StarCloth: anything you can update us on?
TL;DRStarCloth now has a Maya physics plug-in that lets artists mark up and preview cloth in real time and include rigid pieces like buttons that affect the simulation, improving quality.
Yeah, but I don't know that the community is going to care that much. So we talk about tools, right? So when we did StarCloth, we didn't really make a lot of tools for it. We just made it work. So I marked it up in Maya. We could export it. It was super easy. But to really start polishing some of the issues that we had with different sections of it, especially within Squadron, but also within the PU, to really polish some of the outfits that we need to start making, like ponchos over armor and things like that, we needed some more markup ability. So what they've done, it was really cool, Vineet, the physics guys, we have Abhinav in Montreal, they've all worked together to make a physics plug-in for Maya that replicates StarCloth in Maya, and the markup that we do within Maya, the deformation that we do with cages and things like this, so they can see it real time. So what this does is just amp up the quality of the data that we actually get out of it, and it's so much better. Because yes, we would go in the engine, but I never did show the tools that we were using to paint in the engine. They were very basic. We have a system called ImGui that has this very, very debug GUI, and the physics guys had made a quick tool so that we could just kind of broad-stroke it, but you couldn't do anything sophisticated with it. Now that it's in Maya, super sophisticated. You still see it in engine in real time and stuff like that back and forth, so that's fine, but it's just more control over it. Oh, one nice... I get so excited over these dumb things. This sounds simple, but it's not. We can now put rigid objects, so for example, buttons. Buttons on the medical gown, there's an example. There's buttons that go down, or Bishop's trench coat. They're rigid. And they're on top of cloth. Before, they were just like cloth. They would move like cloth, and it's hard to see it. But now that we have these rigid bits, they actually affect the simulation too, just those rigid areas. It looks so much better. So there's a trench coat that Bishop has as well that has these, and it's totally not expected, but it has a belt that hangs down, a big leather belt of a trench coat. And the belt hangs down, and there's these little grommets within the belt, so we made all those grommets rigid, and it totally changed how this thing looked, and it was way more real, way more what you would expect from that. So that's a nice little piece of tech that came out of that little work. I know it sounds small, but again, I'm your developers' favorite developer. They think it's great, so I think it's great.