vrengames

More Live2D Progress!

Added 2022-07-21 10:30:28 +0000 UTC

Just a quick update for today as I continue to work on the new character display code for Lab Rats 2. With the move to Ren'py 8 (and with it Python 3) complete I've gotten back to refining the code that actually displays characters throughout LR2.

I've had the basics of the display system figured out since the early Live2D demos. The hard work was introducing that system in a way that played nicely with the existing outfit library, the outfit design system, and so on. The first step of that work is finished now. I have the whole system properly importing outfits from a wardrobe file, recolouring each clothing item (note: patterns are not yet supported.), and displaying the character. Character skin and hair colours are also properly applied now.

There are two immediate tasks I now need to tackle. First, I need to add masks for character faces. Right now the whites of their eyes get recoloured to whatever their skin colour is. Lips are less obvious, but they would also benefit from being singled out and given a slightly different colour. Second, I need to do an art pass and equalize the greyscale images for all of the clothing assets. Without getting the white levels of each item standardized the same colour will appear differently on every single item.

So that's what I'll be working on for the next few days. In the background I am also mulling over potential workflow improvements to make adding the next pose significantly faster - more on that when I get some prototyping time!