NeoFur!

Hi! It's Geril.

Because Lussy is 120% preparing for her finals, Lemniscate's development is going slower than usual. But in the meantime, I've had time to try out a new technology that I've wanted to try for a long time. It's called NeoFur by Neoglyphic. Because all of OLP's player characters have fur and fluff, this plugin is perfect for us.

For now, only Cole the bobcat has a presentable coat of fur applied. It would be a lot better with a fur pattern map, but Lussy is busy so it'll have to wait.

As you can see on the comparison screenshots, the fluff and the beard improves the character's appearance greatly. We can control the fur's length, density, and how much gravity, wind and force fields affect it. It's fun to tinker with and makes things really interesting visually. For example, we can even make Cole's beard grow during the game.

so majestic

According to our experience with NeoFur, it really is the best when used as a fur effect (because, of course, we've tried to use it on other things, too, like hair). However, it also looks decent for things like fluffy carpets or grass.

The fur effect is very costly graphically, especially when using more shells (70<), but using proper LODs helps solve this problem.

We couldn't make animations work with NeoFur yet, but we're working on it. We can watch the animated meshes with fur in the editor frame by frame though. We're looking forward to solving this issue, because the preview looks promising.

We can only recommend the NeoFur plugin for anyone making fur-coated beings in Unreal 4. It's really worth it (it's only $20!).

Apart from this, there are lots of things going on, for example, we may begin to publish posts on other sites, too. Nothing is decided yet, but it feels like our work up to this point is finally going to pay off.

After Lussy's finals, we'll get back to working on Lemniscate again!