Sorry for the lack of updates! January turned out to be even more hectic than December for me. Hopefully I will be able to get back into a groove and start posting more regular updates in February.
As you may have read on the Daz Forums, I’ve begun contract work with Daz 3D on a big project to update the Daz Bridges: merging the Daz Plugin source code into a common library and setting up an automated QA testing system. I’ll be working on this project for Daz 3D full-time over the next several months. However, I’ll still be maintaining my personal projects here in my spare time, including updates to the uDTU and Centaur Sim projects.
If you are here for Centaur-related content, I’ve been working on a free mobile version of the Centaur Forest demo for the past couple of months. Right now, I have the demo running in iOS, but it’s not ready for release on the App Store yet. When I start getting my paychecks for my contract work, I’ll try to look into buying an Android-based device and port the Centaur Forest demo there as well.
This past month, I’ve spent most of my free time planning out the next update for the uDTU project. You may have noticed the github repository for the uDTU-unity-package. This is the Unity half of the uDTU bridge, split off into a unity-compatible github package. This means you can the latest github build directly from the Unity Editor’s Package Manager, instead of needing to use the Daz Studio installers or installing manually. One benefit of doing this is that users can take advantage of Unity’s Package Management system to keep it up-to-date (Unity 2021+). With older versions of unity, you can manually initiate a github “refresh” by deleting the “\Library\PackageCache\com.danielbui78.udtu@…” folder prior to loading your Unity project. The biggest benefit of having a separate unity-package repository is that development and version control process will be much faster and efficient for me.
The Daz Studio-half of the uDTU bridge is being updated to be recognize and work better with the github-based uDTU-unity-package. I am testing out some new installation techniques, including .unitypackage format and/or installing directly into the “\Packages” folder. Once I have both halves updated, I’ll release package everything together and release it as version 1.3.
In related news, I’ve been experimenting with a couple of Unity paid add-ons for strand-based hair. My goal is to directly convert dForce strand-based hair directly into a strand-based hair asset for Unity, similar to how the experimental dForce clothing conversion works.