Greetings all! Over the last few months I’ve been making some great under-the-hood improvements to Flex, and I wanted to share the latest progress in this dev update. These changes will be coming in the next update to the app, which I’m hoping to wrap up by the end of July.

This dev post will “get into the weeds” a little which may not be interesting, so here is a brief TL:DR of the features planned for the next update:

• Character Plugin Rebuild: A ground-up rebuilt of the plugin I was using for character morphing & clothing attachment. This one took the bulk of the time, and unlocks some fun functionality I’ll go into more detail below.
  
• Unity Engine Update: With the clothing attachment plugin rebuild I’m finally able to upgrade to the latest version of Unity, which improves performance and compatibility with various devices.
  
• Character Shading Improvement: Along with the engine update I was able to move to a new and improved shader set for character's skin and eyes. I’m pretty stoked with the results. Check out the comparison images below!
  
• Input System Overhaul: Better support for mouse, with rollover indication for interactable elements. Pose handles can also now be dragged without having to select them first, a small but very helpful change.
  
• (Mostly) Uncensored Characters: Along with an improvement to character texture resolutions I’ve added a toggle to remove the black modesty underwear.

So yeah, a pretty big update with some great improvements that support the longevity of Flex as it nears a full release.

If you’re dipping out here, thanks for reading, check for this update in coming weeks, and thanks for your support!

If you want some behind the scenes details… let’s dive in!

Character Plugin Rebuild

When I began work on Flex in 2017, of the key pieces of tech I used was the Morph character plugin & content library. I had been working with Daz3D and with the guys at Morph and was excited by their release of characters and content on the Unity asset store. Along with the library of game optimized 3D content, their plugin handled the morphing of the character body and face, as well as attachment of clothing pieces. However, as development of Flex progressed I was dismayed to learn that Morph was pulling their content from the asset store, and deprecating their plugin. Unity 2018 became the latest supported version, and I quickly realized that Flex would have an expiration date, unless I undertook the daunting task of rebuilding their character plugin.

After I released the Early Access build of Flex I began looking into what it would take to rebuild the technology that Morph had invested millions to develop. I didn’t have access to any of their source code, as it was wrapped up in a DLL. But I also didn’t 100% like how they did things, so I wanted a fresh take on the problem of character morphing and clothing attachment. At the start of 2021 I began in earnest rebuilding the functionality of the plugin.

So how hard could it be? When you modify a character’s body shape (for instance) the character mesh deforms using the specified blendshape (each mesh vertex has an position offset for each blendshape, which blends together all the other active blendshapes, lots of blending). This is a common method of morphing character's shape and built into basically all 3D game engines. The issue is that while the offsets are stored in memory, the calculation happens on the GPU, so data cannot be passed back to the game logic.

I needed to know those vertex offsets to handle the clothing deformation… or so I thought. Approaching the problem from another perspective led me to a different solution, baking the blendshapes into the clothing piece on attachment rather than trying to tie their vertex positions to the underlying mesh. This meant writing code that caches the vertex proximity for each vertex in the clothing mesh relative to the character mesh below. This process (unoptimized) takes about 30-45 seconds per clothing piece, so that data is pre-calculated and stored in the built app. But with those vertex proximities I can access the blend shape offsets of the base mesh and apply them to the clothing at runtime. Problem #1 solved!

With the clothing deforming along with the base mesh I was able to access all the body modification controls once again. However I still needed to solve animation, and the pesky problem of joint offsets. With the character in its normal form the animation works great, but as soon as you start deforming the character’s proportions (eg. leg length) the skeleton joints also need to move to their correct positions (eg. otherwise your knee joint bends around the mid-thigh). I needed to learn about bind poses, and character skinning to get the joints to move correctly without turning the character into a scary spider monster. Yeah…

With those problems solved, most of the functionality was restored. There were a few more pieces, like rebuilding the alpha masking, and of course many corner-cases to find and solve. But was it worth it? Hell yes. There are some really great improvements and features I can now explore in Flex.

