Clothing Constrainment and Bug Fixing

Before I get into my main post for tonight, I have a request for Mac players. I am trying to pin down the cause of the strange animation scaling, if it is affecting you please take a moment and fill out this bug report form: Mac Bug Form 

For a long time I have been bothered by some systematic by some systematic clipping issues with the clothing system of Lab Rats 2. The clipping issues were a result of how clothing is shown in the game: individual images of each piece of clothing are rendered and then stacked in Ren'py to generate a character outfit. For reasonably skin tight items like bras, panties, or t-shirts this approach works well, but when clothing is suppose to have volume while allowing things to be placed over top it runs into issues. The left image shows a worst case scenario: a camisole with a frilled and flared edges along the bottom and shoulders, a skirt that flares out at the hips, and on top of it all a relatively tight fitting lab coat that goes down to the thighs. I have thought about the problem a lot, but I never came up with a reasonable solution that didn't involve a significant amount of manual effort in Daz as well as much larger image packs for clothing items.

I obviously wouldn't be writing about this unless I had a solution. The fix has ended up being a direct result of the prototype work I did during the bug testing week. That work focused on defining body regions to let hide some sections at a time, and it resulted in a library of region images that I could use to isolate, for example, the upper arms, breasts, feet, ect. It occurred to me that the effect I wanted for layered clothing was to have upper layers constrain lower layers to these same body regions. The short explanation is that when defined pieces of clothing can now be told what regions they should constrain. If other pieces of clothing are drawn near these regions they are only drawn inside the body region, effectively correcting the layering issues.

There are a few benefits to this new system. First, it works with existing assets as-is. There are no extra image sets needed (outside of adding some additional body regions) and constrained regions only need to be added to clothing items that look incorrect without them. These are mostly top layer items that might need to fit over bulky shirts or sweaters. Second, it works flawlessly with the outfit system in general. If a constraining item is removed the items being constrained return to their normal state. It works in the outfit designer with no extra work as well. Because it is based on the same body regions as the half-off body regions it even works flawlessly with that; if a half-off coat would no longer hide a body region that region also no longer constrains anything. The last and most obvious benefit is that the clothing sets just look better.

There are some interesting implementation details and edge cases that I might go into in a future post if people are interested, but I hope you like what you see with this new feature!