The Plan

First of all, I want to thank you all for the amazing reception to the 2027 trailer! If you haven't seen it, you can view the high quality version embedded right here on this article, or see the more compressed version on Twitter:
https://x.com/holden_mcclure/status/2110853606283018349

As an NSFW flagged account, my Twitter has significantly reduced engagement, which means that the only means this content is displayed to other people are people who are already following me, or people following someone else who retweet my post. That's not to say I'm lamenting the circumstances, only to say that that's impressive engagement for something that effectively cannot go truly viral!

I knew it would blow your minds! In spite of that, one question crops up from time to time. Why 2027? It feels so far away, and it doesn't even specify a date other than next year? Could testing possibly take that long? Why the long wait? I hope to clarify that question in this post.

That trailer largely served as a tech demo for Gravure Studio 2027. I'm proud of all the work I've done up until now, and I'm so excited for all the new features and technology coming to Gravure Studio, but there's always been one significant criticism of our project: it lacks a compelling structure.

While Gravure Studio's features are available in the actual core fighting game, the bulk of the work has gone into the "Private Paradise" movies. With a large variety of scenes, poses, costumes and what have you, it's been a great place for taking photos and even making videos for our more motivated users, but a somewhat cynical interpretation of Gravure Studio would be that it's glorified asset tour, with little in the way of interactivity. An involving structure is what makes Venus Vacation our dominant peer, and although I'm not personally a fan of it's systems or implementation, I fundamentally understand that core difference is what draws people towards Venus Vacation and away from Gravure Studio.

That is what I'm aiming to change with the 2027 update. I however must be clear on a few things before I begin to outline the structure of this project:

• This is not a suggestion box. I have a very clear idea of what I want to accomplish, and only the scope that I can practically realize with the tools at my disposal are in question. Feel free to make requests and suggestions, but understand they will more than likely be ignored.

• Money now makes a difference. Up until this point, your donations were a token of gratitude for my work, and that is still the case today. I should be clear that if this patreon's monthly donations were to suddenly, for whatever circumstances, immediately become 0 dollars, I would still work on this project, because I love what I do. However, because of the avenues that've been opened up to me, having more money will make a significant difference in the scale and efficiency of what I can do. Industry grade software licenses, motion capture equipment, and of course usage tokens all cost money, money that I do not have in excess. I'm not going to panhandle, and I'm not going paywall any actual content for the mod under any foreseeable circumstances, but I want you to keep in mind that the more expensive the motion capture equipment in particular, the better quality and more efficiently I can create whole cloth motions, and that is extremely important for me in this next update.

• This is my project, let me be absolutely clear. It is not a consumer product for sale. If you choose to donate, it should be because you like and support what I'm doing. If donating made me answerable to the frequent DM requests I get on a regular basis I would likely kill myself. That's not to say that you can't or shouldn't make them, but understand that they're not a contract, and if that's your expectation then you should put your wallet back in your pocket. This mod has and continues to require DOA5 and a somewhat expensive DLC, and I should hope that transactional requirement will endear me enough to Koei Tecmo to allow me to keep working and distributing this labor of love.

• The introduction of the structure I'm planning on does not mark the end of Gravure Studio's existing functionality. Similar contemporaries like Honey Select and Koikatsu always have an audience, and I hope you could glean from the trailer that there will be even broader customization available to you in Gravure Studio.

• The developer updates I provide will be sparse. Production is moving at a very rapid pace. I've worked on this mod for over 10 years now, but the excitement of all the technological breakthroughs have put me in a frenzy of labor in the past few months. I do little else other than sleep and work on this project. Making something ready to be shipped in increments not only takes a surprisingly long period of time, but it also makes a fully realized project less exciting.

• It may be painful to watch that trailer, see how much is already done and have to wait all that time to experience it, but it will be all the more satisfying to play it when it's finally out, and with such a long track record I think you can trust me when I say that I won't allow the scope of the project to grow to large and give up, however that's precisely why I must also be careful about show off. I do not want to disappoint you, so you'll just have to trust that what I'm working on will shock and amaze you.

• I was hesitant to even release the trailer I showed you already because I wanted the final product to be a huge surprise, but I felt that I must demonstrate that big things are happening, but that trailer does not fully capture the breadth and scale of what I'm working on, and I can share little else without spoiling the fun or at worst, potentially show something that doesn't make the final cut.

This has been an incredibly exciting time for me. For long time fans, this is likely a lot to take in, but there will be a stretch of time where you're just going to have to trust me. I surprised you once and I will surprise you again.