The biggest improvement is I have now updated to the latest greatest version of the Unity engine. This means I’m not worried about Flex just “not working” one day, I’ll be able to support it into the future. With the new Unity I get better and faster rendering and better hardware compatibility. Additionally, one small change which has a big impact: Unity 2018 failed to support blend shape normals, which meant the geometry moved, but the lighting didn’t really reflect that change. In the latest version of the engine that is now fixed:

Another massive gain by switching to my custom character plugin, is the ability to actually modify the character model and clothing! The old Morph plugin didn’t allow the customization of the model (it would break on re-import, probably due to changes in vertex order). Now I can take the model into Maya and change it as much as I want! Including building new blendshapes, and increasing the character mesh resolution. In this coming release I’ve sub-divided the character face, to give you an even high quality character when you customize the face or expressions.

And a huge door has opened for including more clothing and hair content. I can now purchase items from the Daz3D store (with the interactive license of course), run them through my quick setup process, and include them in Flex.

Performance and memory footprint are also much improved. My custom setup is a fraction of the size on disk (because I’m not storing all the blend shape information for every clothing piece, just the vertex associations). Character loading is 2-3x faster, and the runtime memory footprint should be improved down the road (I have to build some memory management to take advantage of this).

So, this update has been many months in the making, but has been well worth the time investment. Most importantly I’ve given Flex the longevity to continue into the future, as well as improving quality and unlocking new features.

Character Shader Update

When I first looked at moving to the latest version of Unity I was excited by the possibility of leveraging Unity’s new HDRP pipeline. I did some side-by-side comparisons of different shading options, but in the end I didn’t feel the tradeoffs were worth it when compared to the standard render pipeline. The HDRP pipeline provides improved support for subsurface scattering (SSS) and better quality shadows, but at the expense of performance and locking Flex to the desktop platform. HDRP may be something I explore in the future, but I didn’t feel confident in moving Flex over just yet.

Instead I found a really nice skin shader package that improves the quality of the skin and eyes, and also handles SSS. I’m still tweaking the shader settings, and adjusting the texture maps to take advantage of the capability, but the results I’m seeing are pretty impressive. Along with this is proper ACES tone-mapping, which can be toggled on/off.

A big improvement is to the eye shading, which I’m in love with. Along with the new shader there are several new high res eye textures, and a white one that can be tinted to a color of your choosing.

Sadly things are still in-progress is the hair shading. I’m currently in R&D for a better solution for both the shading and dynamics for hair. Ultimately I want a hair shader that performs better, offers customization. Additionally I want some physics simulation on the hair (as well as for loose clothing) but this will be an update down the road. So for now the hair remains a little realistic, but I’m going to be focusing on improvements soon!


So with all these changes (especially to the character plugin) I’ve effectively taken a hatchet to a large chunk of Flex. I’m planning on spending the coming weeks finding and fixing bugs and making sure there is good backwards compatibility for previously saved characters. I’ve been slogging through the last couple of months working on the new features and am excited to release them to you all later this month!

Thanks for all your support (and reading through my dev blog ramblings!), keep a look out for the next update to Flex coming late July.

Hello! After some serious bug squashing I finally feel ready to release the latest update of Flex! It’s taken a little longer than anticipated to get here, but I think it’s worth the wait. As I discussed in last month’s post, there’s not a ton of new features, just the one big one:

Multiple Characters

In this latest version of Flex you’ll be able to add, remove, and quickly switch between any number of characters you want, all inside a single scene. While this feature addition doesn’t sound like a big change, there was a pretty significant overhaul to get here. But on the positive side, a lot of the codebase (which I wrote years ago) was pretty clunky and bad, and so I was able to fix those issues, and hopefully make the app more stable and performant going forward.

Getting multiple characters working meant a big restructure, and improvement, in the main channels of communication in the app, some significant changes to saving/loading, a scene outliner to manage the characters, and a rebuild of the tutorial. With so many structural changes it really opens the door for new and unknown bugs to crop up, so I’ll be keeping a keen eye on the forums in case any issues arise!

