Hey Everyone,

Sadly for the foreseeable future I'm going to slow down with updating this mod, because instead of a hobby, it feels to me like having another job, which is not really what I had set in mind when I started working on this.

(not to mention I already have waaay too much on my plate as of right now. [job, language courses, and a thesis that I have to work on to be able to finish my normal school])

This doesn't mean that I've abandoned this mod, I'm not going to stop working on this mod until I patched most of the regularly used mods out there.

It just means I'm not as actively going to participate working on this mod. ie:

Hello Everyone,

As you might have noticed I've been gone for a couple of weeks,
no, I'm not dead, I'm just stuck in a different country working on some stuff.

But as soon as I'm back to my workstation (should be in a couple of weeks) I'm planning to create a short tutorial on how to convert your favorite mod to 'work' with different body models.

I'm also planning on creating an application similar to the gamebryo (later on Creation Engine)'s BodySlide mod(s), which will let you dynamically change your character model. Sadly this is much easier to say, than do. So no promises there.

Hello everyone,

As you have probably noticed I haven't been able to work on this mod for quite some time, there's multiple reasons for this, me working on my thesis is one of the bigger ones. I simply do not have the time nor the willpower to continue working on this mod.

I'm not gonna lie and pretend I will ever continue working on this mod,
I can only say I might, when I fishing with my college (hopefully) in January.

I'm sorry for making you all wait for the next update for so long.

Hopefully in the future when things calm down I will be able to return to this mod.

But until then, I guess this is goodbye.

Thank you to everyone who helped with this mod, and I'm sincerely sorry for doing this.

Hello everyone,

I'm officially back.

I know I promised I would return during January, but real life happened,
and now I'm full time employed.

But it's not all bad news bears, I started working on another version of this mod,
where you can modify your character's shape to your hearts content, with easy to use sliders!

Here is a quick video I whipped together of how it looks right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E4OF2KPBy4

for the people that noticed, yes I am using Unity to create the mod.
I tried creating it purely in C#, however I spent too much time trying to figure out implementing 3D, and I already knew how to use Unity, so yeah. ANYWAYS

I am planning on implementing a lot more options so you can create your own perfect character.

Currently this is in early prototype, so I don't have an ETA on when it will be done,
however I am working on it.

Yes, this does mean that the base character model will need to be different as well, so we will slowly move away from being a patch for Pear Shape Patches, to be used alone.

I will leave the old patches as it is for save-game and server compatibility.

Good news everyone!

Today we had a breakthrough, and I was able to import a custom clothing, and apply custom blendshapes to it, so that it conforms to the original body,
which means we're that much closer to having our own totally customizable character inside Project Zomboid with just a couple of clicks.

Currently the project is a mess, we still yet to finish the UI, and we still have to figure out a way of exporting all of the models and the character in a way that PZ can handle, because of course that is the hardest thing to do. Not to mention figure out a way of importing direct X files, and having a corrective brush, with which one can "push" out stuck vertexes that's underneath the character.


So yeah, there's still a lot to do, but we're getting there.

No videos this time around (Maybe tomorrow!) as I spent way too much time trying to get things to work,

Here's hoping next week will be better.

Hello everyone!

Here is a list of all of the different slides you will be able to change:

