Monthly Report: January

Hello! It's this time of the month again. I'm still working on that scene I talked about. This turned out more time consuming that expected. Well, kind of expected. I'm still figuring out how I want to solve some problems, that's why I won't commit to any particular release date or feature set, it will be done when it is done.

I made a quick video of the current state. Current focus is the transition between the two main poses of the scene, which is the most complicated part. I'm kind of happy with the animation of the right girl, but the long walk of the left girl between poses is rather on the awkward side. Part of this is due to feet and body being animated by different IdlePosers, which are slightly out of sync. The other part is that IdlePoser is using a fixed SmoothStep curve on top of its Bézier interpolation.

In this scene there are 4 IdlePoser plugins on each of the girls, that's two for hands, one for the body and one for the feet. I will likely add another one for the EyeTarget at a later point. These IdlePosers are all being controlled by a central StateMachine and some helping LogicBricks. Using that many IdlePosers means I can combine partial animations to reduce the appearance of repeating animation loops and a create a lot more variance. I'm still experimenting how to make a nicer walk animation with IdlePoser as well as how to setup the central StateMachine without loosing myself in the mess of interacting states. Likely I need some more IdlePoser and LogicBricks improvements.....we coders love to solve everything with just more code! Other than that there is still lots of animation work ahead.

What else happened this month?

• Some work related to upcoming VaM changes related to plugin security for SuperShot, SkyMagic and IdlePoser. This is related to the appearance of a malicious VaM plugin, although it was on a pirate site. You might have seen Meshed's post on Discord about it. Remember, get your stuff from trusted sources only. Anyway, Meshed changed his solution again, so the change is not that urgent anymore....lol.
• Various IdlePoser tweaks and bugfixes.
• Release of my PowerHandles plugin, which was extremely helpful for building my scene so far.
• An unusual amount of people asked quite a lot of questions this month. While I totally like to help people, formulating answers that are actually correct and helpful can easily take 20 minutes or more, especially if there is a bit of back and forth needed. At the end of the month that easily adds up to several hours of time. If you want to help me to use my limited VaM time-budget more efficiently, please consider asking your question publicly in a new thread on the Hub. A lot of you have the same or very similar questions. Asking publicly means more people might profit from my time spend on writing an answer. Also you can potentially help each other and I can more easily post screenshots, code, etc. which is not possible in private messages here on Patreon or Reddit.

Cheers, MacGruber