Naturalis v1.4-alpha8 (83.var) (Patreon)

Hi! Back after a summer break of sorts. Didn't really plan it, it just kind of happened due to various circumstances. Anyway, all good, things are now progressing. Let's get to the content of this release - a quick summary:

• g-force morphs for the overall chest area

• added more morphs for the back

• various important fixes

Chest g-force morphs

As shown in the video, the chest morphs affect the broader chest area rather than just the breasts. Due to how TittyMagic's morphing works, its morphs get exaggerated when the base layer morphs in Shapeshift are applied, resulting in a bit more extreme shapes than before. This is not the intended final look, but it's decent enough for an alpha. If you want to reduce the effect, you can do so with the chest region g-force morph multiplier in Shapeshift, or perhaps reduce the base morph multiplier a bit in TittyMagic itself.

The chest g-force morphs are anchored to the chest joint and cover both sides of the chest (not independent per breast).

Back g-force morphs

Previously there were just morphs for the up and down directions. Those morphs are redone, and morphs are also added for the in/out and side to side directions. While the back doesn't immediately sound like an area that would need dynamic morphing, it's good for balance so that gravity acting in a given direction won't just morph the front of the body while the back would be entirely static. However the morphs are pretty subtle (as they should for a non soft region).

Fixed armpit area collision issue

In some poses, the shoulder collider could hit the breast soft physics colliders. Now, that collider is ignored by the soft physics and the weird dent is gone! (Technically this was an issue in how the soft physics is set up in VAM itself rather than a bug in Naturalis, but it wouldn't really come up without breasts being morphed upwards like that.)

Fixed morph jerk/hiccup occurring every 10 minutes 😲

This was a long-standing issue and a pet peeve of many an animation creator and mocapper. I had almost lost hope of ever fixing it. In the end, it only took one critical insight into how stuff works in VAM, and one line of code... !

For those who don't know the problem was this: VAM reapplies all morphs from scratch every 10 minutes to prevent the morphs from distorting due to floating point rounding errors (a performance tradeoff in VAM's skinning system). Normally, this doesn't cause any noticeable issue on the user end, but when using Naturalis, it would cause a hiccup where morphs would get applied at an extreme value for 1 frame every 10 minutes.

Changes to how g-force morphing spring/damper work

The jiggle should look a bit better now. Previously the actual spring value would depend on the amount of g-force, now it is constant. Sometimes less is more...

In addition, the "smooth frames" implementation that I've talked about before and that used to be adjustable before the g-force spring/damper were implemented - that is now removed entirely. It used to spread the acceleration that the drives morph values over multiple frames, but I came to the conclusion that it was interfering with the spring/damper setup which also is an over-time effect. It would kind of result in unpredictable peaks and valleys in the morph values, rather than a smooth oscillation.

Other

• changing physics rate no longer requires calibration, the plugin now adapts immediately

• simulating gravity now works properly on breasts even if TittyMagic is disabled, and on glutes even if BootyMagic is disabled

• fixed Shapeshift morph debug window not showing the visualization lines on the person atom

• during calibration when gravity is being simulated for different directions, gforce morphs are also applied to ensure calibration result is accurate and doesn't mess up things for the advanced soft physics features in TittyMagic and BootyMagic (which require soft physics joints to be calibrated to the different shapes that gravity results in)

• during calibration, g-force morphs have increased damper to prevent jiggling

• since Shapeshift morphs affecting the chest and hip skin vertices have an effect on the Tittymagic and BootyMagic calibration, respectively, adjustments to those morphs in the Shapeshift UI now sets calibration to pending

  • settings which can trigger this are the overall g-force or angle multiplier, region specific multipliers, and specific morph value at lower/upper limit slider values

• fixed a g-force morph's damper saving to plugin JSON with an incorrect value (wasn't indepedent of physics rate)

Next steps

When it comes to the chest area morphs, the next step will be to create breast specific g-force morphs that are anchored to the pectoral joints and affect a smaller area. And then, I will implement a system which allows different morphs to be applied in TittyMagic based on the amount of g-force affecting the breast (as well as create the morphs for that system). This should achieve two important things:

1. prevent the g-force morphs from feeding too much into the TM morphs

2. allow a more accurate and realistic shape change response due to collision or other forces when gravity is already being applied in a given direction

Currently the normal downward gravity along the chest is basically the baseline around which all TittyMagic morphs are applied, i.e. all morphs are zero in that scenario. In the new system, each possible direction of gravity relative to the chest (up, down, forward, back, left, right) will have its own morphs and those morphs will adjust from that baseline. Basically there will be six morph groups and their values will interpolate based on what the current angle (and amount) of gravity is relative to the chest. And those morphs will also assume the included baseline chest g-force morphs are being used.

This will take time to do. I feel that there's not really any other way to have g-force morphs affecting the chest area work properly with TittyMagic.

Of course, the same concepts will be relevant to the hip and glutes and to BootyMagic.

Before I get to all of that, I want to take another look at the thigh morphs. I think they need some fixes, e.g. there's too much vertical motion. I also want to introduce some angle morphs for Shapeshift, targeting the hip area and the glute under curve. So those will come first.

Also, Naturalis v1.3 will be free from the beginning of next month.

Lots to look forward to!

-everlaster