For a long time, it was my goal to work on a character creation system that was truly creative, and have those characters be fully featured and interactive in a game that is actually interesting and fun. I worked hard to prove the value of this feature, and when I was finally given permission to start working on it, it felt like the realization of one of my greatest career goals.
Now, for many projects, the concept of extremely variable characters is not that unheard of. However, in projects of the style and scope of lifestyle simulation games, it is taboo to do this sort of thing. Well, get excited because I went and did it.
There are several things happening in this video that are very exciting. First, the character can receive changes to their animation driver without needing to completely reload the character. That means that we can use sliders to let the user set their character's body proportions while they watch them take effect. Second, the rig changes propagate to the animations perfectly. Third, the blend shapes on the character are applying through the rig changes and retaining their visual fidelity.
These are all things that people take for granted, I think. Which is a tragedy, since it was not small lift to get this working without dropping to 6 frames per second.
New rig changes can be created with serialized objects that can be stored either on disk as a generic setup, or on a specific character's creation configuration.
