Reworked full body support. Up to 8 trackers. Avatar anchors. Cloud updates.
Hello everyone!
This is the first of our weekly development and community highlights, where major features as well as creations and meetups by our community will be showcased!
If you’re building something cool with any of the new features and wish to have them in the weekly community highlights, please share your pictures and videos in the Discord’s #screenshots and #videos channels and tag @Veer in your post!
We’re going to be livestreaming on Twitch about this update on 3 PM PST (6 PM EST) today (November 8th), one hour from publishing of this update. Please join us if you’d like to see them in action or if you have any questions and suggestions!
Major improvements to full-body tracking and calibration have been made, including the new quick T-pose calibration! The new setup process should make things much more streamlined than before. You just press a button, go into a T pose, and then pull both of your triggers! You can then fine-tune the calibration on a real-time miniature rendering of your avatar.
A lot of the older problems involving full body IK have been solved, such as people’s heads sinking into their chests, knees not moving properly with your legs or the body getting twisted when you lie down. The full-body IK should now work reliably regardless of which position you are in.
Our full-body calibration is designed to be independent from your avatars. If you change your full body setup, you don’t have to recalibrate all of your avatars again.
To top it off, we now support up to 8 additional trackers for a total of 11 tracking points for high quality full body tracking! You can now track your hips, knees, feet, elbows, and chest! The new full body calibrator will automatically calibrate all of these for you.
This new feature allows you to anchor parts of your avatar to various objects! You can anchor your avatar’s hips, hands, feet and other body parts to anchor-points and restrict their movement to a certain range, allowing for the creation of vehicles, hoverboards, rollercoasters and easy to use furniture (such as seats)!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Anchors are a set of components that can be added to any object, which means you can program them with LogiX to do a ton of fun stuff! They allow you to intercept user’s locomotion controls and using them for your own control scheme. This is particularly useful for vehicles, but has lots of other uses as well. You can move them around programmatically as well, moving the avatar’s body with them, to create simple animations.
Because you have control on how exactly is the character posed, you can make a variety of seat poses for various forms of furniture. You can also use multi-anchors to set up a bench that can seat multiple users easily along a line or a circle without setting up dozens of individual anchors. Now you can easily sit all your friends on a couch for movie night!
They can also scale your avatar too. If you add the anchors onto your avatar, you can pick your friends up or have them ride on your shoulder! They nest as well, so it’s possible for multiple characters standing on each other's shoulders.
There are so many things you can do with anchors that the possibilities are near endless! We’ve already seen some great creations from our community, from a variety of vehicles, dragons, hoverboards, spaceships to avatar mechs that you can sit inside of. We can't wait to see what else you’ll build with them!
Recently we noticed our cloud services getting slow due to increasing number of users. Worlds took a long time to connect to, friend lists and inventories weren’t loading and browsing worlds was difficult.
Because of that we made major improvements to the cloud. We’ve switched from .NET Framework to a more modern .NET Core, reworked the architecture and added many optimizations on top. This made the cloud services much more responsive and scalable for the future!
Some other improvements include increased upload speed and reliability, especially for big assets. Synchronizing worlds and items with lots of assets is more reliable as well. Worlds with thousands of assets that would fail to sync before should process correctly now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVRgKqaKZGo
PolyLogix Studio is working on a two handed weapon system for their Neos based game GunLight Online. This system allows for pavlov-style handling of rifles and other firearms so you can precisely aim down sights.
A lot of our users have enjoyed watching videos with each other with our easy to use video imports. If you have a YouTube link, just copy the link and, inside the Neos window, press Ctrl+V and a video player simply pops up in front of you and your friends. If you have a video file, you can easily drag and drop the file from your computer onto Neos window.
We are currently finishing up the Asset Variant System and have just released the first working version of it in the public build!
Right now the variant system is focusing on textures, but later on it will include objects, sound files, videos and more. Neos now uses significantly less RAM and VRAM because it loads much more optimized variants of the assets.
Worlds and items now also load in a fraction of time they took before! Some of our users are lending their computing power to process popular items and worlds, which has helped to smooth out the roll out of this new system to the public. Thank you to everyone who volunteered!
We still have some work to do as some features are still missing and the system isn’t available for Quest yet. Once it’s finished and some issues are ironed out, we will begin work on the long awaited UI Update!
Also lastly, big thanks to our community and Patreon, Twitch and ICO supporters. Your ideas, feedback and passion is what keeps moving this project forward and allows us to make updates like these. Thank you!
This is the first of our weekly development and community highlights, where major features as well as creations and meetups by our community will be showcased!
