Unreal Engine Afterparty [Development Thread]

[Dilly_]

Another cool feature I'm working on. It's fair to say some people probably won't like the characters in the game as I design them- we all have different taste. So I'm going to make them customizable. Not to the degree that the MC is, but enough so you can make them your own.

When you speak to an NPC for the first time, a new entry is created in the inventory menu. Here you can change NPC outfits, hairstyles/hair color, morph values, and swap between male/female anatomy. But you won't be able to go crazy right from the start, because these will need to be unlocked via progressing with that character's storyline.

So enjoy the clip and sorry for the stutter, OBS seems to have trouble sometimes. I promise it ran buttery smooth on my PC!

 

[Nantec]

The knowledge and pain you go through by creating that game stands for itself. Amazing what you provide and share, other people might gatekeep those things and I have to say that I follow this thread not only because of the project but because you are giving amazing knowledge if one asks something, even if we are "just" on an old "pirate" forum lmao, I learnt a lot of new things by following your project and might be tempted to share my project also but I don't have a character editor as of now which might change because it's not impossible by seeing yours. I am also learning by "looking"? Can we say that?

Once you release this, I'll support this.

 

[zhr121388]

FUTA X FUTA

 

[JessicaBlueFire]

Another cool feature I'm working on. It's fair to say some people probably won't like the characters in the game as I design them- we all have different taste. So I'm going to make them customizable. Not to the degree that the MC is, but enough so you can make them your own.

When you speak to an NPC for the first time, a new entry is created in the inventory menu. Here you can change NPC outfits, hairstyles/hair color, morph values, and swap between male/female anatomy. But you won't be able to go crazy right from the start, because these will need to be unlocked via progressing with that character's storyline.

So enjoy the clip and sorry for the stutter, OBS seems to have trouble sometimes. I promise it ran buttery smooth on my PC!

I spotted the QOS material! You already had my attention with this project and I rarely give it and now you have me double interested.

 

[varus_the_great]

I just found this development thread and the quality of this game looks awesome. Cannot wait for the release.

Some questions if you do not mind:
1) The skin shader look great is this the default daz iray pbr shader or did you use the metahuman material on the daz mesh or some product from the daz shop?

2) Did you use the daz skeleton or did you rig the daz mesh to the metahuman/epic skeleton?

3) How are you planning to do lip sync and face animations?

Is this a hobby or dou you have a background in game development and 3D? This looks like AAA-Quality.

 

[Dilly_]

I just found this development thread and the quality of this game looks awesome. Cannot wait for the release.

Some questions if you do not mind:
1) The skin shader look great is this the default daz iray pbr shader or did you use the metahuman material on the daz mesh or some product from the daz shop?

2) Did you use the daz skeleton or did you rig the daz mesh to the metahuman/epic skeleton?

3) How are you planning to do lip sync and face animations?

Is this a hobby or dou you have a background in game development and 3D? This looks like AAA-Quality.

Skin shader uses bits and pieces from lots of places, and some custom logic. It's heavily based on the MH skin shader. I'm using UDIM and UDIM tile masking to achieve overlays on specific areas while having only one material slot.

I'm using the Daz skeleton, which I've added some additional bones to for stuff like jiggling.

Lip sync is done with a plugin called Oculus Lip sync and generating frame sequences from .wav files

This is a hobby for me, no background in 3D. Never worked in the industry. Started taking UE seriously last summer, but I've put probably thousands and thousands of hours into it between then and now so that my progress would be accelerated.

 

[Dilly_]

Every day closer to release. Let me know what you think

 

[varus_the_great]

Skin shader uses bits and pieces from lots of places, and some custom logic. It's heavily based on the MH skin shader. I'm using UDIM and UDIM tile masking to achieve overlays on specific areas while having only one material slot.

I'm using the Daz skeleton, which I've added some additional bones to for stuff like jiggling.

Lip sync is done with a plugin called Oculus Lip sync and generating frame sequences from .wav files

This is a hobby for me, no background in 3D. Never worked in the industry. Started taking UE seriously last summer, but I've put probably thousands and thousands of hours into it between then and now so that my progress would be accelerated.

Thanks for sharing!

Looks great I like the minimalistic UI and the color scheme.

