Vastly improved skinning (Patreon)

Ever since the first build of Yiffalicious, there has been a very tough-to-solve problem present. In the chest/belly area, artifacts can arise due to the complex nature of the skinning. This problem has been brought up several times in the forum and other places.

Basically, in order for a belly to be dynamic, vertices have to be "bound" to a belly bone. But this also means that these vertices are less affected by the spine, and in turn cause artifacts [for some poses].

Here are some examples of the artifacts:

https://gyazo.com/614d0977fa53f73f9f733823ed80a9e9

https://gyazo.com/52321f7197b32e8cb336a10363ef5f15

It's a complex problem, because there's no way to get the belly to be dynamic [using existing techniques & tools], and at the same time avoid these artifacts.

This has been very frustrating for us, not only in terms of the inadequate result, but also during authoring, since continuously having to balance great deformation vs having a dynamic belly is really tough and time-consuming.

The last couple of days, we have investigated this issue quite thoroughly, and managed to come up with a new technique that vastly improves the look of the deformation. It allows us to have the best of both worlds - dynamic vertices with great deformation.

Here's a video showing our new technique:

https://gfycat.com/DevotedTerribleEider

This solution is entirely accelerated by the GPU, and thus has virtually no performance cost whatsoever. Furthermore, it makes the authoring process so much easier and less time consuming.

We will migrate to this new technique for flat chested characters as well (cat breasts).