Lab Rats 2 Animation Prototyping
Added 2018-02-21 07:13:54 +0000 UTCIt's the time between the patron bugtesting release and the general public release of v0.2.1, which means I've had some time to step away from the main LR2 project and do some experimental prototyping. I've got something very exciting to show you all today, a first look at an animation technique that may work very well with the style of Lab Rats 2.
The gif above is showing off some experimentation with shader based animation. A shader is fed the character images and manipulates the image. In this case there are two effects going on: a psudo-random swirling motion ideal for hair or skirts and a bobbing motion ideal for simulating movement. A separate influence map image is used to mark where the shader effects should be applied, and how strong they should be.
Implementing this in Lab Rats 2 would require a few days of coding and testing, along with some work to generate the appropriate influence maps for different body types and positions, but I don't believe there are any technical limitations that would stop me from getting it working. Let me know what you think!
Comments
you need to animate to compete with what people will be putting out in the next 18 months.
blakeness
2018-03-18 18:51:23 +0000 UTCThis was just a few hours playing around with a new library and some default shaders, so final results should be better looking. I hadn't thought about using this shader style for non-animation stuff, but now that you mention it that might have a lot of potential. I'll give it some thought and see what might be possible!
Vren
2018-02-23 05:59:52 +0000 UTCi like the hair, am indifferent to the breasts, and think the doggy style 'animation' is a bit off. the breasts need movement of the body to make it seem like a bounce and not breast resizing, and the doggy style seems like just warping of the image. good job, though it looks like a useful skill to apply in the right situations (like the hair for what was shown). the breast thing if used to alter static images can give a bit more variance on breast sizes (or shapes) on existing breasts without increasing the asset load.
james steele
2018-02-22 22:08:39 +0000 UTCMy feelings about this are a mix of the comments above. This does seem to have potential, but it can also easily fall into the uncanny valley, and to me this chest animation definitely does.
Bingbong
2018-02-22 04:46:12 +0000 UTCI like it. It seems to have some good potential. I would continue with it.
Mr_Ice
2018-02-22 02:06:41 +0000 UTCIt strikes me as very uncanny valley. I'm not opposed to the idea of animations generally, but I don't like this.
Cassie
2018-02-21 15:52:11 +0000 UTC
