Smoove Off (Build 0.7.1)

A really nice mix of changes this update, if I do say so myself: FINALLY a new pose to add to the roster, some new customization options, some gussying up of existing customization options, and a smattering of bugfixes and tweaks. What more could you want?

Sit on it

Sitting cross-legged pose! Why not?
It's been a long time since I've created a new pose for HyperDeep and so I wanted to choose something that wasn't overly complicated. That being said, sitting cross-legged is actually a reasonably difficult pose to get to look right, particularly using a rig with very few "helper" bones like HD-chan's.
I'm happy with the result and enjoyed the process, so I reckon the next new pose should be along sooner rather than later.

The eyes have it

Eyelashes have been reworked in this build to give more flexibility and more visual appeal. Eyelash "style" has been split into upper and lower parts, and several blendable effects have been added: bevel, stroke, and glow.

New parameters for eyelids have also been added: "fold" and "shading". These are obviously most apparent when HD-chan's eyes are closed.

The nose knows

I completely redid the nose rendering pipeline this time. I really hated the texture blending setup the game used before. This time everything is rendered in separate parts using SDF shaders, meaning that the individual components (lineart, shadows, highlights) can be tweaked separately. This provides more flexibility and makes it easier to expand the options in future. It does mean that the game no longer supports importing custom nose textures, but I'm pretty sure that nobody has ever used that feature anyway.

RTX ON!

No not really. In fact, instead of introducing an advanced but dubiously useful rendering feature I actually removed one: tessellation.
Long-time readers will remember that several eons ago I added tessellation support to HyperDeep to make HD-chan's character model smoother. This did work, and most of the time it looked pretty good, but tessellation is unfortunately not without its limitations. For certain shapes, particularly highly deformed ones, tessellation breaks down and causes an extremely ugly wavy effect, visible in older builds under certain conditions.

Tessellation is not really designed for the kind of application that we were using it for. If you look up examples of tessellation online, every single one is a cobblestone street. HD-chan isn't a cobblestone street; she's a sexy girl.
Technically speaking, tessellation generates a kind of shitty subdivided version of a mesh dynamically at runtime so that we don't have to manually generate a non-shitty subdivided version before the game runs. Why is this useful? That's the question I finally got round to asking this month. When I couldn't think of an answer, I decided to get rid of it.

It turns out that generating a high-quality subdivided version of HD-chan looks a lot better and doesn't really perform any worse than using tessellation. Win-win! Of course, rendering the game with quadruple the number of polygons isn't free, so if your shitbox computer was already struggling to run the game then it's going to struggle even more now. Thankfully I also added a "High quality geometry" toggle in the settings menu to turn off this new fancy mesh and use the old one instead.