Will YL2 allow skin changing in the middle of an animation?

arrkhal

I don't think it's been mentioned as a possible feature in any of the patreon updates yet, but I think it'd be pretty nice to have. Chameleons and other color-changing characters are one obvious application. Another could be adding things like whip marks and red butt cheeks for BDSM scenes. Blushing, going pale, and other complexion changes. Applying or removing makeup. Tattooing is probably someone's fetish? Body painting maybe? Sex outside, getting dirty and grass stained?

odes

We intend to implement blushing, but other than that we haven't had any plans to make skins changeable during an interaction. Since you'll be able to change the setup of an interaction and change characters in it (or even switch environments), you could have multiple variations of your character and replace them in different scenes (after fading the camera to black for example).

arrkhal

Any possibility of just having a number of custom layer slots that can be faded in/out during a scene, instead of hardcoded blushing? Even for just blushing, there's enough variation (cheeks, ears, whole face, anime-style middle of the face, different colors... I've definitely seen some vulva blushing in furry porn, as well) that it might be better to let people create their own custom blush/other layers (with masks that make it easy to make something standard, like cheek blushing).

Actually, that might allow a pretty good amount of custom anime-esque expressions, as well. Drawn-on sweat droplets and forehead veins, turning blue, etc. Plus things like body writing, which I definitely see in furry porn all the time (and there's currently one skin request, though it's impossible with the YL1 skin system).

It really seems like a versatile enough feature to be worth including. Especially compared to needing to fade the camera to black every time something minor changes.

I'm mostly thinking things like spanking and mild whipping, having redness/whip marks slowly fade in would be pretty nice. I mean, what if cum inflation (which I'm fairly sure is a LOT more technically complex) had to be done by model swapping, too? That would be pretty unsatisfying, having a skinny character, fading to black, fading back in, and now they're inflated.

odes

Blushing will be accomplished by a mask and a color. Both the mask and the color will be customizable, so it isn't hardcoded (although a default blush map will probably be provided).

Interesting idea with several blush layers. That could be accomplished by just combining several of them into a single texture. It wouldn't cost any extra texture lookups in the shader.

I like the idea of custom expressions. Sweat would probably require a normal map to look good though. We did actually create a mask-to-normal-map module, so I think that could work with the custom blush maps. However, that does require an additional texture lookup and texture, so it comes at some cost of performance and memory. Having several normal maps for expressions wouldn't be good for memory and performance at all actually, but a single one might be acceptable.

Inflation will work on characters w/o swapping, and with blush layers you could change the inflated part's color (yeah I'm sold on the idea with several blush layers so that's probably gonna happen).

arrkhal

Glad to hear it! Very simple blush/spank marks/etc. based on 1 mask and 1 color at a time sounds like a good, low-cost option. And it should even allow things like chameleon color changing, by having the mask cover the entire body.

If the masks can be added together into a single layer on the fly, that would allow for a LOT of things to be done with only 2 layers and some creativity.

For instance, layer 1 starts out with a cheek blush, then layer 2 is ears. Fade in 1, then 2, then you merge them both to layer 1. Then you change layer 2 to another area of the face/body (starting at 0 opacity again), fade that in over top, and merge again. You get as many different stages of blushing as you want, with only 2 total layers needed. Because they're just based around merging masks instead of merging actual images, you don't have to worry about overlapping areas being more opaque (as long as they're all the same color, which is a reasonable limitation). And because the masks can be very simple coordinate based gradients, it should still be very lightweight for most effects. Basically just reusing some of the character creator code.

It'd even be possible to fade in whip marks one at a time that way, just adding and merging masks (lines or capsule gradients) one at a time.

So you'd only need a maximum of 2 layers for each color you want (maximum number of colors would probably need some performance testing). Especially if the system allows subtractive masks, then it should definitely be possible to do a LOT of different things with only 2 layers, adding and taking away colored areas.

odes

That type of layer merging you suggest resembles the texture builder layering we're working on. In that, you will be able to merge masks and layers exactly the way you like. However, the output of that layer stack is static and cannot change during an interaction. Likewise, the blush map will also just be a combination of pre-authored masks that have been combined together into a static texture. That means the masks cannot change or be combined into a new mask during an interaction, as everything is static. You will however be able to adjust how much a certain blush map should be blended on top of the static texture output. This is done in the shader during runtime, and doesn't require generating additional textures. So unfortunately, that type of blush layering you suggest will not be supported as we don't want the overhead or memory cost of generating textures during an interaction.

arrkhal

Darn. Still, a handful of pre-textured blush maps should be a good compromise, with some creativity. Just need to fade to black in order to merge them down (with a new character skin), I guess.