One quick note for people who have saved characters in the previous version of Flex: When you open your old character file for the first time it will perform a conversion to the new save file format. I have tested this conversion on several old character files and it seems to work great. But if you have any issues, I recommend doing a “Save As” and keeping the old version of the save file intact. Then please let me know in the forums what the issues were and I’ll take a look at solving the problem.


What’s Coming Next?


Alongside the big overhaul over the last few months I’ve also been doing some early development on something much more fun, a big update to the character rendering and visual quality. This process has been a little more intense than just slapping on some new shaders. The biggest hurdle has been ditching the third party plugin that handles the attachment of character clothing.

The tl:dr version is basically, this character plugin has been deprecated, and only works in an older version of Unity. So in order to update the engine, and take advantage of the latest and greatest tech, I’ve needed to re-engineer this plugin from scratch.

This will do a few fantastic things for Flex. The first as I mentioned, is a big improvement to the quality of the character rendering. I’ll share some images soon, but the skin and eyes look significantly better, hopefully rivaling triple-A game quality. Additionally this change should speed up the character loading process quite a bit, and also reduce the RAM requirements of the app. And lastly I’ll finally be able to add more clothing and hair options into Flex!

I’ll be working over the coming weeks on these improvements and post an update later next month with progress and an estimated date for their completion.

Thanks as always for your support and interest in the app! It keeps me motivated to see you guys commenting suggestions and improvements, and posting images. I'd love to see how you're using the app and do a better job sharing more on social media as we get closer to release, so if you have any content you'd be happy to share please let me know!

Since January’s big update I’ve been pushing hard on a couple of big improvements to Flex. The first is a feature that has been long requested, but required some significant structural changes to the app, multiple characters!

From the beginning of development I built Flex around a single character. Much of the code that communicates between the UI and the character, the connective tissue of the app, needed to be ripped apart and reconstructed to handle multiple characters. Additionally, there were some user experience considerations around multiple characters, as well as accommodating long-term plans for things like additional characters and props.

I’m pretty satisfied with my solutions, and happy with how fast and intuitive adding and interacting with multiple characters feels.

Check it out below [click the image for a gif]

[imgur.com]As you can see a key new feature for handling multiple characters is the new scene outliner side-bar. This incorporates global file menu commands (New Scene, Save Scene, Settings, etc), as well as displaying a list of the characters and other elements you’ve added to the scene. You can use the outliner to quickly select between these elements, or close the side-bar and simply click on the body of a character to switch your selection.

[imgur.com]Currently the core of the multiple character code is finished, and I’m just identifying and cleaning up bugs. That said, two big areas are still yet to be fully implemented: Scene Saving/Loading, and the Tutorial.

The old character data structure that the app uses to save needs to be updated to include additional character elements, as well as the global scene options (camera & lighting). Additionally, I want to make sure previously created characters still load properly into the app.

I plan to spend the next weeks rebuilding the saving/loading, as well as the tutorial (which unfortunately got wrecked when I refactored the structure of the app).

I’m estimating this work will take me another couple of weeks, with an additional couple of weeks planned for cleanup and testing. So I’m aiming for an early to mid-April release of the multiple character features.

Thanks for staying tuned on the development of Flex. If you have any questions or comments about multiple character implementation feel free to post them below!

A quick fix for a bug in the animation selection

Greetings all, and happy 2021! I realize it’s been a solid year since my last update to the app, and I apologize for the radio silence. Turns out 2020 held some big life changes for me (as I’m sure it did for many of you), and I unfortunately had to make other projects a priority.

Over the last few months, I’ve been able to spend more time working on Flex in my free moments. I’ve been able to really make some progress, and I’m excited to tell you all about some new features and improvements coming this month!

Hand Posing
This feature has been near the top of the list for requests this last year, so I’m happy to say it’s finally here! There are a whole new set of options which allow you to customize your model’s hand pose.

