Custom Cosmetic: Novabeast

Custom Full Body Cosmetic for any chest piece to play as Novabeast. Highly optimized to keep texture memory usage as low as possible while retaining as much quality as possible.

The Devs are investigating the morph target issue!

Following Update 40 i will focus on bringing the other planned models to Ark. Starting with the X-Doggo and Waggan.

Conditional Overlays

• The Novabeast visually becomes wet while standing in rain or while swimming and slowly dries when not.
• The Novabeast will visually get dirty and bloody. Scars and cuts appear and the goggles start to crack as health drops. Healing will mend the wounds but the cracks in your goggles will stay until you repair them by sleeping.

Lifelike Behaviors

• The Novabeast will visually show that its in pain and hurt. Ears droop down and the facial expressions change to show the player its condition without looking at the UI. (Unfunctional currently due to Devkit Cooker bug)
• The goggles will pull down while in a sandstorm or underwater to shield the eyes.
• The eyes move and jitter around randomly as eyes do to breathe some more life into this fluffy fellow.

Body Features

• The tail, ears, mane, fluff and body have physics, interacting with the environment, structures and objects around, colliding with them.
• Most of the Novabeasts are available in both a male and female version unless the specific author has chosen to gender lock them.
• All Novabeasts come with a first person view model that reflects the fur color and patterns of the third person model as well as the damage and wetness overlays.
• Most Novabeasts come with emissions, stripes or patterns that will glow in the dark similar to aberrant dinos.
• All Novabeast textures have been carefully optimized to keep the texture memory usage at a minimum. All Novabeasts together use less memory than just the male human model alone for one of its AO textures alone. Most textures also have been carefully modified to reduce their filesize to a minimum in order to keep the mod size as small as possible while offering as much quality and quantity as possible.

Variations

• There are many different Novabeasts available, they come in different colors, fur patterns and model features. Some have goggles, some don't. Some may have a collar, others don't.
• A few Novabeasts are also available as tribal outfit variant with a cool feather outfit.

Available Variations:

Outfits

Upcoming

Future Plans:

• Add coloring regions to allow recoloring
• Several versions for the different armors.

Known Issues:

• Morph Targets which are required to play facial animations currently do not work outside of the Devkit/Editor, the Developers are investigating the issue and it seems like its a Devkit/Cooker issue. As soon as this is fixed i will push an update to fix the facial expressions (and probably add more)

Version 41 & 42 (Applied for Whitelist)

• Changed Shinsei's right eye top half of the iris to be golden colored, as per request.
• Added Tribal version of Shinsei.
• Added Tribal version of Toxas.
• Changed Amethyst's Outfit to be topless.
• Changed wrong name -> Solstica to Solstice.
• Changed tribal outfit feathers default wetness to 0. Was 1.

Version 40

• Added Phantom Foxx's Novabeast.
• Added Raisie's Novabeast.
• Added zZSleepy's Dusk Novabeast.
• Added Wolfstrike's Nocturna Novabeast.
• Added Rylan's Novabeast.
• Fixed eye normals on Shinsei.
• Fixed pupils not glowing on Shinsei.
• Changed Shinsei's ear tips to fade to white.
• Allowed Novabeast to be skinned on Training Dummy Dermis's allowing the training dummy to be skinned (It's clipping though)

Version 39 (Officially supported)

• Renamed Dakota model to Nox.
• Added Paladin's Novabeast.
• Added Solstica Novabeast.
• Added Ginga Novabeast.
• Fixed Nox's eyes not moving.
• Removed Nox as public model as per request.
• Fixed blueprint error passing a bad object to the Blinking function.
• Optimized several more textures.

Version 38

• Packed and optimized base Metalness ,Specularity and Roughness into one texture.
• Optimized Purple and Cyan emissions, reduced them to greyscale and combined both models to use one texture.
• Fixed Tribal Sunday being wrongly named Tribal Dakota.
• Fixed Tribal Sunday and Erin using the wrong body physics.
• Packed and finetuned Regina's Metal, Specularity and Roughness textures into one.
• Packed Wolfstrike's Metal, Specularity and Roughness textures into one.
• Fixed a texture or two using the wrong texture group.
• Optimized several more textures by removing alpha channels and lowering them from 16bit to 8bit to save in disk space and in some cases VRAM.
• Modified several texture's compression format for better quality and/or lower VRAM usage.
• Removed several now unused textures.

Version 37

• Revamped Amethyst's textures for massively more detail.
• Added Cyan's revamped textures for massively more detail.
• Added Aaron's Novabeast.
• Optimized lots of textures down from 16bit to 8bit to save on disk space.
• Optimized a lot of textures by removing unnecessary alpha channels to save on disk space.
• Re-rendered icons for Amethyst (normal and tribal) and Cyan with new the textures.

