Happy Holidays! Latest Update and Plans for 2021

The year is coming to an end, and we have several updates to share, both inside outside the app. The latest version of Mannequin (0.3.11) brought so many new things to the table, and there are also several developments from the planning/management side. Let us delve into more details!

Eye Template Updates

The latest change in the eye template structure means some new features, such as customizable iris style and gaze direction. Look for these extra options in the 'Eye' section of the 'Face' sidebar. We also added several new comedic eye templates for those cute lighthearted events in your game.

Mouth Template Updates

Changes to the mouth template structure now enables customizable lip and teeth styles. We have also added a lot of new expressions into the library! You might notice that a lot of these new mouth expressions is labeled ‘Lipsync’. What are these for, I wonder?

Other Template Updates

Other than eye and mouth which has seen the most significant changes, there are also several small updates for other parts. Nose templates has been redrawn, ‘Masculine’ brow templates have their default height adjusted.

Adobe Character Animator PSD Export

All those new ‘Lipsync’ mouth templates? It is for this new feature! Importing optimized PSD files from Mannequin to Adobe Character Animator now becomes even more easier with proper layer naming and structure. This means that some behaviors such as eye gaze and lipsync will be applied automatically. See more on how to utilize this feature at its most by reading this section on our online documentation.

Performance Improvements

We have talked about improving the rendering speed before, and today is the first step of realizing that. Various optimizations have been done to make rendering speed up to 25% faster! Of course, optimizations are something that must be done continuously, and we are striving for even more performance in the next update.

Bugfixes

Some bugfixes that are implemented in this update:

• Face masks template now will not be clipped by eye parts.
• Some comedic eye styles which require ‘Eye Gloss / Shine’ to be activated for it to display properly will now automatically activate this switch.
• ‘Head scale is invalid’ error message which is shown when opening a file even though the head scale value is valid is now fixed.
• Mouth innards now will not change color together with skin (prevents darker-skinned characters from having black mouth innards).
• Fixed missing front hair parts under several circumstances.
• A workaround for stuck PNG and PSD exports has been implemented. If you're experiencing stuck PNG/PSD exports at 0%, you can try to enable 'Use Custom Temp Folder Location' in the Preferences menu. Additionally, you can change this custom location to another location in your computer.

Updated Plans for 2021

Initially, we have planned for this project to be fully released (1.0) just before the end of 2020. Various things have happened since then and there is quite a lot of planned features that are still in progress, such as:

• Proper macOS builds (with notarization and possibly Apple M1 support).
• Steamworks support.
• Additional pose angles and body types.
• Restructured hairstyle templates to allow separate bangs and side hair selection.

Therefore, we have decided to put 1.0 release target to Q3 of 2021.

Short-term Plans: What is in The Works for Next Version?

For the immediate next version, what we are planning are:

• Restructured hairstyle templates, redrawing them if necessary, plus adding several user-requested hairstyles that has been noted.
• More performance improvements (we have identified more points that can be improved but have not been able to put it in today’s update due to time constraints).
• XS and XL chest templates for the default female template.

That is all for now. As usual, expect some of these things to be available as soon as mid-January in the nightly builds if you like to test on the bleeding edge. Happy holidays, happy new year, and hopefully we will have a better year in 2021!