Lemma Soft Forums

Our game needs Live2d to look and feel the way we want. We're willing to hire contract work for someone capable of building a Live2d integration library (OpenGL and DirectX minimum) for RenPy. Tom has talked about animation library (Live2d and/or Spine) for well over a couple of years, but it never makes it to the top of his 'to do' list, so we're now willing to pay for this work.

Please contact me (dark.victory.email@gmail.com) if you're qualified and interested.

Does the license agreement for Live2D allow such integration?

You know, you can easily workaround your limitation by exporting spritesheets and using Ren'Py to preload and frame-crop the spritesheets.

The most time consuming aspect of this method would be determined by how easy it is to export a spritesheet with Live2D.
If exporting frame-by-frame spritesheets is difficult, then I would consider contacting the creators of Live2D to request that feature.

It's probably a lot easier than trying to get Python to perform large amounts of image manipulation in a real-time capacity.

For an example of spritesheet exporting, see the A.I. animator I created for GIMP:
https://twitter.com/SypherZent/status/1 ... 9097407489

Live2D needs the capacity to export a predetermined animation as a set of frames.

I hope the information helps. It is free. ^^

The problem with fully getting Live2d working inside Ren'Py mostly centres around the use of meshes for display.

Live2d uses them whether the user actually utilizes their advanced features or not. If you created a face with five different lip shapes (rather than one mouth and using vertex control to morph it into different shapes) it would still render each as a mesh during animation.

Ren'Py *currently* renders just flat rectangular images (with or without transparency, grouped, zoomed, rotated, whatever) which in most cases is perfectly fine for VNs.

As you noted, Tom has been considering moving Ren'Py to (or toward) a mesh based system though I doubt that will be any time soon.

Though you could write a bespoke interpreter for the Live2d output files (I actually considered doing it for Dragonbones some while back) and composite an animation using the features Ren'Py already has, it would be a good amount of work and would not be able to support all the features of the animation suite (due to not using meshes). A more logical approach is to somehow get hold of the original interpreter and render code and shoehorn that into Ren'Py... not an easy task methinks.