Greetings all, and happy 2021! I realize it’s been a solid year since my last update to the app, and I apologize for the radio silence. Turns out 2020 held some big life changes for me (as I’m sure it did for many of you), and I unfortunately had to make other projects a priority.
Over the last few months, I’ve been able to spend more time working on Flex in my free moments. I’ve been able to really make some progress, and I’m excited to tell you all about some new features and improvements coming this month!
Hand Posing
This feature has been near the top of the list for requests this last year, so I’m happy to say it’s finally here! There are a whole new set of options which allow you to customize your model’s hand pose.
Check it out [click the image for GIF]:
With Flex, I’ve always tried to walk the line between usability and customizability. Plenty of more high-end software packages give you pretty deep customization controls, but get pretty complex and sometimes clunky to use. I always want Flex to be fast and intuitive, to help you achieve your goal rather than get in the way. I hope I've achieved this with the hand pose controls.
As with all the features of Flex, the hand posing is an ongoing work-in-progress. So if you have suggestions for improvements, I’d love to hear them!
Performance Improvements
When I first released Flex, I didn’t have a chance to look deeply at the performance characteristics and optimize the app. Over the last few months, I’ve been digging in more detail and testing of different hardware to try and sniff out those culprits of lag. The lighting seems to be the biggest offender, so my optimizations thus far have been focused on improving the performance of lighting and shadows.
I've seen quite a bit of improvement so far while testing on several devices with differing spec. Additionally, the FPS seems to be much more stable while toggling through different combinations of lighting. I'll continue to test and tweak to try and get the best possible performance for lower end devices.
I have also added a “High Resolution Shadows” option in the settings. This will allow you to still have really smooth shadows if your machine can handle it, but not be required to use them if your machine is of lower spec.
Click images below for GIFs
Another simple feature I am putting in the upcoming build is a quick way to toggle the lighting on/off. This is useful for more than just performance. I find that sometimes the lighting can get in the way when you’re trying to pose your character, especially if your lighting is high contrast.
The last area of optimization is the RAM footprint. In my testing, it looks like I’ve been able to shave about 1 gb off the working memory for the app, putting it well below the 4gb minimum RAM requirement. This should hopefully help prevent unexpected crashes from occurring!
User Interface Refresh
I wanted to reduce the complexity of the UI, both to help performance, but also just to reduce visual clutter. I feel the new UI better reflects current trends in UI design, and better communicates user interaction with clearer rollover effects (for mouse interaction), as well as more forgiving interaction areas (for touch interaction).
One additional improvement is better support for vertical orientation. This should help those of you who use Flex side-by-side with other applications, or on tablet devices.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the new UI. I feel it’s clean and responsive compared to the old version. However, if there’s anything that seems unclear or frustrating, please let me know!
What’s Next?
Over the coming week, I’m going to be working on fully testing and deploying this latest build. All the features are working great, but I want to make sure it’s stable on a wider variety of devices, and doesn’t cause issues with previously created character files.
In the next months, I want to start to tackle another big requested feature, multiple characters. Now that I’ve wrangled the performance to a more stable place, I can start investigating the possibility of adding multiple characters.
Thank you all for your support and understanding as we weathered the crazy year that was 2020. Over the next year, I will definitely be working on various projects to keep my income stable, but I’m looking forward to making more progress on Flex as it inches closer to the full release!