I don't want to share too much, but I can safely talk about the technical plumbing that's already been completed so far.

The Plumbing

Let's talk about all the new tech I've been working on for the past several months. The trailer does not even begin to describe all the nitty gritty details of what's been done on this front, and I'll try to be at least a bit more exhaustive here.

BEFORE WE BEGIN, it's important to remember that this is all in-dev. Much work lies ahead of me and the project is improving rapidly. With that out of the way...

Take a look at this picture. We see a few things here. The prototype Camera UI, the costume layering system, the detail/alternate texture for Ayane's Bikini, etc..

The costume layering system is somewhat unique in that I've developed a rather novel Z depth ranking. I remembered a system similar to this from another video game called "Mordhau". Essentially, you can set the render order to draw in front of another mesh even if it's technically behind it. Ayane is actually wearing two sets of panties in this image, and even though they're old costumes I never modeled with the intention of having one sit on top of the other, you can layer them however you choose by setting the "rank". I also have her wearing a jacket from another costume on leveraging the same system, and of course her Bikini is green because we can now swap textures in the game's actual PP UI and in real time with the overlay.

I'd like you to pay attention to the green bounding box around Ayane. That's identifes the focus point, and also helps us understand what type of shot we're taking. The frame starts above her head and stops at her thighs, this is generally referred to as a "Cowboy Shot".

As we zoom in, we get a type of shot basically every person on earth is familiar with, a "close up". The bounding box changes accordingly. Having the game intelligently understand your shot composition, with the framing serving as just one example, it will not only serve as a fun little guide for players to better learn about photography, and teach you how to take good photos, but it will also serve as the plumbing for our photoshoots in our campaign. You will be rewarded for taking good images, but again, I do not wish to spoil too much about that, so we'll move onto another part of our technical plumbing.

Please click on this image to view the video clip

Unfortunately Patreon articles only support one video embed per post, so simply click the above image to view the clip.

The scene you're looking at is Pose 125, which is an existing animation/pose card from publically available versions of Gravure Studio, but with an array of new procedural tech. For demonstrative purposes, I mapped a hotkey to snap the strings on her bikini top. We can however set which parts of the bikini snap to our own test, in the case of this bikini her neck tie, the front string that joins the bra cups, or the back can snap, or all three (in this clip it's all three).

Once her top comes loose (you can map this to a hotkey for fun), her bra immediately deforms into cloth physics, and is momentarily propelled through the bra tension coming loose. A shapekey transform shifts her breasts from the indented model to the "nude" model. A slight impulse is applied to her breasts to similarly simulate that tension release. A procedural animation offset is applied to her current pose to simulate the moment of shock when she realizes her bra has come loose (a slight jolt in her posture and a moment of shock in her face). Her hands race to cover her breasts by dynamically pathing around her body with math, and settling her palms over her nipples with IK math.

Then, our soft body simulation kicks in. First is the micro dent. These are the subtle grooves in the flesh that form around the fingertips, and similarly bulge the surrounding flesh in it's immediately vicinity. The Macro dent deforms the overall shape of the breast, pancaking the natural teardrop droop of large breasts into an oval against her ribcage, and finally the standard vanilla collision system moves the breasts vertex weights against the colliders, but unlike in vanilla DOA5, we actually have colliders for each individual finger joint that articulate with the animation.

Her body settles into a more hunched position, her expression hardens depending on how we set it, for Ayane it seems appropriate that she have an expression of embarassment and hatred, and her face gradually reddens and flushes over time. The embarassment system is present even without clothing related mishaps, should we focus too greedily on her breasts, crotch or butt (presuming of course she can see where we're looking), but naturally the embarassment maximum is much higher when they're bare.

None of the systems I described are something that I baked into this pre-existing pose. This is done procedurally with math on an existing pose. All of these settings can be customized in ini configurations, down to granular details like breast softness for dent, cloth tension (how hard the bra swings away when the snaps come loose), reaction time (how quickly the character notices and covers herself), and so on and so forth. I doubt most users would want to fiddle with this themselves, but this system being procedural makes the system dynamic and more game like as opposed to feeling like a static cutscene.

Perhaps more importantly, it serves as technological plumbing for our Gravure Shoots. We talked about shot framing, variety, composition and what have you, and how you are trained and rewarded for understanding these concepts. Should you decide that you are a somewhat devious and immoral photographer, you can snap photographs that fetch a much steeper price.