Some feedback from my side:
- In the character creator you could highlight the button of the current active category
- It would be great if you could create an import/export feature in the character creator. Like that we could share our created characters later which would increase community engagement and traffic for your game.
- thigh high socks are essential for the success of your game

 

[Dilly_]

Thanks for sharing!

Looks great I like the minimalistic UI and the color scheme.

Some feedback from my side:
- In the character creator you could highlight the button of the current active category
- It would be great if you could create an import/export feature in the character creator. Like that we could share our created characters later which would increase community engagement and traffic for your game.
- thigh high socks are essential for the success of your game

Thanks for your feedback, I fixed the buttons and added some socks. There will always be more clothing to add though! I am investigating ways to create sharable save files for the character creator. I'd like to integrate a card system like what they have in HoneySelect, where you take a screenshot of the character and data about the save file is embedded into the image. I'm currently talking with another dev about this.


Here's some of the stuff I've been doing recently with NPC AI.

NPC Following


NPCs can move to different activities depending on the time of day and weather.


And I've gradually been fleshing out the dialogue system more. The lip syncing is finally working properly.

 

[croco_nsfw]

Looks amazing as always.

I'm curious about NPCs, how are you handling animations when a character changes activity? Let's say you have character in A that is laying in bed, but has to go to B walkin:
You have a specific animation for standing up, or you let it blend between the two animations automatically? Do you teleport the character instead next to bed, already standing up?

Real time schedules seem so difficult in 3D. Thanks in advance!

 

[Dilly_]

Looks amazing as always.

I'm curious about NPCs, how are you handling animations when a character changes activity? Let's say you have character in A that is laying in bed, but has to go to B walkin:
You have a specific animation for standing up, or you let it blend between the two animations automatically? Do you teleport the character instead next to bed, already standing up?

Real time schedules seem so difficult in 3D. Thanks in advance!

Currently they just teleport. So, if an NPC wakes up at 6am, they simply teleport out of bed into a standing position and start walking to the next location. I don't intend for that to always be the case though, I'm hoping to use Mocap in order to make some transition animations, but that will come later, after the game has released.

 

[TheExordick]

This is increadibly cool, your devlog is really inspiring and offer some great food for thoughts.

where you take a screenshot of the character and data about the save file is embedded into the image.

This sounds really cool. Does it work with image metadata or do you plan to build your own image extension readable by unreal engine (and i guess by UE alone)?

 

[slider]

Woah, this is shaping up amazingly.

Are voices done by software or read by a voice-actress? They sounded good!

 

[Dilly_]

This is increadibly cool, your devlog is really inspiring and offer some great food for thoughts.



This sounds really cool. Does it work with image metadata or do you plan to build your own image extension readable by unreal engine (and i guess by UE alone)?

Well, the person I'm talking to about this wants to introduce it as a marketplace plugin. I believe he has his own image-capture system for different resolutions. The idea would just be to embed your normal save data inside the image. And yes, I would assume the reading functionality would be specific to UE. I don't think it would be difficult to implement this in any engine though, because most games already have save/load features, it's just a matter of writing the data into an image file instead.

Woah, this is shaping up amazingly.

Are voices done by software or read by a voice-actress? They sounded good!

The voice I used in the clip was created with

You must be registered to see the links

. The lip sync in my game requires an actual .wav file, so I've been generating them with AI. The voices are quite good and realistic, however you can turn the voice volume to 0 in the settings if you find the AI voices to be offputting.

 

[OldDusty]

Hey I just came across this site and your project because of doing research for my own. Are your location models like the house and beach also from Daz? I am new to Daz. I really suck at the art stuff. Thanks for the info.

I have a long road ahead. Did you use any assets from Unreal to help get started with the character creator or with other stuff like changing all those settings in the options?

I'm guessing this will be released on Steam?

 

[Dilly_]

Hey I just came across this site and your project because of doing research for my own. Are your location models like the house and beach also from Daz? I am new to Daz. I really suck at the art stuff. Thanks for the info.

I have a long road ahead. Did you use any assets from Unreal to help get started with the character creator or with other stuff like changing all those settings in the options?

I'm guessing this will be released on Steam?