• abdomen depth
  
• abdomen scale
  
• abs center line depth
  
• abs outer depth
  
• ankle tone
  
• arm fat
  
• arm strong
  
• arm thin
  
• back depth
  
• back lats scale
  
• back lower depth
  
• back muscle scale
  
• back scapula scale
  
• back spine depth
  
• biceps scale
  
• breast flat
  
• breast proximity
  
• breast scale 1
  
• breast scale 2
  
• smaller aerola
  
• breast scale weight
  
• bellybutton depth
  
• breast shape 1
  
• breast shape 2
  
• breast under curve 1
  
• breast under curve 2
  
• breast upper curve
  
• calf center depth
  
• calf inner scale
  
• calf inner upper curve
  
• calf outer upper curve
  
• calf scale
  
• chest depth
  
• chest front depth
  
• Deltoid Scale
  
• forearm inner scale
  
• forearm inner upper scale
  
• forearm outer scale
  
• forearm scale
  
• glue upper depth
  
• glute contour pear
  
• glute contour V
  
• glute height
  
• glute lower depth
  
• glute scale
  
• glute width
  
• hamstring scale
  
• hip bone scale
  
• hip love handles
  
• leg fat
  
• leg strong
  
• leg thin
  
• lower leg scale
  
• pectoral height
  
• pectoral scale
  
• quad inner scale
  
• quad outer scale
  
• ribcage scale
  
• shoulder scale
  
• shoulder top height
  
• thigh scale
  
• trapezius scale
  
• triceps scale
  
• wrist scale

Here's a video about these options.
https://youtu.be/mGpHURsIwOs

If you feel like an option is missing write a comment about it into the new ideas discussions

Hello Everyone!

Sorry for the long silence.

I didn't have that much time to work on this mod, as I've got a bit sick, and ran into a slight issue, that I wrote down in the Footer of this mod update.

TL;DR at the end!

With that unpleasantness aside, I've been working on a way of finding all of the player meshes in game, which comes with it's own share of troubles, as there's a lot of models that are not used, or they are not character models (for example cars, or weapons)

My current solution is not the fastest (on my personal mod-list (which contains a wide array of mods) we can go through 336 mods in about 3 minutes)

Below you will find a detailed log that contains all of the mods (and it's Female clothing) inside my mod-list

https://pastebin.com/HQhM52Jb

Pretty cool, right?

We can see that multiple mods (in this example I will talk about Pygmalion's mod) we can see that there are multiple entries for the model bob_bowBase, which means there are multiple clothing that uses the same model, which is not a problem. All it means is we gotta de-duplicate this list, so from the 2392 lines of items we have actually only have 1020 different clothes. A big difference! Especially when we have to modify those clothing, and then save them. Imagine that kerfuffle!

In any case going through so many items every time the user starts up the program is going to get annoying really fast, so we will save the details of the models into a file, for quick accessing.

The user will need to re-run this algorithm every time their mod's update, or they download a new mod before playing (even if they only downloaded mods that aren't necessarily clothing mods), some mods like Monmouth County contains clothing, even though they're mainly a map mod.
Okay, that's a bad example, but you get the gist.

As for the rest of the mod sadly I haven't had the time to work on it that much, but I did start working on the UI, so maybe soon expect a demo of it. (I gotta preface this: the demo will not be able to export FBX, or even if it does, the models WON'T WORK INSIDE PROJECT ZOMBOID, as I still haven't found out how PZ handles FBX models.)


And with the main part of the mod update done, I'm going to talk about my current problem with PZ.

For some reason now I am unable to export working FBX models into PZ, even though I am doing exactly the same things as before! Why? How? I have no idea!

I might try to reinstall PZ from the g round up and try it that way, but that seem ridiculous, especially because the old models that I have exported work perfectly!

In any case this does actually slow down my work even more, because now I lost the only ability that I had to generate the models in the first place! Very annoying!

Hello Everyone,

Today is a very short update.

I was able to fix my blender and now I am finally able to import objects into PZ once again.

I am still not sure what the problem was, or the solution, but I'm just grateful it works once again.

Hello Everyone,

Sorry for the long silence.

The work on the project is going well!
(Especially because ~4 hours ago I realized I can see a lot more information about FBX files using Visual Studio. Who knew! No. Seriously who knew?!)

Right now we have the ability of modifying the model inside blender using ShapeKeys,
and then exporting it out into PZ (currently there's also another step, where I have to modify a rotation axis, for some reason the model only works if I modify it Visual Studio)

Here's a short video of it!

https://youtu.be/QBplquCRMus

The eagle eyed among you might remember the fact that I was already able to modify clothing and import it into the game, however the character model needs to be imported differently into the game. Or at least the usual way did not work for me.

Right now even though it looks like the clothing was also updated, sadly that is not the case.

Also with my current model the long skirts are not working. At All. So I'll have to fix that later on as well.

Here's hoping I can eliminate that extra Visual Studio step soon!

Hello everyone,

I have good news!
here's a really quick update about the mod:

I was finally able to export clothes directly from my mod into PZ, with correct armature (animations), (aside from a small hiccup where the clothing in question was upside down).

