bear so it wouldn't rub its shoulder quite as often, and I gave the fennec a similarly long set of animations.

I also selectively disabled mesh colliders, but not the dynamic bone colliders, for the hair and tails (except the meaty shark tails), so that the player can touch them, but their body and hands will pass through them. It was a little annoying colliding with the tails as you tried to move around, and the hair feels less stiff if your hand can pass through it, even though ideally it would also had dynamic bone colliders so you can tussle it. You can interact with the ponytails however.

I spent a bunch of time tweaking the dynamic bone settings for the Zawoo peen models as well. I had to modify the shape of the rabbit's a bit to support dynamic bone colliders. Can't use certain blend shapes as the model has to align with the armature for it to deform properly. But by selectively moving and scaling the bones in the armature I was able to achieve a similar effect to what I wanted.

Oh, and I have made a temporary fix to the player's collider, reducing its radius, so that when you get close to the avatars or look inside, your framerate doesn't drop like a rock. I'd disabled colliders on some of the avatars because of that issue, and they're now back on, except the wolf in the sunroom because if I have the collider on for her you walk right up her feet and over her body which was weird. Heh!

And now for some issues that have cropped up...

The first problem that I'll be working on trying to resolve is that at the moment, if you get smaller than 0.25x and you teleport, you become stuck and can only move by teleporting. Setting your scale back to 1.0 and then teleporting once more will unstick you. I trited playing with a bunch of settings on the player capsule to fix this, but nothing seemed to work, so I'm gonna have to do some debugging to figure out what's going on there.

The second issue is that I tried baking occlusion culling data for the scene for the first time, to improve performance, and I discovered that Unity's built in culling system is absolute garbage. No matter what settings I used, I could only get it to cull a handful of objects inside the house when you're standing at the start. I'd expect it could not cull the objects in the living room or dining room for example, but even in the sunroom bathroom, it would not cull the avatar there, the shower, some of the decorations on the wall, or the tub, in spite of other objects in the same room being culled. Same goes for the adjacent sunroom, and the upstairs guest room with the rabbit.

So it seems I'll either need to purchase another asset which does a better job of culling, or I'll have to use a trick people use in VRChat often, which is to have trigger volumes that hide certain portions of the world based on where the player is currently standing. Neither is really ideal though. I'm not sure any other locations I use will be quite as complex or detailed as the house, with so many objects being hidden from view much of the time.

What I may end up doing in the meantime is finally implementing the menu options to choose which of the characters you want to have visible at any particular time. Then at least, you won't have all those avatars with their new dynamic bone colliders eating up performance.

Anyway, that about covers it for this update, I think! I'll post the link to the new build in a few moments.

Enjoy!