Version 36

• Fixed Wolfstrike broken materials causing missing textures.

Version 35

• Fixed Novabeast fluff master shader having slightly different roughness and specularity than the rest of the body resulting in a slightly brighter than intentend fluff.
• Added Tribal Outfit variant of Amethyst.
• Added Tribal Outfit variant of Dakota.
• Added Toxas's alternative hair.
• Added Regina's Nova.
• Renamed all Novabeasts for a shorter proper name.
• Made Dakota and Sunday public Novas as per request.
• Updated Dakota and Sunday UI icon.

Version 34

• Manually downscaled all textures.
• Fixed some oversized 4K textures on Dakota.
• Fixed some oversized 4K textures on Wolfstrike.
• Fixed wrong texture pools being used for Wolfstrike's textures. (World -> Character)
• Internally organized folder structure more.
• Removed unnecessary extra textures.
• Added AO bakes to Wolfstrike's body textures.
• Added Fur normals to Cyan Novabeast.
• Fixed Cyan Novabeast using male normal for female and female for male.
• Added missing Cyan Novabeast emissive map so now Cyan actually glows cyan.
• Fixed Erin using wrong texture pools. (World -> Character)
• Fixed Erin having some wonky texture compression settings on the eye textures.
• Added Fur normals to Erin's Novabeast.
• Added Fur normals to Toxas's Novabeast.
• Fixed Wolfstrike's Novabeast using the wrong normal for the male version.

Version 33

• Added Novabeast fur normal to Purple Nova.
• Added Novabeast fur normal to Default Nova.
• Added Novabeast fur normal to Erin's Nova.
• Added AO to the Default Nova.
• Added AO to Erin's Nova.
• Added new Novabeast variant: Toxas.

Version 30/31/32

• Cleaned up the mod by removing all extra mesh copies and using the override material entries instead.
• Added simple random eye movement to female purple nova.
• Added bone scaling to tail, physics however do not scale and still bug around, no idea why they don't scale
• Added slight flowing water effect when wet.
• Added Wolfstrike's comissioned Novabeast as new selectable costume.
• Added Erin's comissioned Novabeast as new selectable costume.
• Added different icons for all Novabeasts.
• Lowered glaring reflectiveness of glasses a bit, less blinding now.
• Renamed unavailable cosmetics and clarified that these are private ones for people who opted to not share them.

Version 29

• Improved First Person weight painting of hands, less crunchy arms.
• Greatly cleaned up how custom material properties are applied (wetness, bloody)
• Created instances of all materials and upgraded the master materials to allow for easy texture swapping.
• Removed all instances of runtime normal generation and replaced them with hand made ones.
• Altered bloody overlay, much more blood and wounds, tweaked colors a bit.
• (Experimental) Enabled Virtual Texturing for most textures.
• (Experimental) Allowed mipmaps and streaming again for almost all textures (this previously caused the emissive map to blur randomly)
• Added alternative Novabeast that allows bone overrides. Trust me you will not like it but people asked for it.
• Added second Novabeast colored Cyan (aka the original Novabeast). Currently very basic, no AO bakes.
• Wetness and bloody textures are now applied in first person too.
• Tweaked fur darkening effect when wet slightly (darkens 1% more).
• Tweaked fur wet specularity (capped at 50%) to make it look less super reflective in indirect light.
• Lots of internal cleanup.

Version 28

• Fixed normal map that got deleted out on upload for some reason resulting in a material compilation failure causing "missing texture" glasses.

Version 27

• Wetness has been upgraded with generated normal maps this should give the effect some depth.
• Glasses now become wet too.
• Wetness now darkens the fur color to simulate .. well wet fur (obviously).
• Male version of the Novabeast has been added, currently if you are playing as male character you will get the male version instead. I might make this choosable later.
• Following a report from a user i refined the breast topology a bit and managed to smoothen the normals more, making it look less like nipples under very specific lighting conditions.

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It's main purpose was intended as a personal mod but with official permission it's now a public mod for use and might actually turn into something bigger with more features.

Here's the discord for my cosmetics (looks like more are to come), it is currently very basic though: https://discord.gg/RuEjm7crJP

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Credits:

Novabeast Avatar - Made by Kittomatic (Gumroad)

Permission to upload was acquired from Kittomatic. If you like the Novabeast you can get the original model (for VRChat) above.

Alternative Textures - Provided by Kittomatic, Wolfstrike, Erin, Toxas, Regina and Dakota respectively.

Fluffy Texture Overlay - Made by Wolffie on the Novabeast Discord.

Feathery Tribal Outfit - Made by Dakota's Studios.1. -