v1.1.0 Released! Now with Rigging
Merper VR News — February 28, 2018
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hello Everyone,
This update has enough in to be considered the first minor version increase.
Here's what's new:
Selection Improvements:
- fixed an issue that made manipulation with Oculus hard
- laser pointer now indicates the position of manipulation
- you can now select between multiple bones that start from the same position
- bone targetting is more precise
- when the model is in see-through mode, the bone that would be actuated is now highlited
- when manipulating a bone there will be a proportionally sized axis at the center of rotation
- Support for multiple hierarchy roots: e.g. a character that has accesories like weapons like this one
(new bone highlight and controller selection)
File Loading Improvements:
- improved support for FBX models with multiple parts - e.g. this
- improved support for binding pose
- improved material transparency
- improved loading of HDR files with very high range
New Major Feature: Rigging
Models without skeletons will now load into the new rigging mode. I've added new sample model to illustrate rigging: rigging_hero_female.obj which comes from here.
The new rigging menus look like this:
To begin rigging, look for the hierarchy root, the white ball at about the center of the model with additional extra smaller balls around it. 
The green ball at the top will produce a single new node that is locked to the major axis, intenteded to create the spine. The two blue balls to the sides will create two new nodes that have central symetry, intended for limbs - the mirrored node is created and updated automatically.
(dragging the green ball to create a spine node)
(releasing to show the new spine node)
You can select and move any node to update its position. Any node that begins life on the central axis will stay locked to that axis. Any child node of a mirror link will produce a child of the correct mirror node (i.e. left elbow will produce a right elbow as a child of the right shoudler).
You can delete nodes by selecting the red ball below the node. The red ball will only appear at the end of the chain, and you can't delete the root.
Because of the symetry controls, rigging assumes that the model is symetrical on the X axis, that is the YZ plane is the mirror. In order to support models that may be aligned differently there are new mesh controls that will help you orient your model's meshes to this configuration while rigging. These transforms will only last while doing the rigging process so as to keep the model's original frame of reference.
Once your new skeleton is aligned with your mesh, hit the apply to mesh button :
... the model will now turn solid and will be ready to animate.
There's also a Load and Save buttons on the Rig Control menu - these will save the state of your rig to a file that matches your model's file name (model.fbx will generate model.merprig).
For the time being, there's only one per file and you don't get any warnings around it. The new sample model comes with a pre-made rig that you can load using this button.
Finally, the rigging method is doing a simple nearest vertext to bone search, using a single bone per vertex. This is far from state of the art but it is simple and easy to understand. I wanted to focus on releasing the user interface and workflow to the community first and wait for feedback on the feature before diving deeper into refining that.
And with everything here, you can of course save back your model and use it wherever you want (minor note on that: the .obj file provided will be saved as .fbx)
Please keep commenting on the forums and let me know what your expericences are with the new features. I hope you like them.
Cheers,
F