If you’re building something cool with any of the new features and wish to have them in the weekly community highlights, please share your pictures and videos in the Discord’s #screenshots and #videos channels and tag @Veer in your post!
Livestream!
We’re going to be livestreaming on Twitch about this update on 3 PM PST (6 PM EST) today (November 8th), one hour from publishing of this update. Please join us if you’d like to see them in action or if you have any questions and suggestions!
Full Body Tracking
Major improvements to full-body tracking and calibration have been made, including the new quick T-pose calibration! The new setup process should make things much more streamlined than before. You just press a button, go into a T pose, and then pull both of your triggers! You can then fine-tune the calibration on a real-time miniature rendering of your avatar.
A lot of the older problems involving full body IK have been solved, such as people’s heads sinking into their chests, knees not moving properly with your legs or the body getting twisted when you lie down. The full-body IK should now work reliably regardless of which position you are in.
Our full-body calibration is designed to be independent from your avatars. If you change your full body setup, you don’t have to recalibrate all of your avatars again.
To top it off, we now support up to 8 additional trackers for a total of 11 tracking points for high quality full body tracking! You can now track your hips, knees, feet, elbows, and chest! The new full body calibrator will automatically calibrate all of these for you.
Avatar Anchors
This new feature allows you to anchor parts of your avatar to various objects! You can anchor your avatar’s hips, hands, feet and other body parts to anchor-points and restrict their movement to a certain range, allowing for the creation of vehicles, hoverboards, rollercoasters and easy to use furniture (such as seats)!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Anchors are a set of components that can be added to any object, which means you can program them with LogiX to do a ton of fun stuff! They allow you to intercept user’s locomotion controls and using them for your own control scheme. This is particularly useful for vehicles, but has lots of other uses as well. You can move them around programmatically as well, moving the avatar’s body with them, to create simple animations.
Because you have control on how exactly is the character posed, you can make a variety of seat poses for various forms of furniture. You can also use multi-anchors to set up a bench that can seat multiple users easily along a line or a circle without setting up dozens of individual anchors. Now you can easily sit all your friends on a couch for movie night!
They can also scale your avatar too. If you add the anchors onto your avatar, you can pick your friends up or have them ride on your shoulder! They nest as well, so it’s possible for multiple characters standing on each other's shoulders.
There are so many things you can do with anchors that the possibilities are near endless! We’ve already seen some great creations from our community, from a variety of vehicles, dragons, hoverboards, spaceships to avatar mechs that you can sit inside of. We can't wait to see what else you’ll build with them!
Upgrades to the Cloud
Recently we noticed our cloud services getting slow due to increasing number of users. Worlds took a long time to connect to, friend lists and inventories weren’t loading and browsing worlds was difficult.
Because of that we made major improvements to the cloud. We’ve switched from .NET Framework to a more modern .NET Core, reworked the architecture and added many optimizations on top. This made the cloud services much more responsive and scalable for the future!
Some other improvements include increased upload speed and reliability, especially for big assets. Synchronizing worlds and items with lots of assets is more reliable as well. Worlds with thousands of assets that would fail to sync before should process correctly now!
Community highlights
ProbablePrime is making a whole library of tutorial videos for various extremely useful Neos components and LogiX nodes. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill tutorials. One can learn how to create grab instancers (like grabbing ammo from a bag), how to create a nice basic world, how to relay Twitch messages and a ton more!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVRgKqaKZGo
PolyLogix Studio is working on a two handed weapon system for their Neos based game GunLight Online. This system allows for pavlov-style handling of rifles and other firearms so you can precisely aim down sights.
A lot of our users have enjoyed watching videos with each other with our easy to use video imports. If you have a YouTube link, just copy the link and, inside the Neos window, press Ctrl+V and a video player simply pops up in front of you and your friends. If you have a video file, you can easily drag and drop the file from your computer onto Neos window.
What’s Next?
We are currently finishing up the Asset Variant System and have just released the first working version of it in the public build!
Right now the variant system is focusing on textures, but later on it will include objects, sound files, videos and more. Neos now uses significantly less RAM and VRAM because it loads much more optimized variants of the assets.
Worlds and items now also load in a fraction of time they took before! Some of our users are lending their computing power to process popular items and worlds, which has helped to smooth out the roll out of this new system to the public. Thank you to everyone who volunteered!
We still have some work to do as some features are still missing and the system isn’t available for Quest yet. Once it’s finished and some issues are ironed out, we will begin work on the long awaited UI Update!
Also lastly, big thanks to our community and Patreon, Twitch and ICO supporters. Your ideas, feedback and passion is what keeps moving this project forward and allows us to make updates like these. Thank you!