Posted December 20, 2023 by Mike Da Bird
Merry Early Christmas to all of Avalon and welcome to update #2 for the Mike'Vali! Today is the official release of Version 1.1.0! It contains some significant upgrades to the tech Mike'Vali uses and some nice Quality Of Life tweaks. Get all your Manipulator Modules from the ship, because you'll need a LOT of them!
(you can read upon the full patch notes at the bottom of the post)
The Mike'Vali now officially comes loaded with a Face Tracking variant! Look around, smile, wink, move your eyebrows, show your teeth, stick out your tongue, go nuts! All default gesture expressions can be used in tandem with this new ultra-expressive tracking method!
It utilizes VRCFaceTracking to send OSC information to apps such as ChilloutVR and VRChat. Simply open up the program, install the according module for your face tracking hardware, open up CVR or VRC and you're ready to rock!
The Mike'Vali now has official Substance Painter files! This was a VERY highly requested feature, but I never got around to it because Greedobe doesn't deserve my moneyz monthly and I had never used Substance much.... until now!
Every avi I'll work on with Substance will be using Substance Painter 2023, I will most likely not update to 2024 and later, so you won't have to worry much about backward compatibility issues starting next year!
EZRecolor has had quite a bit of a revamp, and has been upgraded to use an optimization technique called channel packing! In turn, this reduces VRAM usage by some margin or allows to edit 4x more colors using the same amount of textures! This prompted me to also do some upgrades to what can be done with the EZRecolor shader, such as having both an overlay texture on top of the multiplicative one from the previous version.
With this, the Mike'Vali has been upgraded to use V2 of EZRecolor! And now allows to edit previously uneditable colors, such as inside the ears or coloring the claws separate from the teeth! (that latter one should avoid you wanting black claws but turning your teeth black too in the process, making some look like they have no teeth).
The Mike'Vali also now includes the EZRecolor Baker by default! It is a custom utility window that allows you to bake your EZRecolor materials into reusable textures! Extremely useful (and required) for use cases that cannot utilize Unity Custom Shaders (such as Blender, Unreal Engine, Beat Saber, VRM and VRChat Quest). To bake your Mike'Vali, simply select the Mike'Vali from the dropdown, drag & drop the prefab you edited from the hierarchy tab (not the project tab), name it and press Bake! You can also tell the baker to auto-replace the EZRecolor materials on the meshes with the newly baked ones, making assigning baked EZRecolors, well... easier!
This was quite a weird one. I think several factors contributed to the project files being "corrupted" in some way. Editing within the project itself was no problem, but trying to append anything from it to a different project would cause corrupted data to be sent over instead (such as a sphere that did not exist at all... except in the background data blocks for some reason). I have gone and smacked the project to oblivion, reducing every single bit of useless data block, and ensuring that appending or linking to other projects was working properly.
This is due to modifications in the Blender code regarding how files are saved. It's possible to read a 3.6 file in 4.0, but not the other way around.
The 4.0 update does include amazing new tools and QOL features, so I highly recommend upgrading! Sorry if it does cause inconveniences to some.
The Mike'Vali will soon have a VRM version! This was planned for the 1.1.0 update, but due to complications, it unfortunately has been delayed a little further down the line. I will be revisiting this upcoming package soon as I think of potential solutions.
Some minor QoL updates and features have been added, which do not really require their own specific section. One of them includes the ability to scale DOWN the talons! This was implemented from feedback I got. I've also finally added a toggle to turn off the nuzzle animation on yourself, just like found on the Avigen. This is more of a "how did I forget this" kind of thing, but it's there now! Whoops!
And now, these are the full patch note, containing everything that has changed since the 1.0.2 update! Here we go!
You'll need to reimport every required package into your project, being the Base Package first then the one for whichever platform you are working with. Plus, if you wish to use the baker, please also import the Baker Optimized EZRecolor masks. These are meant for baking and not uploading due to insane VRAM usage, but grants the best baking results. You can always go back to upload optimized textures if you wish using the other EZRecolor textures package, but I will always recommend baking instead (everyone's GPUs and Questies will thank you for that).
If you find a Bug, please come over to the Discord Community to report it and get assistance! It's a MASSIVE update, so I suspect some bugs might have slid into some unnoticed cracks.
I'll also include the ones from the previous two previous patches as these have not been reported in devlogs yet