Experimental Musings

v0.13.1 goes out to the general public tomorrow, which means tonight is mostly bug testing and writing some limited scope features that aren't likely to break anything. While working I had a couple interesting thoughts that I wanted to share with you, and that I'll probably be following up on in the future with some small prototypes.

First, while working on the skin tone consistency problem I had an idea about alternative ways to render everything. A quick aside into computer graphics: when doing ray tracing to render an object (like Daz does) there are a number of different surface effects that are computed, with the main ones being diffuse and specular lighting. The diffuse bit of an object is the part that gives it most of it's colour and corresponds to rough surfaced object which scatter light in all directions. The specular component corresponds to flat, polished surfaces and gives lots of light in a focused direction and not might light in every other direction (like bouncing a laser off a mirror). Different combinations of diffuse and specular lighting produce objects that look like different materials. Concrete is a grey colour with very little specular lighting; plastic has a larger specular component and smaller diffuse component.

It should be possible to have Daz output the diffuse and specular components separately which would let me combined and manipulate them later. If I got all of the values tweaked correctly I could simulate different clothing materials directly inside of LR2. A pair of lace panties might use the same image set as a pair of cotton panties, but look appropriately different. Wet things also tend to have large specular components, so I could tweak a girls body images as things start getting hot and heavy.

Second, I've been thinking about how I can use the text display in LR2 more dynamically to reflect what's happening in the scene. I'm going to have to do some reading and experimentation, but it should be possible to add movement to certain words or sentences. If you've played or watched any Slay the Spire you might recognise the general effect from some of the events that pop up. I'd like to do it dynamically, taking, for example, all of the dialogue a character says and checking what they're arousal is. If it's over a threshold their words start to shake slightly, and as they get more aroused they start to get bigger or move more. Picking out key words and emphasising them via different colours, sizes, or movement, would also be interesting. As an example: Stephanie might fixate on the word "Cum", making it a larger font, colouring it off-white instead of her normal font colour, and making it float up and down like a cloud when she says it.

The prototyping for either of these ideas will have to wait a little, but I thought they were both interesting enough to share and get some opinions from my patrons on!