Roadmap update (Patreon)

It's been a while since the previous roadmap update, and both TittyMagic and BootyMagic could do with a refresher on what is planned and prioritized. This not only gives you a better sense of what's happening but helps me organize the work ahead as well 👍

The previous roadmap post was 3 months ago, almost to the day. I guess this is a bit like a quarterly report to shareholders now 😂

Also, just a heads up - I'll be on vacation for the latter half of this month, so development will be paused during that time.

BootyMagic [✔ Done in Naturalis v1.0]

There's a few features left to implement, but most of them involve quite a lot of tuning and optimizing, and they also need to work together well. It's the interplay of physics, colliders and morphing that matters much more than any individual feature. In that sense, the alpha versions where things are incomplete can seem lackluster, but at some point things will click and come together and that's where the magic will happen. That's the plan, anyway!

Hard colliders

It turns out that when enabling the hard colliders that VAM normally only uses when soft physics is off (as mentioned in the development status post) doesn't work out of the box. The hard colliders interact with the soft colliders and distort them, but that interaction should be pretty easy to disable. Getting this to work would also automatically fix the plugin initialization bug in the alpha 1 version.

Morphing

I'll do this over multiple alpha releases. At first I will use placeholder morphs that kind of do the right sort of adjustment but aren't optimized yet.

Glute mass

Trying to use an accurate glute mass based on glute volume seems like a bad idea, since increasing mass too much makes the butt behave like it's made of lead. The person's physics rig isn't really designed for individual joints to have a lot of mass. In reality of course the butt can weigh many kilograms, but that weight isn't tied to a single joint in the body, it's spread around an area and the weight is supported by muscles, joints and bones in the rest of the body.

This means that the actual mass in kilograms will be whatever works and looks good. It'll be a parameter like any other that you can adjust without it affecting other physics values. All physics parameters will be automatically calculated directly from glute volume instead of being based on mass (in addition to being affected by things like softness, quickness and gravity).

The "Auto-update mass" checkbox will still be a thing though, it will just need to be renamed - the point of that is more to ensure morphing works correctly after the size and shape of the glutes is changed.

Physics settings

I will prioritize work on the hard colliders and the morphing, it's really only after those are both working to some degree that it makes sense to scale the physics settings with softness etc. So, until then I'll stick with the defaults that were introduced in alpha 1.

Glute Gravity

Adjusting the physics target angles etc. with hip or glute joint rotations is probably the least important single feature but also pretty easy to do. I will leave this for the last.

TittyMagic

Every item from the previous roadmap post is still on the to-do list.

The post was written before TittyMagic 5.2 development began and doesn't mention the revamped morphing that was introduced in 5.2. I'd say that was definitely worth doing over other planned improvements though!

A quick run through current priorities:

• Custom morphs are in the planning stage and will be in development as soon as BootyMagic v1 is done
• I have some ideas for improving the soft physics, described below
• Breast hard colliders and the breast gravity implementation need to be improved, explained in the previous roadmap post

Plan for custom morphs

In a nutshell, the plan for custom morphs is not just to replace existing morphs, but to overhaul the ways for adjusting them as well. That overhaul will better enable morphs to be adapted for different breast shapes, and the way that will be achieved is by splitting the morphs into separate components that can each be individually adjusted

1. Movement morphs (up/down/sideways)

2. Rotation morphs (up/down/sideways)

3. Fixer morphs for smoothing the edges around the breast

4. Shape morphs (up/down/sideways/forward/back)

The movement and rotation morphs will be simple since they involve only minimal changes to the breast shape.

Movement morphs move the breast base along the chest without having any significant effect on shape.

Rotation morphs rotate the breast from the base, stretching or compressing the skin around the base.

Currently, build in Breast Under Smoother morphs are used, but these should be replaced with custom smoother morphs. Breast side and center gap smoother morphs could also be improved. These improved smoother morphs will then be applied in varying degrees based on the amount that other morphs (especially rotation morphs) get applied, and the amount of smoothing will be customizable, this will make it possible to influence how firm or loose the skin around the base of the breast should be. These might be useful to offer as separate standard (i.e. non-pose) morphs as well, we'll see.

Shape morphs will do everything else that is needed from the morphs. These are especially important for the forward and back directions since those aren't affected by the movement and rotation morphs, and those are also the ones where I think the biggest visual improvements are to be had.

There's probably room for multiple types of shape morphs to target specific breast shapes, but I expect that for the up/down/sideways directions, different ratios of the amount of rotation to the amount of shape morphing will accommodate different base breast shapes pretty well.

Overhauling physics [✔ Done in Naturalis v1.0]

I think this one is quite an important thing to do, on par with custom morphs. There's a few components to this.

Breast mass parameter

The issue described with glute mass above also makes me somewhat question the way that TittyMagic calculates and uses the breast mass parameter. In the case of breasts though, having the mass applied to a single joint is less of an issue. Since breasts do in fact hang off of the chest and don't have a lot of muscles and joints to hold things together, that's a better approximation of reality than in the case of glutes. Regardless, it might make sense to move away from using the mass parameter to drive other physics.

Local skin deformation physics

I experimented with tracking the distances of individual soft physics joints relative to neighboring joints. You can view a video about what that looks like here: https://mega.nz/file/ARNVnKAQ#0RmsQtoRctCBkMif4EuoEoxJLOIDvlE12HcEV4j4h_U

In the video there are lines drawn from the selected soft physics joint rigidbody to the closest 5 other rigidbodies, and those distances are shown in the text panel. The distance could be used to scale that individual joint's physics parameters with every physics update.

This could lead to something like simulating how physics changes with local skin deformation. For example, increasing the joint's spring sharply if it gets too far from its neighbors would simulate how the skin and underlying tissue tightens up as it stretches. My hope is that something like this system would make the breasts seem firmer to the touch and better at maintaining volume with collision, but without an adverse effect on animation jiggles. It's early days though, it's hard to say how useful or feasible it'll be.

Adjusting physics for individual soft physics joints

The above depends on being able to adjust the parameters individually for each joint instead of per group (main, outer, areola, spring). This requires some new implementation, but not too much. Most of the code in VAM that deals with applying physics parameters to individual soft joints is pretty straight forward and can be easily reimplemented in and customized for TittyMagic.

The main consequence of doing this would be that there are no more groups. That would be a good thing - groups result in sharp lines between physics in one group and physics in another, and it would be better if physics from the outer edge to the nipple would instead be adjusted along some curve. For example, the outermost joints could have high spring and damper and this would fall off sharply for joints closed to the breast center. This could smooth out the physics at the edge between the breast and the chest. Similarly, instead of a sharp distinction between the nipple/areola physics and the rest of the breast, there would be a smooth gradient.

This and the local skin deformation physics would naturally carry over to BootyMagic as well.

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Alright, that's a pretty long post, let's leave it there. Lots of stuff to be excited about for 2023!

-everlaster