This is a small continuation from that ridiculously long blog post. And the only reason it was so long, was from all the pictures I showed.
Erodac finished work on the fixed Dutchie model and sent it to me. It’s as I wanted it. But, I will be be getting to this in just a bit.
The other (shorter) thing I want to talk about, I finally found out where Sarge, Nappz, and the others got the cool eye tracking thing for their Dutchies (called ‘Vilar’s Eye Tracking Shader‘). However, application is something I’m still waiting for an answer to. It shows that I have to do it in Blender (though it does give a tutorial)… but I’m not 100% sure if this shader can be used for the Dutchie (due to the size of the eye).
Been asking in a patient manner all day, to anyone that has the shader (and would respond to my request for knowledge). Most of them say it was done for them (who I would assume Nappz, he’s a miracle worker).
His girlfriend (AzureFox) came through for me again, the following day of the posting of this blog post. She was the one that told me I could put the Dutchie tail on a Best Boi (without using Blender).
She said yes, this is the shader. She also said that she heard someone say it costed $60. Think someone confused it for something else, because I’m seeing no price tag. Anyway, she says that I don’t have to use Blender to do this. However, it’s still a viable option. The other option is to erase the eye in both left and right texture sheets. Yet she claims the Blender option is ‘easier’. Huh.
Once either are done, drag the shader to the scene, parent them to the Head bone (not the Eye bones), then size them to my liking. The shader has additional features, such as simulated eye tracking, and an iris that can contract and expand under certain conditions.
Very nice. I’ll mess with this at a later date. I got more important things to deal with…
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Which brings us back to the main event: the fixed Dutchie model for BenieTheDragon. Erodac put it in a .unitypackage file instead of just sending me the .blend file. Because of this, it wanted to overwrite the default model. I tried everything I can think of to prevent this, but it always sniffed it out. Soon I realized “wait, he could had just sent me the model.”
Really wish I thought of that before. Did get the file I needed. Went in Unity and was about to do what I said I was going to do, then seeing something that my jaw hit the floor in shock.
Something that has taken me two days to work on, has been replaced with ‘Missing prefab (Dummy)’ for every bone. Every. Fucking. Bone in the hierarchy, replaced with this missing prefab thing. And all of the attachments, were in strange positions.
It was like the avatar had collapsed into itself, and created a singularity (with the missing prefabs).
I just turned, something that would had only taken me.. 15-30 minutes to do, to.. NOTHING!!
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But, I did fix it, in a sense. My project file now has a bug, all because I didn’t want to overwrite the default Dutchie model.
The only way that Unity (and the SDK) are allowing a fix, is to allow the default Dutchie model to be in the folder it was originally created (the Assets folder, instead of mine). Attempting to move it to my custom folders, causes the issue with the ‘missing prefab’ crap. Think it might be because it’s a model that was made with the old Unity version (and hasn’t been updated since).
Have to go with it. And after some time, I was able to re-attach all the attachments to the new model as close to what I remembered.
What a mess.. but I dug through it. Uploaded just fine, going to be testing as soon as I finish this post up.
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Testing complete. It works! Am noticing an issue with the firebreath animation not playing. But I’m pretty sure I know the reason for this, and it’ll be fixed.
And the one that helped me with the texturing (who knows what my sona looks like), asked “are you going to add ears to it eventually?”
*deep sigh*… Look, I get it, it’s based off of the Dutchie, and the Dutchie have ears. But what part of ‘custom designed model’ do they not understand!?
My sona’s ears, are on the back of his head (but invisible). DEAL WITH IT!! Geezus!
On one hand, I shouldn’t let this bother me and continue on. On the other, I just wish people would accept my attempt for being as close to my sona as possible (without Blender knowledge).
Wish I could meet the unknown creator of that gif art, that became my scalesona (if they’re even still alive at this point), and ask them “why didn’t you add ears?” Then I could refer their answer to all the people questioning.
.
Meh. Going to continue as planned: fix the firebreath emote, try to get this eye tracking shader installed and working, then make several different versions of the avatar (much like I did for BTDB and Red Boi). For the 3rd thing, I’ll likely delete all the IDs for Red Boi (again), to make room for this one. Though I’m unsure if I should just flat out replace BTDB with this. If only I could have BTDB’s eyes, but with BTD’s long nose. Then it’ll be even closer to my sona.
But first, I really should take a closer look at my project folder. With the issue of the model being in a different location than where it needs to be (in order to work), I can’t really trust my plans working as expected.
I need to create a new one, which (should) undo this mess… I hope. If it really is the age of the model causing the issue, it would only happen again (even with a new project folder).
But in any case, I need to do some spring cleaning on the folder– deleting unused assets/scripts/textures, should (in theory) make Unity a bit faster when loading.
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An update. Cleaned up the project folder as good as I could. A lot of unused materials, and mistakenly deleting the Plugins folder (that the VRCSDK needs). Thankfully at the time, I hadn’t cleaned out the recycle bin, and managed to restore that folder.
Just over 100 items (about 1.7GB) was removed from the Assets folder. And as for if Unity is faster, well.. I think I shaved a few seconds off of load time. Not bad.
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As for the firebreath animation being broken, it was kind of what I was thinking. The particle system was in a different location, but it also said one of the two Skinned Mesh Renders was missing; the ‘AntiBlep’ one (removes the tongue from showing up when doing the firebreath). And it definitely is. Not to mention the one that tells the jaw to open up, also wasn’t there. Yet somehow the animation says it still exists.
Not sure why. But, whatever. I’m fine without it. The tongue can be made fireproof.
Now as for the eye tracking shader… since Blender looks like a complete mess when trying to load up the custom Dutchie model, I’ve decided to go with the texture route.
Though the Blender part of the tutorial looks quite helpful, the Unity part of it.. not so much. But I followed what it said, parenting them to the eyes. Though I’m confused why it said that each eye needs to have its own texture. I mean, sure, if you wanted one eye as a different color. But if you want both eyes to use the same texture, then I don’t see the point.
Speaking of texture, I made my own based on what I’ve seen the others use; a black iris but with the actual eyeball in a blue color (to hopefully mask with the color of the texture).
So yeah… it took awhile to get them installed. Scaling them, making sure they looked realistic in their respected blue eye holes. Using this script that uses the mesh of determining how they’ll look (with eye tracking, something I’m pretty sure WMR isn’t capable of doing).
But… this is the (rather creepy) result..
The “I will stare into your soul” illusion is absolutely creepy and awesome at the same time. Not to mention, the phrase ‘devilishly handsome’ comes to mind.
Looking at him from the front, though…
I mean.. they’re …not ‘bad’, but they’re not good either. Though, they are correctly sized, since I used the Dutchie’s default iris to scale it (0.07 incase you’re interested).
But something just bugs me about them, and I think it’s the forced reflection that I can’t seem to get rid of. Because, they look nothing like what I saw of the others having.
*sigh* I wish Nappz would actually talk to me, so I could get this done the correct way. But, I’m gonna have to deal with it. If anyone says anything, I’ll just tell them that I didn’t have him to help me. Maybe that person knows how to do it. Who knows.