Chirp!

Merry Early Christmas to all of Avalon and welcome to update #2 for the Mike'Vali! Today is the official release of Version 1.1.0! It contains some significant upgrades to the tech Mike'Vali uses and some nice Quality Of Life tweaks. Get all your Manipulator Modules from the ship, because you'll need a LOT of them!

(you can read upon the full patch notes at the bottom of the post)

Face Tracking!

The Mike'Vali now officially comes loaded with a Face Tracking variant! Look around, smile, wink, move your eyebrows, show your teeth, stick out your tongue, go nuts! All default gesture expressions can be used in tandem with this new ultra-expressive tracking method!

It utilizes VRCFaceTracking to send OSC information to apps such as ChilloutVR and VRChat. Simply open up the program, install the according module for your face tracking hardware, open up CVR or VRC and you're ready to rock!

Substance Files!

The Mike'Vali now has official Substance Painter files! This was a VERY highly requested feature, but I never got around to it because Greedobe doesn't deserve my moneyz monthly and I had never used Substance much.... until now!

Every avi I'll work on with Substance will be using Substance Painter 2023, I will most likely not update to 2024 and later, so you won't have to worry much about backward compatibility issues starting next year!

EZRecolor V2 and Baker!

EZRecolor has had quite a bit of a revamp, and has been upgraded to use an optimization technique called channel packing! In turn, this reduces VRAM usage by some margin or allows to edit 4x more colors using the same amount of textures! This prompted me to also do some upgrades to what can be done with the EZRecolor shader, such as having both an overlay texture on top of the multiplicative one from the previous version.

With this, the Mike'Vali has been upgraded to use V2 of EZRecolor! And now allows to edit previously uneditable colors, such as inside the ears or coloring the claws separate from the teeth! (that latter one should avoid you wanting black claws but turning your teeth black too in the process, making some look like they have no teeth).

The Mike'Vali also now includes the EZRecolor Baker by default! It is a custom utility window that allows you to bake your EZRecolor materials into reusable textures! Extremely useful (and required) for use cases that cannot utilize Unity Custom Shaders (such as Blender, Unreal Engine, Beat Saber, VRM and VRChat Quest). To bake your Mike'Vali, simply select the Mike'Vali from the dropdown, drag & drop the prefab you edited from the hierarchy tab (not the project tab), name it and press Bake! You can also tell the baker to auto-replace the EZRecolor materials on the meshes with the newly baked ones, making assigning baked EZRecolors, well... easier!

Blender project append is fixed!

This was quite a weird one. I think several factors contributed to the project files being "corrupted" in some way. Editing within the project itself was no problem, but trying to append anything from it to a different project would cause corrupted data to be sent over instead (such as a sphere that did not exist at all... except in the background data blocks for some reason). I have gone and smacked the project to oblivion, reducing every single bit of useless data block, and ensuring that appending or linking to other projects was working properly.

IMPORTANT: Blender 4.0 upgrade

The 1.1.0 update has upgraded the Blender project version to Blender 4.0, which is INCOMPATIBLE with Blender 3.6 and older. 

This is due to modifications in the Blender code regarding how files are saved. It's possible to read a 3.6 file in 4.0, but not the other way around. 

The 4.0 update does include amazing new tools and QOL features, so I highly recommend upgrading! Sorry if it does cause inconveniences to some.

COMING SOON: VRM Support!

The Mike'Vali will soon have a VRM version! This was planned for the 1.1.0 update, but due to complications, it unfortunately has been delayed a little further down the line. I will be revisiting this upcoming package soon as I think of potential solutions.

Quality Of Life updates

Some minor QoL updates and features have been added, which do not really require their own specific section. One of them includes the ability to scale DOWN the talons! This was implemented from feedback I got. I've also finally added a toggle to turn off the nuzzle animation on yourself, just like found on the Avigen. This is more of a "how did I forget this" kind of thing, but it's there now! Whoops!

And now, these are the full patch note, containing everything that has changed since the 1.0.2 update! Here we go!

New Features

• (Substance) NEW SUBSTANCE SOURCE FILES! Been asked about that a LOT, and since I have Substance 2023 (Steam Edition) and I started slowing learning it, I gave a shot at it and made an SPP file for the Mike'Vali! I'm still new to this, so there's probably better ways I could have made the file, but hopefully it's good enough for your needs!
• (General) Added Blend Shapes and animations for face tracking! VRC Quest & Fallback are supported too!
• (General) Added a Blend Shape to reduce the size of the talons (if large beans isn't your thing).
• (EZRecolor) Made some Amplify Shader Functions so that EZRecolor can be added to any custom Amplify Shader with ease.
• (Unity + CVR + VRC) Added a toggle to enable the nuzzles feature (On by default).

