Flex Development Update - November 2021
Greetings all! Tremendous apologies for the lengthy radio silence. Towards the end of July I had to prioritize some paid work to keep the debt collectors at bay. This was coupled with what seemed like an endless cascade of bugs caused by the hefty changes to the app. So progress
Greetings all! Tremendous apologies for the lengthy radio silence. Towards the end of July I had to prioritize some paid work to keep the debt collectors at bay. This was coupled with what seemed like an endless cascade of bugs caused by the hefty changes to the app. So progress ground to a halt there for a moment, but last month I finally had the bandwidth to pick back up the development of Flex!
Over the last month I’ve been able to invest some significant time into testing every corner of the app, finding and squashing bugs, tweaking features and graphics, and improving performance. I’ve reached a point now where all the basic features, as well as the most recent updates, are back up and working well. I don't want to call it bug free (because that is basically impossible) but I'm hoping the issues that have been cropping up in the forums have been fixed.
For those struggling with the animation selection. I tried replicating the issues on a bunch of different computers, and while I couldn't get it to exhibit the same issues, I did find a bunch of garbage code that I promptly tossed out and rewrote. So I've done my darnedest to fix these issues, and have hopefully succeed? Please tell me if you are still having issues after the next update.
With this next update I also spent an excessive amount of time trying to get the older versions of Flex characters to update correctly. Ultimately I got pretty close, but there are still issues that I couldn't resolve (mostly small differences in the character positioning). So, if you're working on a project that relies on an older version of Flex, please send me a message and I can provide a download link to the previous versions.
So looking at the bigger picture for a moment (and setting some expectations for the coming months). I am now back into the swing of Flex development, but I do still have work commitments that will ramp back up in the coming weeks. While I get a good amount of enjoyment from working on Flex, it's not yet something I can devote a large portion of time to. Almost all the money I make from Flex goes into software licensing costs, business costs, etc. So while it is self sustaining to a degree, I have to prioritize work that pays the bills. Of course I would love for this to change! I have yet to do any large scale promotion of Flex, and once I feel Early Access is complete I will start doing paid advertisements and looking for creators to promote Flex to their followings.
So my roadmap as I inch closer to the full release is to focus on aspects of the app that will make it more desirable and competitive. Flex has always been lacking in clothing content, with my new clothing attachment system I can now integrate more clothing and hair content into Flex, and even work on attachments, like glasses and facial hair. The posing system (the handles that control the characters positions) is feeling clunky when compared with those in an app like VRoid. I'd also like to give better control of character skin and clothing textures, with the ability to export/import custom textures. If you have any feedback and ideas for new features, or improvements, I'd love to hear them!
As for this next update, I'm working on the last few fixes, and am aiming to have it uploaded by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience in the last few months & please let me know if you run into bugs/issues when this next version drops.
Original post 
With those problems solved, most of the functionality was restored. There were a few more pieces, like rebuilding the alpha masking, and of course many corner-cases to find and solve. But was it worth it? Hell yes. There are some really great improvements and features I can now explore in Flex.
The biggest improvement is I have now updated to the latest greatest version of the Unity engine. This means I’m not worried about Flex just “not working” one day, I’ll be able to support it into the future. With the new Unity I get better and faster rendering and better hardware compatibility. Additionally, one small change which has a big impact: Unity 2018 failed to support blend shape normals, which meant the geometry moved, but the lighting didn’t really reflect that change. In the latest version of the engine that is now fixed:
Another massive gain by switching to my custom character plugin, is the ability to actually modify the character model and clothing! The old Morph plugin didn’t allow the customization of the model (it would break on re-import, probably due to changes in vertex order). Now I can take the model into Maya and change it as much as I want! Including building new blendshapes, and increasing the character mesh resolution. In this coming release I’ve sub-divided the character face, to give you an even high quality character when you customize the face or expressions.
And a huge door has opened for including more clothing and hair content. I can now purchase items from the Daz3D store (with the interactive license of course), run them through my quick setup process, and include them in Flex.
Performance and memory footprint are also much improved. My custom setup is a fraction of the size on disk (because I’m not storing all the blend shape information for every clothing piece, just the vertex associations). Character loading is 2-3x faster, and the runtime memory footprint should be improved down the road (I have to build some memory management to take advantage of this).
So, this update has been many months in the making, but has been well worth the time investment. Most importantly I’ve given Flex the longevity to continue into the future, as well as improving quality and unlocking new features.
Character Shader Update
When I first looked at moving to the latest version of Unity I was excited by the possibility of leveraging Unity’s new HDRP pipeline. I did some side-by-side comparisons of different shading options, but in the end I didn’t feel the tradeoffs were worth it when compared to the standard render pipeline. The HDRP pipeline provides improved support for subsurface scattering (SSS) and better quality shadows, but at the expense of performance and locking Flex to the desktop platform. HDRP may be something I explore in the future, but I didn’t feel confident in moving Flex over just yet.
Instead I found a really nice skin shader package that improves the quality of the skin and eyes, and also handles SSS. I’m still tweaking the shader settings, and adjusting the texture maps to take advantage of the capability, but the results I’m seeing are pretty impressive. Along with this is proper ACES tone-mapping, which can be toggled on/off.
A big improvement is to the eye shading, which I’m in love with. Along with the new shader there are several new high res eye textures, and a white one that can be tinted to a color of your choosing.
Sadly things are still in-progress is the hair shading. I’m currently in R&D for a better solution for both the shading and dynamics for hair. Ultimately I want a hair shader that performs better, offers customization. Additionally I want some physics simulation on the hair (as well as for loose clothing) but this will be an update down the road. So for now the hair remains a little realistic, but I’m going to be focusing on improvements soon!
So with all these changes (especially to the character plugin) I’ve effectively taken a hatchet to a large chunk of Flex. I’m planning on spending the coming weeks finding and fixing bugs and making sure there is good backwards compatibility for previously saved characters. I’ve been slogging through the last couple of months working on the new features and am excited to release them to you all later this month!
Thanks for all your support (and reading through my dev blog ramblings!), keep a look out for the next update to Flex coming late July.
Finally, I’ve put in some nifty tools for cinematographers who want to use Flex as a storyboard tool. I have some friends in film that were requesting some framing guides (rule of thirds, etc) and letterboxing to different aspect ratios (emulating wide screen, etc). https://imgur.com/0TwG4j1
So, to wrap up, progress is good! I’ll be out of town for a much needed break over the holidays. If you run into any issues let me know and I’ll be able to look into fixes when I get back in town.
As always, thanks for all your comments and support. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you all make with this next build of Flex!