Naturalis v1.1-beta1 Release (Patreon)

Hello! This release in a nutshell:

• Manual clothing coverage joint selection
• Improved visualizations
• Presets for built-in clothing items (TittyMagic)
• Identical joint physics & morphing when soft physics is off vs on
• Constant default friction on clothing covered soft colliders
• Friction as a soft physics parameter
• Fixes

Manual clothing coverage joint selection

Manually selecting soft joints allows you to precisely map the clothing item's geometry to the soft physics mesh. It's easy and quick to do, but only works on desktop mode.

When "Coverage" is selected in the Visualize popup, you can hover over any joint with the mouse cursor. A red rectangle shows the selected joint, and pressing Ctrl includes it in or excludes it from the list of covered soft joints.

Improved visualizations

• significantly increased the opacity of the soft phycis gradient visualization
• instead of a three dimensional marker, the new visualization renders a 2 dimensional plus sign - there's a bit less performance overhead with this method, and it looks cleaner

Presets for built-in clothing items (TittyMagic)

All built in chest area clothing items now have default profiles included in the plugin var. Unlike normal profile presets, these are all in the same directory (MeshedVR) and have the item's name as file name (instead of Default).

These presets are always visible in the profile file browser regardless of the clothing item that you're loading a profile for - the idea is to be able to use these as starting points for custom clothing items. E.g. you can load the Alphakini Bra for a custom bra item and go from there.

When loading a different item's profile, the soft joint coverage data is not loaded. The covered soft joints are those that are already mapped for the current item (if any). However, the soft physics parameter percentage adjustments are loaded from the different item's profile.

When enabling a built-in item, the plugin will automatically load the default profile from the above folder, unless a locally saved default profile is present. The same is true when clicking the Load Item Default button:

A profile loaded from the plugin's var package is shown as above ("Tank Top (everlaster.Naturalis.26.var)" instead of "Default").

Physics & morphing when soft physics is off

All morphing and physics parameters are now identical when soft physics is disabled compared to when it is enabled. This essentially undoes the optimizations I implemented in v1.0. I think I probably overcomplicated things by doing those optimizations.

The reason for this change is to ensure that clothing profiles work identically when soft physics is on or off. In previous v1.1 alpha versions, there was a pretty noticeable difference in how the forces of a clothing profile affected breasts depending on whether soft physics was enabled. Just making the physics and morphing identical was the simplest solution to this problem - having separate profiles for soft physics on/off is not an option, and automatically interpreting the adjustments of a soft-physics-enabled profile to a model with soft physics disabled is just too complicated.

Another effect of this change is that it's much more predictable how a plugin preset saved with soft physics disabled will behave when soft physics is enabled again, and vice versa.

So there you go. Hopefully the changed behavior doesn't break too many existing presets or scenes which apply their own offsets to physics parameters.

Friction on clothing covered colliders

VAM's default soft collider friction (0.6) is applied to soft colliders covered by a clothing item. This means any custom offset to fricton and any automatic adjustment resulting from Adaptive Friction / Skin Gloss have no effect on the part of the mesh covered by clothing. The covered colliders are those that are attached to the joints that you have selected in the clothing profile Soft Physics tab for all currently active clothing items.

Alternative ideas I played around with were: (a) copy the cloth sim friction value to the soft colliders, (b) always apply the dry skin friction value (c) slider for setting custom friction for the cloth covered colliders. Option "a" would only work with sim clothing, option "b" kinda made sense but at the same time, the clothing isn't necessarily as "dry" as the skin underneath it and the material is different anyway. Option "c" made perhaps the most sense, maybe I will do that in the future. However collider friction just doesn't have all that much effect so I consider this pretty low priority.

Friction as a soft physics parameter

Fat collider friction is now available as an actual physics parameter that supports local distortion physics and adjustment along a gradient. By default, the LDP compression and stretching effects are zero, and the gradient is set to increase friction for the areola and nipple colliders.

I'm not sure if there's actually any value to LDP adjustments for this parameter, but no reason not to make that possible to play with. In theory, pressing down on the soft physics mesh could increase friction for the stretched out joints, but Unity already calculates the actual amount of frictional force based on the force being applied to the collider.

The "Configure Collider Friction" button takes you to Skin Materials 2, and unlike other parameters, you can't directly adjust the Offset. Instead you're just shown the automatically calculated Friction Value, which is the same as the slider in Skin Materials 2. To adjust the offset use the offset slider in Skin Materials 2 to which affects both soft collider and hard collider friction simultaneously.

Other

• Fix: prevent duplicating soft joints in the coverage data of the clothing profile json
• A few minor performance fixes
• Fixed issue where profile referenced in scene save file was not auto-applied if the profile was in a subdirectory
• If the loaded profile belongs to a different clothing item, display the author and item part of path in current profile text
• increased Reduce Size morph max to 2.00
• do not cycle through with prev next buttons in clothing coverage visualization popup
• the clothing coverage visualization is not drawn if the selected item not enabled or selected item's profile inactive

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To-do for the next release

Most of these have been mentioned previously.

• Test and adapt BootyMagic clothing profiles to work correctly with different butt sizes
• Create and include built-in BootyMagic clothing profiles in the plugin var
• Limit synchronization of physics adjustments to the person's joints or soft physics mesh to once per physics update (currently done multiple times in many cases)
• LDP optimizations
• Investigate Futa breast soft physics
• Possible other physics adjustments (tied to the hold, dampening or force sliders)
• Auto-fix triggers in the scene when auto-updating from an earlier Naturalis version causes the plugin id # to change
• Try to break the plugin with various tests and fix any errors

Investigate, implement if easy, otherwise v1.2:

• investigate automatically preventing nipple clipping
• investigate linking clothing adjustment profile with clothing item preset
• interpret default clothing adjustment parameters automatically (at least some kind of basic automation would be nice for cases where there is no existing default profile = most custom clothing items)
• investigate enabling breast hard colliders for futa/male characters

I started work on porting the futa breast soft physics code from Stopper's plugin, but I immediately ran into issues with the plugin. I'm not sure what it'll take to get it to work reliably, but I'll try. It'd be nice for existing male-skinned futa characters to have soft physics. However Stopper's Alternative Futa plugin is probably the superior way to implement futa for new looks in a way that works ideally with all female content and plugins.

Regarding items listed on the trello board (and not everything mentioned above is listed there), I decided to move the "Glute or thigh angle based glute fat distance limit" away from the v1.1 todo list. It's just too unrelated to the rest of v1.1.

Overall, still quite a bit of development work remaining to get v1.1 to early access. But the main goal - clothing adjustment profiles - is now pretty much done, hence the beta1 tag 😎. I want to also update the tutorials and documentation for v1.1 before releasing to early access, that'll take some time to do.

FYI - I'm going off the grid for a few days, so won't be able to read messages until later in the week!

-everlaster