Ground Destruction Test & Neko vid Re-Lighting

To be honest, this month has sucked extremely bad. Loss of our only family dog, non-stop drama multiple times a week that requires my careful attention or things split apart, lack of energy throughout my days, discovered I have tinnitus, (inevitable with my tmj, but this SUCKS as a composer! The ringing gets so loud) and I even felt so down I couldn't animate properly at the beginning of last week. I was able to regain that near the end of the week real quick though. VRChat has been fun, but I wanted to get some kind of something going to help me feel actually better and get some stuff going on the Patreon. First off, Ground destruction in Blender.

It seems simple looking at the finished thing but figuring it out was what I was worried about. In UE4, I had a block come down and then another one come up for floor destruction there so I tried the same thing here. This time I used an oval and a ring to get the same effect in higher quality and it's really good! Even better than Apex destruction! And yes, actually simple too.

I'm trying to use Fracture Iterator more as this started kinda crappy but it really became something as I fractured the broken pieces once they started flying. Really helped make it look good. Had to adjust gravity and speed of the rigid body world because everything is super huge in order to be compatible with UE4's scaling.
Another thing i'll have to test in the future is texturing the inside vs the outside. Cell fracture thankfully does separate the inside materials created so I can pull that off so I just gotta learn the texture part.

In other news, here's a screenshot of the differences in Neko vid between before and after the lighting changes.

I still need to add text and jokes back in after hiding everything when Neko crushes the place. Lighting wise, the way the lights hit the characters are far more natural and allow softness rather than flat character shadows and hard brightness. Still adjusting character materials though like Rin's hair. What's gotten a HUGE upgrade is the environment lighting. Instead of things being super dark and the brightness artificially raised in post process, I fixed all that thanks to working on the Michiru picture and learning more about cinematic lighting. I will have a tutorial out on youtube soon for that as I just recorded the footage and now have to edit it all together. 

It's funny how it took A LOT of work to fix the lighting to be natural and get even close to what it originally was. But it's all the better for it. The setup here is a fill/rectangle light facing the living room. The point light bulbs are mostly used for getting the regular light from lamps and whatever makes sense. The 2 spotlights are going to be moving to keep characters lit well, but it won't be too noticeable since you think that the light is simply coming from the lamps. Also just now learning that soft source radius somehow softens shadows taken from that light. Looking into that more.

Still, I couldn't truly solve why the framerate is so damn heavy in this project! I was able to get it to 30fps at least from 12fps. Which is crazy because I get dips down to 60fps on the Marin/Diane map! (I can't see framerates above 60fps on this monitor so it's all fine since UE4 tries to maintain 120fps)
There's also a huge issue where the project does NOT want to be in higher post process engine quality. So depth of field and higher post process fx is unfortunately out the window.

Anyways, there's definitely plans for 180 VR. (Which likes low usage of post process anyways) What will be massively helpful is that this is the first project I did Blender destruction for! (I was experimenting what the best method for destruction was and this was too performance heavy since I did it in the main Blender project... which is also a 3-part project mess in Blender instead of just using different actions. I know to do destruction in a separate project now though for performance!)
The huge benefit is no re-rendering if the destruction messes up mid-render! It's baked from Blender to UE4 and acts like a character animation! But I think I might redo it all with what I know in Blender using Fracture Iterator now.

Also thinking of adding more portraits.