Mini Update!

Hey guys,

I want to avoid having long stretches with no updates as I have had in the past when I didn't yet have anything major to show off, so I thought I'd post this smaller update to explain what I've been working on recently!

Penetration System!

As you may have noticed in the demo, or read in my previous update, there's one major issue right now that I'd like to get resolved as soon as possible, which is the lack of a penetration system.

Without a penetration system in place, the dicks everywhere except where they should be. For example, poking out of the backs of people's heads, or simply not going into any available hole.

This looks silly obviously, and so I have been researching ways to fix this. And there are a lot of them.

Solutions I looked at and ran tests with this past month include Poiyomi Pro's TPS system, Naelstrof's penetration system, a mesh deformation system called Megafiers, FinalIK, and Dynamic Bones.

Each of these potential solutions has different upsides and downsides...

Poiyomi:

Should be relatively easy to implement, but the results aren't terribly realistic. Dicks are attracted to the hole like a magnet, and have no spring to them when they pull out. And all the deformation is done with shaders, so physical interaction with them would be extremely limited. You could jerk or suck them off because I can put a hole   in your closed fist, or mouth, you couldn't touch them. And worse still, as a micro you couldn't ride them, because the physics system wouldn't know they're being deformed.

Naelstrof:

Naelstrof's system is much more advanced than Poiyomi's but it has many of the same problems and limitations. It too deforms the dicks using a shader, so real physics and interactions will not work. You would not be able to ride the dicks. But it does at least have the ability to emulate springiness and throbbing. Setup for this system also seems rather complicated, and it really wants the holes to have a bone in them so they can be offset, which requires customization of the models.

Megafiers:

Megafiers is a highly optimized system for deforming meshes in realtime. It can make them twist, bend, inflate, and more, and it does it by modifying the actual vertices rather than using a shader, so it should work with Unity's physics. However it's not a penetration system per-se, and so it would require a lot of work to implement something using it. And if I want to only bend the dicks, I could just use the bones already inside of them and maintain the benefits of using Dynamic Bones to have spring physics.

Megafires is still interesting though, because it would allow me to add things Naelstrof's system can do to a system that works with physics, like make the dick pulse as they cum, or inflate a character's belly, or stretch a hole beyond what the shapekeys would normally allow.

It also has something called a poke modifier which is just what I needed to add soft body physics. With that, you would be able to push a finger against a character's skin and see it deform. 

So I'll definitely be making use of Megafiers at some point, but it alone is not a solution for my dick problem!

Final IK:

FinalIK is a very powerful system which enables a lot of stuff. In this instance, I was hoping that I could treat a dick like a form of tentacle where I could drag the end to where it needs to go and have it bend the way I expect. But alas my first tests with this were not very fruitful. However I spoke with the creator and he suggested an alternative method which might work a bit better. But I have my doubts it will be suitable.

Dynamic Bones:

I have seen some people who have used dynamic bones to create a penetrable anus, which behaves as you would expect, stretching and puckering, just by pushing the dick into it. However setting this up is complicated and requires adding a bunch of new bones to the mesh. So it's not a great solution.

There is also another problem with this kind of setup, and this is why I need to put so much thought into this in advance.

In my game I have two primary but very different scenarios where penetration can happen. Either the penetration will be between two animated characters, or it will be between an animated character and the player.

These scenarios might seem similar at first glance, but here's crux of the issue: An animated character cannot dynamically respond to what's happening. A player can.

If I were to fully physically simulate the dicks, how do I ensure the initial penetration happens at all, and that in the middle of the animation, the dick doesn't slip out and stop going into the hole?

If the player is controlling the dick, this isn't a problem. They will simply adjust and stick it back in. It is not even remotely easy to make an animated character do that.

So, I realized that in animated scenarios, I pretty much have to force those dicks to find the holes. As long as the hips are in roughly the right spot, and the dick is kinda near the hole, it should be aiming at that hole. And if it is offset from the hole, it should bend in a nice S curve like it's a spring. Ideally I should also attempt to move the hips to better align the dick with the hole to prevent as much bending as possible.

When the player is involved though, if they're not explicitly gripping the dick with their hand, or actively jerking it off with a fleshlight, the dick should be free to physically react to their touch and should not automatically seek out the hole as if it's a magnet.

So, it's like I need to have two different modes for the dick. One for ensuring it goes where it needs to during animations, and one where it is more free to move and slip out of the hole when it is a player involved interaction.

For a system like this, I'd likely need to calculate a spline from the base of the dick to the hole, and then use that to position the bones in the dick along the spline if it's close enough to the hole. Then the physics would work, and I could tweak this to either force the dick into the hole or allow for more manipulation when the player is involved, enabling dynamic bones on it for springiness only when it's not penetrating something.

But this is obviously very complicated to set up and get right, and right now I need a good-enough solution that I can implement quickly which works with the animations. Then later I can implement a better system. So I might end up using Poyomi's system for now. Though there was an issue with the vertices animating improperly on the penetrator that I still need to look into with that.

Fixing animations with Final IK!

Another thing I researched this past month is using Final IK to correct some issues with the animations.

One issue you may have noticed is that a character's feet, knees, hands, and ass are not always planted firmly on the ground. This is due to the animations not being authored specifically for these characters and due to the software they were animated in having IK built into it which takes care of these problems for the animator.

The solution to this problem is to enable the game to automatically bend the knees and elbows when a hand or foot is going to penetrate a collider to prevent that penetration from happening. For example, some of the animations have characters kneeling, but the knees are up off the floor. With a proper IK system in place, I could move the character down so their knees are on the floor, and their feet having contacted the ground, would bend the legs up a bit to make them lay flat on the floor as they should. And in instances like the two macros fucking on the garage, I can move them down a bit to make the feet of both characters contact the ground solidly, and the hands of the one leaning on the roof will move up a bit automatically to compensate.

And if I use that same animation in one of he bedrooms, I will be able to move the characters down enough to get the character to lean on the lower bed while the one standing behind them will bend their knees to compensate. I can even specify bend targets for the knees and elbows to tell them if they should go bow-legged in those poses to avoid clipping the bed or the other character's legs.

I was testing all this out yesterday with a dummy that I had playing a walking animation, and I laid it down on its back on the ground and confirmed that the hands and feet would stop rotating down when they contacted the ground or another collider and the legs would bend if I had it standing and I pulled the hips down, so I think I should be able to quickly implement this into the game so the characters feel more grounded in the world, and I can use all those animations that I couldn't place because of issues with the surfaces not being the right height for them!

Final Words

Anyway, I think that covers everything for this update. It went on a bit longer than expected!

I don't have a new build ready yet, but I'm gonna try and get another build out this month, probably within the next couple of weeks. I'm not sure if the penetration system will be in, but the Final IK fix should be along with some new spawn points, and maybe some new animations!