Neos VR Beta 0.7 - Full body avatars (new IK), Inventory, Mirrors, daily updates for everyone and more!
Hello guys!
I’m Frooxius, developer of Neos VR and I’m happy to bring you the new 0.7 beta update. It’s different from what was originally planned, but it was certainly worth it! So what’s new?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex0oyGuybCo
The support for full body avatars in Neos was pretty poor in previous versions and great pain for many of our existing users and newcomers. Because having your own character is important in virtual environment, I spent a few weeks porting and extending the excellent Final IK into Neos and build new avatar components on top of it.
In the latest beta, most 3D models with humanoid rigs are automatically setup with the new IK system on import and a new full body avatar driver when you create an avatar from it using the avatar creator (which was significantly improved too! :3).
I’ve put significant effort (and good chunk of my sanity) into making many different rigs work out of the box, but as with everything in Neos you can change and tweak any settings via inspector to your liking. If you still run into any issues, you can get help at our Discord server.
You can also now use the Vive trackers for feet and pelvis tracking for your avatars.
Another big feature is an inventory system, which allows you to save anything in Neos to your cloud account and immediately spawn it anywhere else. This is a great workflow improvement (and hoarder’s delight) as you no longer have to run off to another world to grab tools, assets or your cool items you want to show off to someone.
The inventory lets you organize your things into folders, so you can stuff it with hundreds or even thousands of items (although you might need to upgrade your cloud storage for that, hint hint ;) ).
You’ll also find two inventory folder links by default: Essential Tools and Neos Essentials. We’ll keep these stocked with useful things, but you can simply delete them if you want to organize the tools yourself.
Another cool addition to Neos are cameras, which allow to render the scene into a texture, which can be used with any existing material and can be used to create wide variety of environments and items. We have built a functioning virtual DSLR (available in Neos Essentials, check it out!), functioning microscope and many other things with it. I can’t wait to see what you’ll build!
You can also spawn mirrors and portals, which behave as you’d expect (except for the portals, which are just visual and don’t let things pass through (yet!)). They’re useful in their own right (ever try edit your avatar in the mirror?), but can also be used as a building blocks for any of your tasks.
As every update, there’s dozens of other new features, tools, improvements and fixes. Just to name a few there’s a Color Tooltip (lets you recolor anything or pick colors), Component Clone tool, reworked file browser, import progress report, moving/rotating grabbed things, area mode for material gun, user icon badges or spawn areas.
There have been some performance optimizations, resulting in 2-4 times performance increase in some scenarios (especially math heavy), fixed lingering developer mode, video textures not loading, session asset transfers getting stuck and many more.
If you’d like to keep up with the updates, I recommend visiting our Discord server, where I post updates daily in the nightly channel. Which brings me to another point…
For past three months, our Patreon supporters had access to the nightly channel with the latest features, which I often update several times a day. Because of the quick development on this branch, most of our active users ended up using the nightly branch.
However because it’s not compatible with the public one, the public build often ended up empty, which isn’t good for newcomers. Neos is really best in social setting, especially when you have someone show you around and show you its power.
From this update forward, the nightly builds are now default, available for free for anybody, to help to unify the community and help it grow. There’s an inherent danger having these builds as default, but after discussing this with ours members, I believe the benefits outweigh the risks, especially since the builds have been pretty stable over the past few months.
To mitigate any problems, I’m introducing a new set of branches that are now available on steam:
Our community has been slowly, but steadily growing. I’m proud that we have many diverse users from different backgrounds using Neos for variety of tasks, from simple playing around and social setting, to education and research, to building awesome environments and interactive objects.
Neos is a project of passion for us, with the goal to build the proper metaverse, where creators, teachers, scientists, engineers and casual users all coexist within the same universe and are able to build and share together.
To achieve this goal we need your help. We need anyone who’s willing to use the system, whether you’re a talented creator or just want to have fun with other people.
And if you’d like to support us financially, you can do so over at our Patreon. You’ll get a bunch of cool perks, like increased online storage, feature requests, early access to some experiences we’re building or custom badges.
Recently we’ve also made available experimental Oculus Go builds, which are now an official Patreon reward. They’re very rough, but also very fun, as they run at the same codebase (with cross PC-mobile multiplayer).
Most of the features that were originally planned for the 0.7 are now rolling over to 0.8 after being displaced by the IK system.
I’ll be working on improving the Neos usability with better UI’s, exposing more control over who can join your worlds and what they can do and adding more social features, like friends lists. And of course, the long requested Undo!
Since the nightly builds are now available for everyone, you’ll be able to use those new features right as they’re added in, so stay tuned!