For demonstrative purposes, the previous clip simply snapped the bra string with a push of a button, but our dynamic malfunction system enables these types of interactions to occur organically, which you saw a very brief demonstration of in the trailer, where I used a debugging menu to drag Sayuri below the pool, and the surface tension of the water dislodged her bikini top. This system measure the characters velocity when her chest or pelvis meet the water line, and decide whether that article of clothing should come loose should it meet the set threshold. This system is also leveraged for certain actions where breast velocity battles against the string tension, and depending on how it's configured, the top may lose.

As we develop a greater rapport with our models, her overall demeaner and willingness changes. We can have a photoshoot in a more intimate location like the bathroom, below a running showerhead, and perhaps more embarassing clothing like underwear. Her disposition affects how she responds to certain requests like "strike a cool pose!", and her posture might relax and become less guarded... a perfect time for mischief. Let's try and see how the systems we explained have a gameplay application.

We bought a burst shot upgrade for our camera, allowing us to take a flurry of photographs in a short period. Very crucial for trying to capture momements like these, but alas, we're foiled nonetheless. With her arms behind her back, she's less likely to cover herself in time, but even with the neck and backstraps failing on her bra, it holds fast just long enough for her hands to arrive to the rescue. This outcome wasn't inevitable however, because there's enough programmed variance in her reaction that even with conditions mostly the same, you might get lucky.

This bandaeu bikini top however offers no top straps. With no cloth or strings to hang onto the shoulder or collarbone she was doomed the moment the backstrap failed. She was fast enough that her left hand snagged the strings as she brought her arm forward, but we got a couple good moneyshots. No respectable magazine would buy shots like these, so submitting them for the gravure shoot would be pointless, but certain private buyers are very interested. However, if you're only a slightly bad person, you can just keep these for your personal collection.

What I'm saying is not simply theorizing a system, the technological plumbing is there. Let's zoom in on this camera UI element.

This graph is a helpful guide for overall color composition of the shot. While there are some juts and spikes, the overall shape is a pleasant mound. Nothing too hard or contrasty on the eyes. Insofar as there are juts and spikes, it's Ayane, but that's largely a good thing because she's the focus of the shot and the reason we're here. These types of things are factored into our intelligent scoring system, and naturally it also takes into account less technical considerations like whether or not her private parts are showing.

Ever since DOAX3, some mischief and deviancy is par for the course. With poking, peeping and wardrobe malfunctions part of the official canon, I don't feel I'm wading too far outside the overall cute, sexy but a bit naughty tone of the spinoff franchise, but I'm still measuring just how mischievous I wish to go. Something like tampering with swimsuits to invite accidents, setting up pinhole cameras, insofar as this type of deviant, downright evil behavior makes the final cut, I want to make sure it's not something a player who wants a more cute and wholesome experience won't accidentally stumble into. That's part of why I don't want to make promises, beyond what's simply already engineered. I'm still working out the shape and scope of the campaign in my mind. More than anything I don't wish to forcefully subject prospective users to authors barely disguised fetish.

While the details are still being worked out, the broad strokes of what I hope to achieve are pretty clear and unlikely to change based on flights of fancy. The core system will revolve around photography, you will learn real photography lessons from playing the game, you will be rewarded for employing those skills with an intelligent system, you will select a "venus" who will go on a "vacation" with you on Zack Island to release a gravure shoot to promote the DOATEC tournament, concepts and systems from PRISM, VV and X3 will be employed in a more coherant and rewarding manner, and as you can already see based on what I've shown you so far, the technology backing it will be far more advanced.

Let's take a step back from the scope of the campaign and revisit all the cool new tech that's already been implemented, rather than the shape of what's to come.

Tech

Click the image to view the video

While the trailer showed water water simulation with splashes, ripples, better simulation of bodies of water like ocean waves and whatnot, since that trailer I've added more sophisticated water simulation on the body. The body only gets wet WHERE the water touched the character, simulated water droplets trail down the skin leaving shimmering trails and drip off the steep areas like the breasts, chin, hair. Wetness PBR materials create a finely patterned drip sheen on the skin, and just for fun we made the fabric for Meg's bra become translucent with wetness to better demonstrate the effect. The turning pose demonstrates the locational wetness quite well as each individual breast rests beneath the shower stream one at a time.

Click the image to view the video.

Real IK's, planar reflections, and dynamic pooling puddles and mist. I've written walls of text already so you can just google it if you don't know what some of these terms mean.

Sand simulation. Leaves footprints in the ground. PCF soft shadows (simulates actual shadows getting softer the farther they are from the casting object.

I may update this article later and spend more time providing A/B comparisons of all the new features and what have you, or write a new one, but this one has gone on for quite a while at this point, and time is money. I'll try and rapid bullet point the rest that isn't immediately apparent from the trailer

• Support for PBR materials such as roughness maps, texel based detail textures, etc.

