Hello Awesome People!
Every two announcements we keep posting (for the new folks) a reminder about FaceRig being still in development. It is fun and functional, but it still has bugs (though their number decreases with each passing version). Please read this announcement (click to open) for more info and a look at the EULA before pre-ordering FaceRig.
After you have done that, please look at the minimal requirements and remember that for now FaceRig is Windows-only.
And now to the actual news!
A new background and three brand new holidays-based avatars have just been added to the FaceRig starting line-up (free of any additional charge) .
We have
- the one and only Santa,
- a somewhat spooky Talking Present,
- and a lovely Snowman...
...for you to use and send out the season's greetings to your family and entertain your nephews (if you're old enough to have any :D).
These goodies are up only on the "nextversion" Beta branch for now, as we test them some more over the weekend before wide-scale deployment next week. You can join and test them too (steps provided at the end of the announcement) :) .
On the programming side during these last few weeks we have also focused a lot on performance improvements (especially CPU occupancy).
This v0.921b version that just went up on the "nextversion" saves a whooping 25%-30% of CPU occupancy when broadcasting on DX9 when compared with the previous version. Even that previous version was a big step up from the one before it.
To put things in perspective, compared with August-September , the v0.921b Facerig version is more than twice as effective when using the CPU. (Dare we way, it's super-effective ?). There are even more optimizations to come in January, as our goal is to get the 1.0 version to be able to run comfortably on portable chipsets.
On Dx11 the performance improvements are even more dramatic, however Dx11 still has some lighting and post-processing bugs, so we still label it as "experimental" for now (use it for a bit and you'll quickly realize why).
Here's the change-log.
Change log FaceRig v0.921b (build 376 Holotech Studios - Dec 12 2014) - nextversion branch
- added avatar Santa Claus
- added avatar Santa Claus without the hat
- added avatar Talking Present
- added avatar Snow Man
- added background Winter Wonderland
- broadcasting now works on DX11
- optimized video/camera feed on both DX9 and DX11
- optimized FaceRig video frame to Virtual Camera flow
- optimized the Virtual Web Cam, software that use it should have a significantly lower CPU usage
- added pupil configurable behavior (micro-movements to mimic life like eye movements)
- fixed a Launcher bug. First time users (or users that delete config.usc), if they have clicked Action without going through the settings and saving them, would have started FaceRig with DX11 and legacy frame grabber, instead of DX9 with default frame grabber. This fix is also available on FaceRig v0.914b (build 368 Holotech Studios - Dec 4 2014) - current default branch.
- added props world space movement feature. A prop can be selected for movement in the Props or Props Adv tabs from Avatar Customization. Use avatar movement key bindings to move props.
- fixed eye pupil positioning from Pose Avatar bug
- added new key binding for zooming avatars (or props): Alt + wheel (Alt + middle-click still works though)
- added the Grinch defense mechanism
Known issues/bugs :
- Occasional crash when changing resolutions from within the program (not from the launcher though)
- After exporting a performance as a movie, the input webcam feed freezes (program needs to be restarted).
- If you set the FaceRig resolution to a resolution larger than your monitor, the interface will not behave correctly.
- Dx11 is still experimental.
That's about it. We didn't have a lot of time to build new movies for this update, but we're doing this next week, when we will promote it to the official branch. :D.
If you are wondering about how to use the "nextversion" branch here are the steps:
- Open Steam Client. Go to Library -> Software
- Right mouse click on FaceRig -> Properties
- Go to BETAS tab, click in the "Select the beta you would like to opt into:" drop down, select "nextversion"
- Close window. The FaceRig program will update to the "nextversion" branch.
We could really use a bit of help testing it ;).
Let us know what you think in the comments below :).
We wish you an awesome week-end,
The FaceRig Team.