BootyMagic development status (Patreon)

Hi all.

Since releasing TittyMagic 5.2 to early access, I've been focusing on getting BootyMagic's basic functionalities to work without issues, and it's pretty close to that. 

Once that's done, the major tasks that remain before the first alpha can be released are to ensure compatibility with TittyMagic, and to come up with decent enough default physics settings. These are detailed at the end of the post.

But first, let's look at the overall picture and what BootyMagic will probably look like when it's done.

Work in Progress UI

As the idea is to keep BootyMagic and TittyMagic code bases synced as much as possible, the UI will also be very similar. Morph Multipliers and Gravity Multipliers tabs have a UI similar to TittyMagic as well, but those features won't work in the first alpha. 

(The Glute softness info text is obviously not accurate.)

Hard Colliders

I was surprised to find out that Virt-A-Mate uses different hard colliders for the glutes when soft physics is enabled compared to when it is disabled.

Glute soft physics enabled:

Glute soft physics disabled:

Not only are they different but when soft physics is disabled, the number of hard colliders goes up from 1 to 8 and they fill up the volume of the glute. When soft physics is disabled, the auto collider group LGluteAlt gets turned on and the auto collider group LGlute is turned off.

My hunch is that using those 8 colliders also when soft physics is enabled would be very useful for improving collision physics. It would make glute collision physics work more like TittyMagic's breast collision physics where hard colliders fill up the volume and complement the soft physics.

At the moment, the hard colliders configuration UI just controls that single collider that's used when soft physics is enabled. But the goal is that all 8 colliders can be configured there and that they will always be enabled. Hopefully there's nothing in VAM's internal workings preventing that!

Morphing

There's one major challenge here that will probably require some rethinking of how calibration works. The issue is that the thigh angle relative to hip can have a huge difference to the shape of the glute. That is to say the calibration result can be very different depending on whether the person is standing up in a neutral pose, walking, sitting, stretching, etc.

With TittyMagic, it was easy to ensure a somewhat consistent calibration result regardless of the person's pose - all I needed to do was simulate the force of gravity downwards along the chest during calibration. The morphs would then zero in correctly to that neutral upright pose, enabling any deviations from that neutral pose to cause morphs to be applied. But with BootyMagic, that doesn't work since glutes don't just "hang" off of the hip.

Instead of just simulating gravity during calibration, I would also have to simulate a pose where the thighs line up with the hip in a predetermined way, and then return the person to the pose before calibration. That's probably not a good idea because changing the pose temporarily can easily break animations or cause other weird issues in the scene. So I'll need to come up with something else. It's pretty simple to get started with the morphing system though - in the alpha stage it's fine to just require the user to put the the model in a neutral pose when calibrating. But later on, that requirement will have to be either automated or made obsolete in some way.

What about the morphs themselves? As mentioned in some earlier post, at first I will just use built-in morphs. The first iteration of that will probably just involve what are essentially test morphs - it might not look particularly good but it'll be a proof of concept that dynamically morphing the booty based on soft physics joint positions can work.

Compatibility with TittyMagic

Like TittyMagic, BootyMagic will rely on a calibration cycle that involves freezing animation temporarily. This is already implemented, although the first alpha won't include any dynamic morphing, and therefore the freeze isn't strictly necessary. Animation is frozen only in order to ensure that the body doesn't move while the plugin calculates what zero means for the morphs. 

In order for both plugins to be used at the same time, they need to network and agree upon whether the freeze should be unchecked after calibration, and which plugin will actually do that. This already works between TittyMagic instances, so it should be pretty easy to make it work between TittyMagic and BootyMagic instances as well.

Secondly, both plugins modify the person's Skin Materials 2 tab in pretty much exactly the same way. The plugins will need to communicate with each other so that whichever plugin is loaded last will modify the UI with a toggle that allows switching between the interfaces.

Physics settings

Physics settings requirements of the booty are quite different from those of the breasts. It would be easy to just copy-paste the settings from TittyMagic and call it a day - but very early on I noticed it doesn't look anywhere near correct. And that of course makes sense because the glutes themselves are mostly muscle. Unlike breasts which are fat, glutes are just covered by fat, and no matter what size the butt is and how high the fat percentage is, there's always that more rigid and springy underlying layer of muscle.

Like TittyMagic, BootyMagic will have softness and quickness sliders. However, what "softness" means for glutes is different from what it means for breasts - lower softness will just mean more muscle and lower fat percentage, rather than "butt implants". The physics will have to reflect that. Quickness will be similar to TittyMagic - just an abstract concept that doesn't really map to reality, it's just a way to easily tune the physics without having to adjust individual slider offsets for several parameters.

The Twist Angle Target parameter shown in the UI screenshot may have to be removed, it doesn't work currently and I'm not sure if it can be made to work.

The first alpha will have default settings that are designed to get the job done, but they are likely to undergo changes as colliders and morphing are implemented.

A summary of features

The first alpha will include

• automatic calculation of glute mass
• automatic physics settings based on mass, softness and quickness
• hard collider configuration (for the 1 hard collider that's enabled when using soft physics)
• physics parameter offsets similar to TittyMagic (but glutes don't have groups like main, outer etc.)
• soft collider visualization when adjusting Fat Collider Radius or Fat Collider Depth
• glute collider friction settings, dynamic friction based on Skin Gloss
• hard collider friction that falls off with distance from the collider's original position to prevent the hard collider from sticking to objects beyond the skin boundary
• Keybindings integration
• TittyMagic compatibility

For the final v1.0 release, the goal is to include also at least the following

• some form of Glute Gravity based on the glute rotation, possibly combined with hip rotation
• dynamic glute soft physics joint position based morphing
• some solution to the calibration issue described above
• use of the 8 hard colliders that are normally only enabled when soft physics is off

First alpha when?

Soon™. No but seriously, pretty soon. 

-everlaster