Naturalis framerate testing: Part 2 (Patreon)

Continuing from https://www.patreon.com/posts/naturalis-105368543

I've now tested the advanced soft physics features as well. Local distortion physics, depth physics and spread physics (all of which continuously adjust soft physics parameters) will absolutely choke my Ryzen 3700X in the two person test scenario with all soft physics on and cycle forces running.

There's some small optimizations I could do, but the issue is almost entirely in the physics engine.

I'm going to assume that many people are running these features enabled without being aware of how much it adds to the CPU main thread load. It's my fault that I haven't made that clearer, especially in the plugin UI (there should be a warning). It'd probably make sense to remove the user preferences option to set these on by default.

If you have Local Distortion Physics, Depth Physics or Spread Physics enabled and are seeing low framerates during animation, try disabling those features and make sure they are disabled by default in Naturalis User Preferences (v1.4-alpha4 and earlier) and in your default presets.

Mesh pressure is much less of an issue, but it's still more an issue than I expected and thought based on some earlier testing I had done. It's almost comparable to the fps hit from adjusting morphs continuously. Currently the user preference option so have it on by default is enabled when the user preferences are initialized (when the plugin is added for the first time in a VAM installation). From a performance standpoint it'd be better if the option was disabled. The impact of mesh pressure on visual quality is relatively small, e.g. morphs are much more important.

I think the role of g-force morphing actually slightly overlaps with that of local distortion physics. Both are ways to make the skin jiggle and behave more "dynamically" - perhaps local distortion physics could be labeled a legacy feature.

I'm planning to make other parts of the plugin toggleable as well - it should be possible to turn off morphing entirely, or turn off dynamic adjustments to joint physics, etc. Some of those could be useful in general for improving performance, others more for troubleshooting issues.

-everlaster