Check it out [click the image for GIF]:

[imgur.com]With Flex, I’ve always tried to walk the line between usability and customizability. Plenty of more high-end software packages give you pretty deep customization controls, but get pretty complex and sometimes clunky to use. I always want Flex to be fast and intuitive, to help you achieve your goal rather than get in the way. I hope I've achieved this with the hand pose controls.

As with all the features of Flex, the hand posing is an ongoing work-in-progress. So if you have suggestions for improvements, I’d love to hear them!


Performance Improvements
When I first released Flex, I didn’t have a chance to look deeply at the performance characteristics and optimize the app. Over the last few months, I’ve been digging in more detail and testing of different hardware to try and sniff out those culprits of lag. The lighting seems to be the biggest offender, so my optimizations thus far have been focused on improving the performance of lighting and shadows.

I've seen quite a bit of improvement so far while testing on several devices with differing spec. Additionally, the FPS seems to be much more stable while toggling through different combinations of lighting. I'll continue to test and tweak to try and get the best possible performance for lower end devices.

I have also added a “High Resolution Shadows” option in the settings. This will allow you to still have really smooth shadows if your machine can handle it, but not be required to use them if your machine is of lower spec.

Click images below for GIFs


[imgur.com]Another simple feature I am putting in the upcoming build is a quick way to toggle the lighting on/off. This is useful for more than just performance. I find that sometimes the lighting can get in the way when you’re trying to pose your character, especially if your lighting is high contrast.


[imgur.com]The last area of optimization is the RAM footprint. In my testing, it looks like I’ve been able to shave about 1 gb off the working memory for the app, putting it well below the 4gb minimum RAM requirement. This should hopefully help prevent unexpected crashes from occurring!


User Interface Refresh
I wanted to reduce the complexity of the UI, both to help performance, but also just to reduce visual clutter. I feel the new UI better reflects current trends in UI design, and better communicates user interaction with clearer rollover effects (for mouse interaction), as well as more forgiving interaction areas (for touch interaction).


[imgur.com]One additional improvement is better support for vertical orientation. This should help those of you who use Flex side-by-side with other applications, or on tablet devices.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the new UI. I feel it’s clean and responsive compared to the old version. However, if there’s anything that seems unclear or frustrating, please let me know!


What’s Next?
Over the coming week, I’m going to be working on fully testing and deploying this latest build. All the features are working great, but I want to make sure it’s stable on a wider variety of devices, and doesn’t cause issues with previously created character files.

In the next months, I want to start to tackle another big requested feature, multiple characters. Now that I’ve wrangled the performance to a more stable place, I can start investigating the possibility of adding multiple characters.


Thank you all for your support and understanding as we weathered the crazy year that was 2020. Over the next year, I will definitely be working on various projects to keep my income stable, but I’m looking forward to making more progress on Flex as it inches closer to the full release!

Greetings all! I’m just about to release the next update to Flex, and wanted to give you a quick overview of what new features to expect in the December build.

Extreme Sliders

I really couldn’t think of a better name, though there probably is one. This feature was originally suggested in the discussion forum, and for a while I was under the impression there was a technical limitation preventing it. But a little research later, and after an update to the engine, voila! Extreme Sliders became a thing!

So what, you might ask, is an extreme slider? Well it’s basically the ability to crank any slider past its natural min and max values. This has some obvious benefits for things like lighting intensity, etc. But things get pretty wacky, and amazing, when you introduce this to the body modification.

I think you should probably be the judge of how wacky. https://imgur.com/rIA93nk

I can’t imagine what horrific creatures you could create with this new feature. I’ll let your dark imaginations be the guide. But I beg of you, please post your grotesque creations in the community pages on Steam, and elsewhere on the internet. I don’t even care if you don’t give credit to Flex (though, it would be cool if ya did;), I just feel like the world needs to see your monstrous twisting of normalcy into the nightmare inducing creatures born of darkness and terror.

Ok, that got a little Lovecraftian for a second. Really, though, you can make some meme-level shenanigans, so have at it!

One important thing to note, to open up the extreme slider simply click and hold on any normal slider in the UI and it will pop up.