• Dynamic lighting for stage materials and overhauled stage graphics in general, not worth going over every gritty detail here.

• Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion (GTAO)

• No Reshade post processing, all done in engine

• Overhauled lighting, skin shaders, materials, textures, etc.

• Real cloth physics simulation engine and not just the jiggle bone mapping from vanilla

• Real time IK editing for pose customization such as mapping hands to breasts, etc..

• Real time edit bone rotations, articulate fingers and face bones, save offsets and configurations

• "Capture" expressions or poses for certain bones to readily and easily be applied to other scenes, and augment with procedural animation systems for blinking etc. rather than having to rely on baked animations

• Bed comforter deforms and sinks in like a real bed would when characters lay in them

• Camcorder, Studio Camera and Stage projector can be set to display independant view rather than just mirroring what's on your screen

• Real mirrors and mirror props that cast real reflections, like hand mirrors, standing mirrors or the mirrors in the bathroom

• Fixes for obnoxious issues with the vanilla game like the private paradise icons disappearing as you scroll, transparent meshes unrendering behind other transparent meshes, or effects being missing behind transparent objects

• No more bald shadows or blocky shadows because of lack of transparency shadow casting and stenciling

• Higher caps for meshes, textures, stages and whatnot (but not too high so its not too wasteful of the address space/RAM)

• Lots of new hair and approximated TressFX hair strand simulation (not fully implemented for all hairs but successfully prototyped on Meg's bobcut)

• Vastly improved breast physics and easily ingame overlay customization for the idiots who think they know how breasts work better than I do

• Real time body proportion editing, I'll probably make some presets that clone the original proportions better since this is a really common complaint despite how often I try and explain myself, but I might end up hiding this feature because giving you guys this power is usually a mistake

• Anticlipping technology that dramatically reduces skin poking through clothing (ranking Z depth to prioritize ordering of certain meshes)

• True infinite looping scenes and poses and procedural animation blending

• Vastly improved stability.

• Customizable scenes with up to 4 girls. You can set different animations for each girl, set different offsets so they play asynchronously, move and manipulate them all individually, and of course save presets, and share them with other people or download other ones.

• Canned animation "clips" that you can save or just use a stock set of like pointing, shaking can, shaking leg, you can just set it so that it applies to another animation for broad customization. Set the intensity of the animation and speed, or the offset. I UNDERSTAND MANY OF THESE OPTIONS ARE CONVOLUTED AND UNWIELDY FOR A BEGINNER BUT THEY ARE THERE IF YOU WANT TO FIDDLE WITH THEM! The broader customization won't be something we use in the campaign regardless.

• CPU multithreading (purely for our additions, which is fine because they're the heaviest. Multithreading the entire game would be a monumental effort with little payoff considering the vanilla game is lightweight enough to run well on a single thread)

• FSR3 upscaling (effect only or full screenspace)

• Contact "squish" which is notably different from the aforementioned Denting (breasts squeezing against glass effect)

• Thigh, arm and butt jiggle (aside from the standard breast). Denting threshold varies based upon tissue softness (breasts dent most, clavicle and such dent least)

• Subsurface scattering for skin (look it up)

• Map hotkeys for lots of stuff like making the breasts jiggle, you can set a jiggle direction and customize the intensity and whatnot. Create gusts of wind for upskirts, configure the direction and intensity. You get the idea.

• Shapekey support. We went over this before and how it's used but it bears repeating that this doesn't exist in the vanilla game. Hell most of this shit isn't in DOA6 or VV either.

• Lots of scene customization like fog, mist, actual real directional stage lighting and sun shadows for the environment, realistic handheld camera shake, customizable camera autofocus, clamp camera to certain parts of the body and set offsets, smoothing, delays etc.

Honestly, there's just too much I've done to even be able to remember it all and write it down. It would probably take me a week just to remember it all, give a bunch of comparison images and what have you. That'll come later. I'm just so excited to work that even spending time making videos and recapping all this for you feels like precious time that could be spent working. I'll end this by saying you should REALLY consider giving me money so I can buy a really good motion capture setup! At home motion capture varies wildly in price and the more money I have, the better cleaner results I can get! Handmade high quality realistic animations are absolutely a thing and have been for a long time, but making them is incredibly time consuming and I have enough work as it is! A lower quality setup can be worked with but the overall quality ends up being lower because it has to be artificially smoothed for jitter, and it takes more time to add those details back in and correct issues like foot skating or lets crossing and stuff.