I mentioned before that DDLullu was working on an updated MDL Formatter for VTMB that can port facial animations. I spent most of March testing that. Was working with one of my custom Malk models, and then ported Alyx Vance to VTMB. That was quite a bit of work. Despite being from around the same time and on a version of the same engine, Alyx does not fit on any skeleton from VTMB. Had to adjust her model and redo some of her weight painting to make her work.

Short version - there are still issues with porting facial animation. Long version - While the model and their flex controllers are porting to VTMB, the engine is not using the flex controllers correctly. How the Source engine works is like this - the model has vertex animations, that Source calls Flexes. There are then Flex Controllers, sliders that you use to trigger the Flexes. You use a program called Faceposer to make presets for facial expressions, and phonemes (the shapes your mouth makes to make sounds). It looks like this:

This is Alyx with VV's presets. (Were fortunate that .txt versions of all the presets shipped with VTMB. They're in the 'Expressions' folder, inside pak007.vpk. Also, Troika's descriptions for the facial expressions are hilarious). These presets are saved in files with the extension .vfe. It's just a list that tells the engine "for this preset, set these sliders to these values". The problem is that VTMB's .vfe files don't work with a custom model. I'm not sure if they're using the wrong value, applying the value to the wrong controller, or both, but the character's face is distorting. .vfe files made with later versions of Faceposer don't work in VTMB. They crash the game in fact.

I passed along everything I learned to DDLullu. He knows how to edit a custom .vfe file to get it working in VTMB. I hope he can either teach others how to do it, or make a converter to automate the process. I'm… waiting for him to post to the forums again. I'm told he's always worked like this. Doesn't respond to DM's or pings. The only thing you can do is make a public forum post and hope he responds to it. Saying I passed things along is actually wrong. I posted everything to the forum in reply to DDLUllu's previous posts, and all I can do is keep waiting.

I spent most of April putting together this gallery of Beta screenshots from VTMB. There's nothing earth-shattering in there, but there are quite a few things that were changed or removed since Troika took the screenshot. Fascinating, if you like seeing how a project changed over time.

Other than that, I've been struggling with work in Blender. Also lost over a week last month to a bad cold that left me too fatigued to work. I keep getting stumped on how to build the geometry for this base body for a Fledgling that I've been working on forever. It just doesn't want to click, no matter how much I look at anatomy references. It's like… have you ever watched a movie or show with the sound off? You can see what people are doing, but you don't know why. You can guess what's going on, but you're going to miss things, and you're going to get things wrong. That's the best comparison I can think of.

Another problem I keep hitting is the level of detail. Keeps happening that for a line or a loop, it looks like there are not enough vertices. But if I add even one more vertex, now there are too many. It makes we want to scream. Feel like I should be working in Quality Assurance, not Development. It's easier (and thus I'm better at it) to edit something than to make it from scratch. But I work too slowly to be reliable. I'll never work in the pro industry. Ah well.

Been chipping away at the palm of her hand. Some days I feel like I'm getting things figured out. Some days I keep hitting a wall. Some days I lock up and don't even open Blender at all. I'll make a proper post about how I've changed my approach (again) and my progress once I have a bigger chunk of her model done.