Undo/Redo

This feature isn’t quite as glamorous but is pretty handy. I’m not really sure it’s been worth the development hours, but I started it a while back and so I wanted to see it through to completion.

Most of the structure of the app is built on a message system, passing data from the UI through a switchboard type system to modify the character or other elements. This isn’t a bad way to have built it, it’s pretty lightweight and easy to quickly add more customizations.

The one benefit (and hence the pre-amble) is that recording a history of the character’s creation is as simple as recording snapshots of each action, and simply reversing that data, rather than the entire character’s data. Meaning each snapshot is very lightweight, as in bytes of data.

This means that there isn’t really any undo limit history, which is great. The downside is that there is the possibility of the character and the user interface getting out of sync. So I’ve been testing every corner of the app to try to iron out these issues. I don’t expect to have caught them all, so if you notice something not working properly, just shoot me a message!

Here’s a boring gif of things being Undo’d. https://imgur.com/sBke10H

Other Stuff…

In other news, Hotkeys! I’ve started to integrate hotkey commands to help speed up working with the app. The full list is below, but it’s just a start! If you have ideas for hotkeys, or feedback on mappings, please leave comments in the discussion, or send me a PM!

Finally, I’ve put in some nifty tools for cinematographers who want to use Flex as a storyboard tool. I have some friends in film that were requesting some framing guides (rule of thirds, etc) and letterboxing to different aspect ratios (emulating wide screen, etc). https://imgur.com/0TwG4j1

So, to wrap up, progress is good! I’ll be out of town for a much needed break over the holidays. If you run into any issues let me know and I’ll be able to look into fixes when I get back in town.

As always, thanks for all your comments and support. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you all make with this next build of Flex!

Greetings all! As you may have noticed, I just pushed the latest update to Flex. There are some neat updates in this release, both big and small. In this post I want go over these changes as well as give you a heads up on what I’ll be working on next!

TL:DR version: Made some nifty updates like character save/load, more body morphs and eye control, as well as smaller updates and fixes… and even more exciting features coming in the December build!

Character Saving & Loading
The ability to save and load is pretty important if you plan on using the app for any ongoing project. I’ve been building the infrastructure for this feature as the app has developed, but there has been a bunch of testing and bug fixing over the last couple of months. Tying in the save infrastructure to the operating system’s file management has been the biggest hurdle. The good news is that it seems to be working well! However, this feature was always a big red flag for me as it could easily introduce bugs, so if you find any issues please let me know!

Additional Body Morphs

More morphs! There are now more fine tune controls for adjusting the character's body giving you more ability to make the character as you envision it. There are also more “toon” options, which push body parts beyond what is natural.

Eye Control

The eye control feature was on the backlog but I decided to throw it in for this build. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but let me know what you think of the control, and if you think it could be improved!


Housekeeping & Bug Fixes

Apple Notarization - This one took me a little by surprise (as it has done with a lot of developers I think). Apple is now requiring apps run on its platform to be “notarized”. This is basically a certification that your app doesn’t contain malicious content. Of course, if you’re developing for the App Store it’s an automatic process, but for Steam it’s a real pain of setting up developer certificates and command line tools to upload your build to the notarization service and “staple” your certificate to the final app, ugh. I THINK I did it right, but if you are a Mac user and have any issues please let me know!

Bug Fixes
- Having a controller connected no longer makes the UI freak out.
- Overlay Grid feature is now rendered to the camera… like it’s supposed to be.
- Naming cleanup in facial expressions for better usability? … I think so.
- Clicking on a lighting preset now doesn’t randomly open one of the lighting adjustment drop-downs.

Unity Engine Update - In this release I pushed up the build version of the game to Unity 2018. I was super hesitant to do this and originally didn’t plan to, but there were a couple of features in 2018 that I really wanted, so I made the leap to update. In my experience a big engine update plays havoc with 3rd party plugins and can unexpectedly break parts of your game. However, this update was relatively painless, requiring only minimal cleanup.