This is a really good news, as this does mean we're really close at finalizing the first version of this mod.

After I fix that export kink I'll finally (for real this time!) start working on the UI, and finish up the coding part, which, if everything goes well, you can expect to try out in the next few weeks.

In smaller news:
for the next few weeks my German courses have stopped, so in theory I should have a bit more time to spend working on this mod.

Currently for the playable character we still need to use Microsoft Visual Studio (community edition) to fix a problem with the character after an export, but if I can't fix this issue by the time I'm ready with the rest of the mod, I'll release the first version, and you will have to manually do the fix (which as you have seen from the last video I posted, takes less than a minute to do so).


After I publish the first version I want to start working on the male body as well, which shouldn't take too long to implement.

Hello everyone,

I have very good news!

It took me a while, but tonight I was finally able to successfully export a modified model straight into PZ.

This means that we finally have a way to:

• Import models (only in FBX right now, .X will come later, hopefully)
  
• Copy the character shapes onto the imported model
  
• Modify the imported model based on how the character model looks
  
• Export it straight into PZ (for the clothing we do not need Microsoft Visual Studio)

While this doesn't sound that complicated, this was (for me) really hard to do, and I'm really glad I was able to do this.

Next steps will be starting the work on the User Interface (UI), more specifically creating a way to import, and export models (individually and in bulk), and a way to change the model shapes using the UI (rather than in the builder, which is what I have been doing so far in the videos I posted), I also want to create a "Shape Options configuration export-import function", where you will be able to export your own body shape configuration, and import it on a different PC, if for example you want to send your creation between your friends, or share it online, or just have multiple different body shapes for different playthroughs.

Hi Everyone,

Quick update this time as it's almost 1 am, and I'm exhausted.

Played around with the whole system and now I'm able to reliably export the modified models from Unity (even during runtime), one small caveat however, they're in the wrong format (as in they're .fbx, but they're ascii, not binary)

So right now to make this work we need an Fbx format converter, which, lucky enough, I was able to find one, however this is an extra step (plus you'd need to download 900 MB of fbx SDK library to be able to convert models, which is not what I intended this mod to be, so this is sadly not the way I'll be taking)

So I'm going to continue trying to find a different way of converting models that I can do seamlessly inside Unity.
I also looked into a way of binding to the already built in fbx exporter during runtime, but that's currently beyond my capacity. But it is a possible way of doing this, so I'll work towards understanding it.

So yeah, not having explicit access to this component during runtime will sadly push back the V 1.0 release by a bit.

Hello Everyone,

I have found a way of exporting the models correctly, into a PZ readable FBX file.

Now that I have a reliable way of exporting the models, there's only 2 main things are left to do,

• find a way to import the models in the first place, which shouldn't be that hard
  
• make the dang UI

And with those new goals in mind, I'm off to bed.

Hello Everyone,

Just a quick update, I started working on the UI, and so far we have this mess:

http://i.imgur.com/UCyKdYm.png


not a lot, sure, but I'm happy.

The right side menu (the sliders) are all working and update the model in real time.
They're set up in a way that they will work with additional shapes as well, so if I, or someone else decides to work on the character model and implement additional features, for example face, hands, or foot sliders, there are no additional work that I need to do to update the software in any way.

I also looked into ways of importing the models into the editor, and so far I got a few leads.

the eagle eyed among you might notice there's a loading bar at the bottom left corner, this will show the user how many models have been loaded into the program, and during exporting how many models have been exported out (while it's not in use it will be hidden, so there's that much more space for all of the different models, which will hopefully look somewhat similar to the old, temporary UI I mentioned in the April 2nd progress showcase)

http://i.imgur.com/1xJKYVT.png

So yeah, things are still in motion, sadly I was way too optimistic with my last prediction of being able to finish this in the upcoming weeks. My bad guys.

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for no updates in the last few weeks, but I've been super busy with work, and with fallout 76.

But I've been working on the mod in the few times I have a little break, and I believe I found a way of integrating the fbx converter into the runtime unity (tool) itself, meaning there won't be a need to have two different executables to run (which also means this should be compatible with Linux, as well as Windows).