BootyMagic development update (Patreon)

Hi, this is just a short update on what I'm working on and what to expect in the next Naturalis release which focuses on BootyMagic. 

For those of you reading this on the old 5€ tier - perhaps this post will help you decide if you want subscribe to the 8€ tier in order to gain access to the next release.

In my development version of the plugin, the glute physics and morph animations can look amazing at best, but it's still very hit and miss. The goal is to get booty animations to look consistently good with any butt size, in any pose, with any amount of force in the animation, and with soft physics on or off. 

Here's what's done so far, and what's still to be done for alpha 5:

Implemented

Glute mass is calculated automatically (min 0.500 kg, max 4.000 kg) from the volume of a sphere based on selected skin vertices. Glute mass in BootyMagic is somewhat different from how it works in TittyMagic where the mass is intended to actually represent the breast's volume more or less realistically. In BootyMagic, mass is just value calibrated based on what looks good in my testing.

Two thirds of the glute mass is applied to the glute joint, and the remaining one third is divided amongst the eight hard colliders. It seems that for the butt, having a pretty high hard collider mass is actually a good thing - unlike the mass of the glute joint, gravity doesn't act on the hard colliders, so the butt doesn't get pulled down due to their mass. But you still get the inertia that's needed for animations to look realistic.

The calibration pose is updated to have legs more spread apart and bent a bit at the knees, and hip pushed back a bit. This is so that the morphs are zeroed around that pose, giving way for morphs to be applied when the legs are not spread apart, and standing with legs straight.

To-do for booty morphing

Booty morphing definitely needs work. I find that the role of morphing in BootyMagic is a bit different. In TittyMagic, it makes breasts go from being fixed in the same spot to actually moving along the chest. However with the butt, that's not really an issue - even with zero morphing, the butt will move pretty well as long as mass is high enough and spring low enough. So with BootyMagic, the role of morphing is to enhance that already existing movement, and to accentuate it with changes in shape.

• Implement limits on maximum morph values, scale limits with glute volume. This will prevent forceful animations from distorting the glute too much.
• Make glute morphing a bit more sensitive to small movements.
• Better scaling of the amount of morphing with respect to glute volume.
• Depth out morphing (the slider is there in Morphing tab but it doesn't do anything since there aren't any depth out morphs). Mainly my concern is with preserving glute volume when the hip is pushed forward or the thigh bone is rotated back. Currently in VAM this causes the butt to shrink visibly.
• Make depth in morphing flatten the glute less.
• Make sideways morphing less based on rotating the glute in place, and more on rotation/moving it around the hip (rotating as in "orbiting"). At extreme values, the current sideways cause a dimple/crease that doesn't look great.

To-do other

• Glute joint physics settings scaling with glute mass
• Glute joint gravity physics scaling with glute mass
• Hard collider radius and x/y/z offsets scaling with glute volume

Softness and quickness adjustment will be implemented afterwards.

Also, I'll release a small test scene so you can check out the booty animation physics in the same scenario that I use in development 🙂

-everlaster