spacedogvam
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So where's the scenes? An update...
🕑 Added 2023-07-10 20:36:49 +0000 UTCFirst of all I'd like to apologise for the lack of scenes lately. As many of you will already know Hazmhox has disappeared and no one seems to have any idea where he is. I hope he is OK and that he will be back at some point, but it has left me in a tricky position since my latest scenes depend on VAMMoan2 which is not yet finished.
What to do? Well, I can't wait forever so I am going to start updating my scenes to work with the original VAMMoan so I can get them released. This is a tough pill to swallow considering how good VAMMoan2 is, but that’s how it goes. Again I can only apologise for all this, it has been as frustrating for me as it has been for you.
In the meantime I've been busy...
Not knowing where Hazmhox is left me in scene building Limbo since I didn't know which version of VAMMoan I can build them around, so in the meantime I've been building the foundations of future scenes:
City backdrop
I wanted some background scenery that I could use in Patreon releases and nothing quite fit my needs. I think my Skyboxes asset was pretty epic but licensing meant I couldn't use it commercially, so I needed a new solution. I developed 2 completely new skybox solutions that I was very happy with but sadly both projects went up in the flames of legal small print that meant I couldn't use them as I wanted. I was gutted since they looked awesome, but I wasn't giving up. Maybe 3rd time lucky?
I found a city asset on Sketchfab that was barebones but showed some promise, so I set about editing it in Unity to see what I could do. I fixed numerous issues and built out a large city from the foundation, then I created normal, metallic, and emissive maps for all the buildings to make them look pretty and have a night time version too. I also decided that for maximum versatility I wanted it to work well with the default skyboxes which are actually quite small, so I used some perspective trickery to make sure the distant buildings were kept visible.
I'm happy with the result and the performance is very good so I hope this will become somewhat of a standard asset for VAM as a better version of the built in City background environments. It is really quite versatile, suitable for dressing up to fit particular needs in a street scene or from an office or apartment window, and can of course be used in paid Patreon scenes.
I have also made some fun little demos to show off some of the things you can do with it, a glass elevator ride and a bus ride through the city streets. The bus ride was a surprisingly difficult trick to pull off the way I wanted, but my years of Timeline experience paid off and I engineered a cunning way to do it realistically.
Light Toggler
During development of my city asset I realised I had a problem with switching my emissive window light textures on and off to make a day/night cycle since Unity doesn't like 2 different versions of the same asset loaded in the same scene. I reached out for help on Discord and VamTastic responded saying he had the same issue with his city asset, so we set about finding a solution. He found an old plugin called Light Toggler made originally by a user named Huha that could turn emissive maps as well as Unity lights on and off. Between the two of us we fixed up the plugin and ironed out the bugs and ended up with what turns out to be a really handy plugin. You can freely switch between day and night versions of an asset, and it also works for those assets on the Hub where the author has left a Unity light in that you can't normally do anything with. This plugin will finally let you turn them off too.
VamTastic said I should be the one to release the plugin so that is what I will do. This will be the first of these assets that I will release.
Sexy Lingerie
I know there are a lot of clothes on the Hub but nothing quite fit what I was after. I wanted some classic sexy 80s or 90s style lingerie so I decided to have a shot at making some of my own. Not having any 3D modelling skills I used the built in Alphakini as a base and built the diffuse, spec, gloss, alpha, and bump maps by hand in Photoshop. This turned out to have some advantages, particularly since you can use the built in clothing states for up, down and pulled to the side for these clothing items and you can be assured that topology and performance will be as good as possible.
Final thoughts
I’ve built some other things too that I’m not ready to show off yet but for now I'd like to say a heartfelt thank you for sticking with me during this difficult period, I hope I can make up for it with the small flood of content on the way : )