The beach environment is from the Unreal marketplace. Daz environments are typically very high poly and using 4k textures, which, there is no need to have a toaster object in your game with 130k tris and 4k textures. Generally if I use props from Daz assets I will decimate the models and reduce the texture sizes to something more appropriate, like 1k-2k depending on the size. However, UE environments are already game-ready so I use those, but I will occasionally grab some specific props I need from my Daz library.

I did use a character creator asset from the marketplace to jump start my progress, but I would say 90% of the code in my character creator is code I've written myself to work with Daz character assets. The 10% that isn't is UI stuff. If you plan on doing a character creator, I'd highly recommend making it very small with very few customize options. That is, if you don't want it to suck up a year of solo development time that could be spent doing actual gameplay.

I may release it on steam in the future, but I was planning on doing a Patreon-only release for the first few updates and foreseeable future, until there is much more content.

 

[OldDusty]

The beach environment is from the Unreal marketplace. Daz environments are typically very high poly and using 4k textures, which, there is no need to have a toaster object in your game with 130k tris and 4k textures. Generally if I use props from Daz assets I will decimate the models and reduce the texture sizes to something more appropriate, like 1k-2k depending on the size. However, UE environments are already game-ready so I use those, but I will occasionally grab some specific props I need from my Daz library.

I did use a character creator asset from the marketplace to jump start my progress, but I would say 90% of the code in my character creator is code I've written myself to work with Daz character assets. The 10% that isn't is UI stuff. If you plan on doing a character creator, I'd highly recommend making it very small with very few customize options. That is, if you don't want it to suck up a year of solo development time that could be spent doing actual gameplay.

I may release it on steam in the future, but I was planning on doing a Patreon-only release for the first few updates and foreseeable future, until there is much more content.

Thanks for the reply.

I don't really want a character creator but I want to be able to change clothes and hair. I have been using the metahuman rig and was likely to stay with that for the deforms in the joints, but Daz has all the clothes and grooms and honestly just has more attractive meshes. I have already spent 6 months or more on developing gameplay, but will now start on all the things you have already finished. I'm not doing an adult game, but what you have done is give me some insight on what is waiting for me on the next step of the journey. For the boobs and ass jiggle I use a spring controller node in the anim BP and I like how that works.

I will be sure to try and stay updated on your project. I didn't get an email notification that you replied, I just refreshed the page. Thanks again for the reply.

 

[Dilly_]

Thanks for the reply.

I don't really want a character creator but I want to be able to change clothes and hair. I have been using the metahuman rig and was likely to stay with that for the deforms in the joints, but Daz has all the clothes and grooms and honestly just has more attractive meshes. I have already spent 6 months or more on developing gameplay, but will now start on all the things you have already finished. I'm not doing an adult game, but what you have done is give me some insight on what is waiting for me on the next step of the journey. For the boobs and ass jiggle I use a spring controller node in the anim BP and I like how that works.

I will be sure to try and stay updated on your project. I didn't get an email notification that you replied, I just refreshed the page. Thanks again for the reply.

Not an adult game, but with boobs and ass jiggle eh? I personally would use Kawaii physics instead of spring controller, but it all depends on how much you care about the quality of physics. If you don't care that much then spring controller is fine. Or you could use Niagara to simulate soft body breast/glute physics and remap the particles to be used in deformer graph. All depends on quality you wish to achieve

 

[OldDusty]

Not an adult game, but with boobs and ass jiggle eh? I personally would use Kawaii physics instead of spring controller, but it all depends on how much you care about the quality of physics. If you don't care that much then spring controller is fine. Or you could use Niagara to simulate soft body breast/glute physics and remap the particles to be used in deformer graph. All depends on quality you wish to achieve

Yeah it's a mature game but no bare pussy. I like the spring controller because it has a more realistic bounce IMO. I don't like floating titties. I've seen the Kawaii physics stuff and will check again if I need to get back to work in that area. The Metahuman rig has all sorts of bones that work well with the spring controller. I have to make some decisions so we will see what direction I end up with.

 

[Lazlo117]

Hello Dilly! I saw your game and I think itrs great. I would love to know if you guys have ever had this problem in the imagine. This happened to me when I transfer a Daz model using Futalicious into Unreal Engine.