I’m Frooxius, developer of Neos VR and I’m happy to bring you the new 0.7 beta update. It’s different from what was originally planned, but it was certainly worth it! So what’s new?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex0oyGuybCo
New IK system for full body avatars
The support for full body avatars in Neos was pretty poor in previous versions and great pain for many of our existing users and newcomers. Because having your own character is important in virtual environment, I spent a few weeks porting and extending the excellent Final IK into Neos and build new avatar components on top of it.
In the latest beta, most 3D models with humanoid rigs are automatically setup with the new IK system on import and a new full body avatar driver when you create an avatar from it using the avatar creator (which was significantly improved too! :3).
I’ve put significant effort (and good chunk of my sanity) into making many different rigs work out of the box, but as with everything in Neos you can change and tweak any settings via inspector to your liking. If you still run into any issues, you can get help at our Discord server.
You can also now use the Vive trackers for feet and pelvis tracking for your avatars.
Inventory system
Another big feature is an inventory system, which allows you to save anything in Neos to your cloud account and immediately spawn it anywhere else. This is a great workflow improvement (and hoarder’s delight) as you no longer have to run off to another world to grab tools, assets or your cool items you want to show off to someone.
The inventory lets you organize your things into folders, so you can stuff it with hundreds or even thousands of items (although you might need to upgrade your cloud storage for that, hint hint ;) ).
You’ll also find two inventory folder links by default: Essential Tools and Neos Essentials. We’ll keep these stocked with useful things, but you can simply delete them if you want to organize the tools yourself.
Cameras, Mirrors, Portals
Another cool addition to Neos are cameras, which allow to render the scene into a texture, which can be used with any existing material and can be used to create wide variety of environments and items. We have built a functioning virtual DSLR (available in Neos Essentials, check it out!), functioning microscope and many other things with it. I can’t wait to see what you’ll build!
You can also spawn mirrors and portals, which behave as you’d expect (except for the portals, which are just visual and don’t let things pass through (yet!)). They’re useful in their own right (ever try edit your avatar in the mirror?), but can also be used as a building blocks for any of your tasks.
Dozens of other additions and improvements
As every update, there’s dozens of other new features, tools, improvements and fixes. Just to name a few there’s a Color Tooltip (lets you recolor anything or pick colors), Component Clone tool, reworked file browser, import progress report, moving/rotating grabbed things, area mode for material gun, user icon badges or spawn areas.
There have been some performance optimizations, resulting in 2-4 times performance increase in some scenarios (especially math heavy), fixed lingering developer mode, video textures not loading, session asset transfers getting stuck and many more.
If you’d like to keep up with the updates, I recommend visiting our Discord server, where I post updates daily in the nightly channel. Which brings me to another point…
Daily updates for everybody for free
For past three months, our Patreon supporters had access to the nightly channel with the latest features, which I often update several times a day. Because of the quick development on this branch, most of our active users ended up using the nightly branch.
However because it’s not compatible with the public one, the public build often ended up empty, which isn’t good for newcomers. Neos is really best in social setting, especially when you have someone show you around and show you its power.
From this update forward, the nightly builds are now default, available for free for anybody, to help to unify the community and help it grow. There’s an inherent danger having these builds as default, but after discussing this with ours members, I believe the benefits outweigh the risks, especially since the builds have been pretty stable over the past few months.
To mitigate any problems, I’m introducing a new set of branches that are now available on steam:
- default - public build with daily updates and new features
- previous-build - the build immediately previous to the current default. You can switch to it in case the default one is broken somehow
- weekly - updated with a build every week, to provide more stability, while still getting new features
- major-stable - updated with every major release of Neos, provides greatest stability (things won’t randomly break)
- danger-nightly - if I’m changing something that’s likely to break things badly, I’ll push it here first, before promoting to default
Join our community and support on Patreon
Our community has been slowly, but steadily growing. I’m proud that we have many diverse users from different backgrounds using Neos for variety of tasks, from simple playing around and social setting, to education and research, to building awesome environments and interactive objects.
Neos is a project of passion for us, with the goal to build the proper metaverse, where creators, teachers, scientists, engineers and casual users all coexist within the same universe and are able to build and share together.
To achieve this goal we need your help. We need anyone who’s willing to use the system, whether you’re a talented creator or just want to have fun with other people.
And if you’d like to support us financially, you can do so over at our Patreon. You’ll get a bunch of cool perks, like increased online storage, feature requests, early access to some experiences we’re building or custom badges.
Recently we’ve also made available experimental Oculus Go builds, which are now an official Patreon reward. They’re very rough, but also very fun, as they run at the same codebase (with cross PC-mobile multiplayer).
What’s next?
Most of the features that were originally planned for the 0.7 are now rolling over to 0.8 after being displaced by the IK system.
I’ll be working on improving the Neos usability with better UI’s, exposing more control over who can join your worlds and what they can do and adding more social features, like friends lists. And of course, the long requested Undo!
Since the nightly builds are now available for everyone, you’ll be able to use those new features right as they’re added in, so stay tuned!