Despite not being anywhere near an immediate goal, and despite my expectations of it taking weeks, if not months, VIRTUAnimator can now export your scene as a COLLADA DAE format file!
This means you can quickly and easily pose your characters, create the keyframes, then export it for fine-tuning in another application like 3DS Max.
There are some limitations, which I'll talk about right now:
No mesh or texture data is exported. Only transform data is exported. For a character model, this means only it's hierarchy is exported (though complete and intact); for a prop, it's position/rotation is exported.
The main reason for this is because I don't want to put myself in legal trouble if, say, someone puts their content on the Workshop, only to have someone else download it, export it, and use it in a way they didn't allow.
The second reason is that it would take a LONG time to do (I had to write a custom exporter, which I've never done before, for a format I've never used before, using concepts I've never heard of before). If I can figure out a way around the legally-messy stuff, I'll look at extending the exporter to include more stuff.
For the mean time, though, this makes it real easy for someone to bring in a model, pose it, export it, then add the animation to the source model via retargetting (I don't know 3D software, so I don't know the workflow for that). If retargetting in something like 3DS Max or Blender is similar to that in Unity with Mecanim, then it should work nicely. As with the app, this exporter is also in the early phases, so things might not work perfectly.
Moving on to the next feature (though much smaller), screenshots taken with the new Screenshot Tool will now also be saved as a Steam Screenshot, so you can share images of your creations easily with others.
Finally, there have been a few bug fixes to hopefully make things more stable/efficient. The viewfinder should also now work properly, though because I never had the non-render issue, I couldn't exactly track it down. If it still happens, let me know, and I'll look into it some more.
And that about covers it for this update!
Until next time.
