v0.52 Progress Update - No New Demo, But Progress Nonetheless

Work on v0.52 and the big shift over to a Live2D centered display system continues. I had hoped to have another demo to go along with this update, but progress had been slow and I figured a dev log is better than nothing! My recent work can be divided into four categories: Experimental stuff, Ren'py stuff, Live2D stuff, and Rendering stuff.

First up: experimental stuff. I spent some time looking into doing separate shadow passes in Daz for dynamic shadow layers in Live2D. I ran into major issues with quality (shadow rendering requires a different, less attractive rendering mode) and integration (file output is some sort of strange high dynamic range image, which I'm unsure how to process). This isn't a critical feature, so I'm putting it on the shelf for now. I also dug around in the Live2D files to try and find an easy way to get texture co-ordinates for aligning pattern renders. I wasn't able to find anything, so for now I'll be doing pattern work the hard way: rendering out patterns and manually aligning them with the Live2D texture they correspond to.

Second: Ren'py stuff. It's mostly good news here; I have the basic Live2D display stuff working inside of Ren'py (and very, very lightly integrated into LR2). There are some minor performance problems related to showing/hiding a character, but I expected they might exist and I already have plans to set up a model prediction/model cache to alleviate them. I have a lot of detail work to do here, like actually hooking character parameters into the model values for height, breast size, etc., but I don't expect any roadblocks.

Third: Live2D stuff. Here's the major source of the slowdown. I had hoped to set up some sort of semi automated framework to take images out of Daz, assign a mesh to them, and apply them to an existing pose. Those hopes haven't panned out; setting up Live2D models is more of an art than a science and it's going to take manual effort to get each piece of clothing set up for each pose. This isn't a roadblock, but it is going to mean a slower pace of development. Each clothing item takes a couple of minutes on average to tidy up the render images, import, glue, and tweak to make sure it looks correct (shirts and bras are the most time consuming, because they bridge multiple body zones. Panties, shoes, etc. are the fastest to add).

LR2's library of hair, clothing, etc. currently contains a hundred-ish clothing items (not counting patterns), at 10 minutes of work each that's about 16 hours of straight work to get them all moved into Live2D, per pose. That's not an impossible amount of work, but the prospect of it has been enough to have me looking for shortcuts. I'm now convinced that there are no easy shortcuts - the fastest way is just to get started.

Fourth and finally, we have Rendering stuff. Rendering is now being done at 1440 vertical resolution, and a new output filesystem is in place. I also discovered a mistake/oversight in Live2D that means the old demo images were probably being displayed at half resolution, so resolution shouldn't be an issue at all. My rendering automation scripts are finished and I'm now rendering out all of the first pose images. In practice this is turning up bugs in the script, which requires me to pause, fix the bugs, and rerender any messed up items, but we're making progress! The whole rendering cycle is massively faster than it use to be thanks to the reduced image count - rendering a poses' worth of images takes a couple of hours, not a couple of days!

There's still a lot for me to do before a playable Live2D version of LR2 will be ready. The old display system had been built up incrementally over many, many updates, and I hadn't appreciated how large it had become until now. I'll keep working away at it and keep you all posted on the progress! My goal for the next demo is to have a single pose inside of LR2 with all clothing items available to it, properly interacting with the Outfit system, character height, and breast size. I hope to have this done for the end of the month, but this project has repeatedly torpedoed my best time estimates so take that with a grain of salt.

Thanks for bearing with me as I tackle this huge rework of the display system!