Unity 2018 has some nice features behind the scenes, but most notably it opens the door for more extreme morphing of the character. In previous versions the min/max of each morph was clamped. Unity 2018 removes that restriction. This segues nicely into …




Upcoming features in the next build! (planned for Mid-December)

Extreme Morphs - This idea was originally mentioned in the discussions and I had assumed it was a limitation of the engine. But after some research I found that Unity 2018 removes blendshape clamping, allowing for extreme morphs (both over 100% and below 0%). This is already working as a proof of concept. However, I want to develop an interface that makes the sliders still easy to adjust for most cases (not super sensitive), but allows for the extreme modification if you need it.

// I actually forgot to remove the extreme morph I was testing, so if you want to see how it looks (spoiler: it looks amazing) simply crank up the overweight body morph :D

Undo/Redo - This is another system that is partially built, but needs a whole bunch of testing and fixing. There are some weird corner cases that I need to account for (such as what happens when you click “reset” on a panel, or use a lighting preset that adjusts multiple UI elements).

Hotkeys - I’m probably going to do a poll or something to get your feedback on this. I have some ideas for how simple hotkeys can speed up the process, but I’m curious to hear your ideas!

Composition & Camera Framing Guides - Much like the Grid Overlay feature I want to add composition guides to help you tune your shot for composition & balance, and also letter box to certain aspect ratios. Along with this I’m going to adjust the camera zoom interaction to make it respond more like a traditional camera (ie. display the mm of the lens).


SO! Lots to work on in the coming weeks. I’m going to be keeping an eye on the discussions so if you have any quick fixes or improvements please let me know. I do keep track of everything that’s mentioned. While I can’t implement every idea I’ll definitely consider it!

Thanks for your support on the project so far, stay tuned for more Flex updates in the coming months!

Greetings all! This is the first official development update for Flex, so I just want to say... thanks for checking out the project!

This project started out as a fun side project a couple of years ago, but has slowly grown in scope and become a big part of my life. Seeing the initial response I am looking forward to investing more time into developing new features in Early Access and post-launch!

So far there have been a ton of cool ideas posted in discussions, as well as some great feedback for improvements and I’m excited to develop Flex as part of a community. While I can’t add every suggested feature, I’ll do my best to incorporate new ideas and suggestions for improvement, so keep the ideas coming!

My plan is to release increment builds, every 1-2 months, as we move closer to launch in early 2020. The majority of the new features will be structural in nature, reducing the initial install size, improving performance, and fixing issues that crop up, etc.

But there will also be new small features that trickle in, and I’ll be keeping an eye on the forums to see what ideas can be incorporated during Early Access.

So what’s coming up first? Character Saving/Loading!

Over the last month I’ve been working through the last stages of hooking up the saving and loading features. Luckily a lot of the structure of the app was built with saving/loading in mind, so there haven’t been any major obstacles in getting this working. But as with any complex project, there’s lots of little details and platform specific testing.

The feature is close to done, but there are still a number of bugs associated with loading the pose handles, clothing colors & lighting presets. Most of these are rooted in annoying things like scripts executing in different orders are causing inconsistent issues which are hard to pin down. So I’m currently carefully going through each set of feature and testing as much as I can, and fixing problems as they arise. The good news is that all the data is saving correctly, it’s just the loading that is kicking up bugs.

One nice aspect of this system is that the character data is just encoded in simple JSON format, so you’ll be able to easily copy/paste or even tweak character settings from a text editor.

While this feature has been taking up the bulk of my time, I’m also working on two smaller improvements:

More Custom Morphs: More customization options for adjusting the physical appearance of your character.

Eye Controls: This first simple version of eye controls, allowing you to move the gaze left/right & up/down.


With the current rate of progress it’s looking good for early October to have the saving/loading feature completed. So keep an eye out for an update of Flex in just a few weeks!

Thanks again for checking out and supporting the project. Flex has been a really enjoyable project to work on, and I hope to continue to develop new features, and with your help, make it the best figure reference tool in the world!