Changes

• (EZRecolor) Considerably optimized texture usage by channel packing each mask into combined textures, which either quadruples the amount of available editable colors or reduces VRAM usage!
• (Unity) Renamed the .unitypackage files with a number in front, representing the order of import.
• (Unity) Set the Anchor Override on every prefab's mesh to the Hips bone and the Collar one to its own Root Bone (this should fix any lighting issues, especially while using a protection system).
• (CVR) Upgraded required CCK version to 3.7 (should work on previous versions still, but that's the version I'll be working on from now on).
• (CVR) Tweaked the Advanced Settings of the plantigrade versions to be in line with the digitigrade versions.
• (Blender) Upgraded the Blender Project to Blender 4.0. Due to the way this new version changed it's mesh saving system, this new project version does NOT work with Blender 3.6 and older. You will unfortunately need to upgrade to the new version to continue editing your Mike'Vali. Sorry if this causes inconveniences.
• (Blender) Cleaned up the Data Blocks even further from unused data.
• (Blender) Changed the Time Uber Node's Time (Frames) node's value to #frame (removing the need for dedicated animation keyframes to simply increase the value by one per frame).

Bug Fixes

• (General) Fixed the low poly version's eyes clipping through each other at the armature level, in a way that cannot be noticed unless doing a close direct side by side comparison (also affects the high poly versions, but also not noticeable).
• (General) Flipped the eye bone 180 (when looking forward, all rotations should be 0 in Unity. But for some reason foward was 180, which interfered with animations and custom eye tracking setups).
• (General) Deleted an extra set of teeth negatively doubling the teeth geometry for nothing.
• (EZRecolor) Fixed up the Occlusion Map used on the Mike'Vali's EZRecolor textures to remove wing occlusion (causes visible clipping, not visible on non-EZRecolor version).
• (Unity) Adjusted muscle settings so that closed hands don't cause the claws to stab through them.
• (Unity) Fixed the eyebrows Angy animation where one of them would not fully lower (unnoticeable but cought while making the VRM) and a similar fix for a slightly closed eyelid blendshape on the Affraid animation.
• (VRC) Fixed the breathing animation not working (it flat out didn't exist in the FX layers before for some reason).
• (Blender) Fixed the corruption that broke any kind of Append operation from the source .blend file (in other words, it is finally possible to append the Mike'Vali from the original blend file to a separate Blender project, without resorting to the Exported FBXs and losing the rig!).
• (Blender) Fixed a Vertex Group name collision in the plantigrade version of tail 2 and tail 3. This error message was introduced in Blender 4.0, it does not appear with Blender 3.6 and older.
• (Texture Sources) Fixed the Teeth layer being named "Eyelashes" for some reason.

How to import this new update:

You'll need to reimport every required package into your project, being the Base Package first then the one for whichever platform you are working with. Plus, if you wish to use the baker, please also import the Baker Optimized EZRecolor masks. These are meant for baking and not uploading due to insane VRAM usage, but grants the best baking results. You can always go back to upload optimized textures if you wish using the other EZRecolor textures package, but I will always recommend baking instead (everyone's GPUs and Questies will thank you for that).

If you find a Bug, please come over to the Discord Community to report it and get assistance! It's a MASSIVE update, so I suspect some bugs might have slid into some unnoticed cracks.

I'll also include the ones from the previous two previous patches as these have not been reported in devlogs yet

Patch 1.0.2

• (General) Added a blend shape to reduce the size of the wings!
• (Unity) Nuzzles and Pats should not override the Closed Eyes toggle anymore.
• (Unity) Added in all animators animations to the blendshapes "No Muscles", "Smaller Shoulders", "No Teeth" and "Smaller Wings"!
• (CVR) Added paramters to control these new animations.
• (VRC) Added parameters and menus to control these new animations.

Patch 1.0.1b

• (VRC) Attempt to Fix Quest and Fallback version (AKA the low-res versions) having the eyes clip through each other when looking around (Unity VCC side fix for now, might or might not work FBX fix itself potentially in the future) (this was properly fixed in the 1.1.0 update)