Drag[en]gine 1.18 and DEMoCap 1.0 Released news

This release contains various bug fixes and improvements but also new features to help with special effects and simplifying animation work.

This includes clip.plane and clip.plane.border texture properties. These new texture properties allow to define a per-texture clip plane (defined by an animation bone) to dynamically make parts of your model vanish. Optionally the border can be soft to create a soft vanishing. Since this is per-texture you can easily create special effects fully inside a skin file.

Another addition is the support for dynamic constructed skin texture properties. So far constructed texture properties</b had been required to be static. Now they can be dynamic with certain node parameters assigned a mapped. These work like mapped texture properties allowing to use input mangled through a curve. You can also use renderables as input for mapped allowing all kinds of effects to be done easily.

See the full changelog here: Changelog Release 1.18.

To help distribute your games find here also the updated distribution files for Steam and Microsoft App Store.

So far DEMoCap had been available as early-access. Now the VR Motion Capture Tool received the first official non-early-access release. This release contains various work to make the basic functionality work well across various test characters. The main focus of DEMoCap is on creating Motion Capture for humanoid and especially non-humanoid game characters without the chore of existing motion capture solutions. Post-processing is mostly not required since the motion capture is applied in real-time to your game character. You can immediately examine the result and re-take capture sequences until they fit perfectly. If you have access to VR equipment (HMD, VIVE trackers) you can get started and spare yourself complex camera setups and motion capture suits.

See the DEMoCap Wiki and the Example Characters page for additional information.