WIP - Round Body Progress

Hey everyone! Progress has been slower than I'd like this month and for that I apologize, but I'm still making headway.

Long story short, I've been dealing with a lot of carpal tunnel pain this month, which has made it difficult to work for long periods of time. Thankfully, stretches, posture adjustments and medication has helped me manage my symptoms lately. Flare ups have been less frequent and I've been able to get back to making steady progress.

Anyway, I've been working on the weight gain sequence for the round blob body and wanted to share some behind the scenes stuff. I built the first stages of the sequence using blend shapes, which involves making copies of the model and sculpting out their fat growth in incremental stages. Here's what that looks like in Maya. You can see the wide body sequence here too.

I tend to work on these backwards. First I sculpt the largest size, trying to make it as close to the target blob shape as possible. Then I sculpt a few smaller in-between sizes to bridge the gap. These intermediate sizes are important, since morphing straight from skinny to the largest size will cause some very strange proportions along the way. The intermediate shapes help keep the curves and rolls more defined as the body grows.

A side effect of sculpting these from such a skinny mesh is texture deformation. As areas bulge out, textures get smeared and warped along the model, resulting in strange looking clothes that often come to a point like this.

I have to get in real close and tweak individual vertices to correct these issues. This takes a really long time since every outfit gets deformed and needs to be manually corrected for each blend shape model. (My carpal tunnel really hates me when I do this part lol)

Thankfully, most of this tedious work is finished. Now I've begun integrating the sequence into the game engine. The model still needs a few tweaks, but it's complete enough for me to get it hooked up with the character controller and add some jiggle physics.

I'm currently fine tuning all the parameters that go into making the character grow, jiggle and collide with stuff. I'm also rewriting some code to support new growth sequence options in the weight class system. I still need to make the final stage between this size and the round blob body, which is a whole different setup. Luckily that phase is much less tedious than this one.

I'm hoping to release a new build with the full round body sequence within the next two weeks. I know this is a longer update cycle than usual so thanks for your patience and support while I work on this project! It seriously means a lot!