Anduo Report January 26th, 2024

 Welcome, cleanse thyselves with news from the creators! This week the maiden receives a toolset of unorthodox elemental properties and her cloth from now on shall bear mark.

Less:

Since we’ve already established that buttplugs will play a role in Erokin as items, we wanted to explore them more visually. Here’s some concepts! They are currently getting modelled.

PKing:

Pac has been working on the different destroyed states of Aldas main outfit! The idea is that during combat, it can rip and slowly become more revealing. c:<

Nerada:

Wouldn’t be a proper H-Game without lewd enemy grapples. Here’s some rough drafts of what that will look like.

Bear:

Whew what have I been doing the last 2 weeks..

I’m working on getting the next version out as soon as possible, while also trying to really up the game of our nsfw quality. I hope you all understand and enjoy this peek behind the curtains! ♥

Most of my time has been poured into the abyss that is aldav1 to aldav2 animation conversions.

Since we have redone Alda’s face, it was the perfect opportunity to update her Rig to. The rig is the stuff that lets us create animations for characters. Essentially bones with extra helper controls.

However, because of the update, Alda’s old rig is not 100% compatible with the new Aldav2 rig. They are very similar, it’s the same character after all, but it has some very key differences. The skirt is rigged completely differently now for example. It automatically deforms to her legs. Her cloak controls are new and her face is redone from the ground up.

On top of that, her “main” bones have also slightly changed in position, scale and rotation. Those differences add up and make it so old animations don’t work with the new rig out of the box.

I’ve explored different ways of making this conversion process as painless as possible. The setup I ended up with is usable but very time consuming. Unreal has a tool that lets you convert animations from one rig to another, even if they are very different. I created a setup that lets us use that tool for aldav1 to aldav2.

Here’s an example of what an unconverted animation looks like on the new alda (right) vs the automatically converted version (left). The left is fixing a lot of the super obvious issues, but if you look closely, you can still find a few issues. Her lower legs are clipping through her upper legs and the skirt is in the wrong spot.

To fix those issues, I can add an FK Rig on top of the aldav2 rig, which lets me rotate and move every single bone manually.

That then looks like this. I see the bones inside unreal in 3d, can click on them and move them as required. Here I “fixed” the lower legs poking through the upper.

I’ve done this for ~100 animations so far. Some were extremely time consuming, especially when Alda was pushing herself off the floor with a hand. Sometimes, I had to fix the arm locations every single frame.

After going through all of that though, I’m finally able to show off some new content in engine!

Sneak peek of the new liquid system (more details below)!

These are 2 out of 3 new animations featuring Alda, Limar and a guard. These scenes will be fully voice acted. The Melt-Bad-End is going to have more additions than that though!

While working implementing the blowjob animation (it was animated by swurst, he’s amazing, check him out! https://twitter.com/swursterotic ), I really wanted to have more exciting liquid rendering. Spit, Cum, Drool, you name it, I want it rendered as juicy as possible. For this, I went on a bit of a tangent lmao.

We can place these animations wherever we want, we can even draw them on surfaces (think like spray in overwatch / old counter strike). With this system, I can have them play continuously like in the gif, I can manually dictate how fast they play in an animation, I can change the opacity and size / deformation.

Behind the scenes, this works by extracting different channels from a video of real life slime. Then those channels get recalculated into normal (how bumpy each pixel is) data and is then squished on a 4k flipbook texture:

Then a shader goes along the flipbook and switches which cell is being displayed. On top of that, there is interpolation between different cells, which makes things a lot smoother at lower frame rates.

All of this required me to actually dust off my python skills (it’s been years lmao) to write a tool that automates a lot of the process I described above. Without this tool, this would be hundreds of hours of work.

And here’s one potential use of this tech! (The effect is amplified for easier visibility)

Aside from that, I also decided to make a detour into the realm of expressions. Previously with aldav1, expressions were 100% driven by bones. I completely redid the facial expression system from the ground up. It’s now based on Shapekeys (mesh deformations, where each vertex has a new position, like a copy of the mesh). Those shapekeys themselves are based on Apples ARKit standard. This opens up a lot of cool opportunities in realtime facetracking (tho I’m not sure if we’ll make use of this.

To use those shapekeys, I built a Control Rig in Unreal. Control rigs are just a fancy name for bones that have logic. In this case, these bones drive different shape keys of the mesh. All the little arrows over her face change her expression in different ways. Whats REALLY cool tho, is that blinking works 100% dynamically. It’s completely driven by code! She also changes the eye rotation very slightly every 0.3-3.0 seconds, which gives her a much more lively feel, even if there is no real animation playing that changes her look direction. Like she’s focussing on another detail of the thing she’s looking at.

I then used this system to build a set of (now 7, during the video it was only 3) expressions. Ahego, Happy, Sad, Uneasy, Pain and such. The really cool thing is that we can mix those expressions though! So instead of building expressions from a plain canvas every time, we can say “she’s 20% happy, 70% uneasy and 10% ahego”. And then from there, we can fine tune the expression using the controls shown above.

Using all of those techniques, I put together this masturbation animation for the melt-bad-end. Have a look!

Because of the switch from Aldav1 to Aldav2, outfits are now wayyyy easier to implement too! Because of this, I asked Pac to make a few variants of Alda’s default outfit. After I got them in my grabby hands, I wasted no time and put them in game and made it so the outfit has separate HP from Alda which is decreased by damage!

Musty caves and angy gobbos

Right now, it really is just a model switch. Ideally, I’d want to have some sort of effect covering up the transition of course.

Here’s some more detailed closeups of the armor damage (sorry for the shit fps, my pc was dying when I was recording for some reason)

Because the goblin is a bought asset from the unreal store, we had to edit him to make him fit with the more.. Unique aspects of Erokin. Pac has modelled and textured the dick and Swurst has made it attached to the skeleton! I’m super happy with the results and am excited to see animations created with all this!

Random fun fact, “again” looks like a buttplug in waveform:

And here’s some screenshots of Alda with new shader effects!

Default:

Sweaty:

Blushing:

Thank you for attending the vigil. The Church hopes that this month's report pleased thee.