Naturalis v1.3-alpha1 (52.var) (Patreon)

Let's start off Naturalis v1.3 with a couple of surprises! I know you guys are waiting for the pressure implementation - it's up next. It's definitely a bigger implementation than anything included in this release, there's much work to be done, and I wanted to get some of the smaller and easier stuff out of the way first.

And the surprises are:

1. New physics parameter: Rotation Inertia

2. Softness can be adjusted independently between soft physics and joint physics, giving you more control over the behavior without having to fine tune individual parameters manually.

3. The UI has been improved - everything still basically in the same place, but the overall look is cleaner and prettier, full list of improvements at the end.

Apart from those, there's the depth physics implementation, and some additional miscellanous improvements.

In case you're wondering, I skipped 50.var and 51.var to leave those open for patching v1.2. V1.1 required 14 patches... But I'm confident that with v1.2 I can make do with just two, haha.

Rotation Inertia

Rotation Inertia is available in a new sub section in the Breast Weight and Glute Weight windows. Put simply, it adds resistance to the joint's rotation similar to how mass adds resistance to its movement. (In Unity, the technical term for this property is "inertia tensor".)

The current values are just the default constant values that VAM applies. In a future version, these will be calibrated automatically - most likely a linear scaling with joint mass will work pretty well, since the idea is that the amount of resistance is similar for rotation as it is for movement.

Softness (Soft Physics) vs. Softness (Joint Physics)

The Softness (Soft Shysics) slider affects soft physics parameters and a background offset on hard collider depth. This slider doesn't do anything if soft physics is disabled.

The Softness (Joint Physics) slider affects everything else - joint physics parameters, other collider properties, background multipliers on morphing, how gravity affects breasts/glutes.

Using different values you can make the joint very rigid while keeping the soft physics soft, and vice versa.

Depth Physics

Like local distortion physics, depth physics needs to be turned on with the toggle in the main tab first. Then it can be adjusted for any soft physics parameter (except Fat Back Force).

The effect slider is 0 in this alpha - simply toggling the feature on doesn't change the behavior. Feel free to play around with different values and see how the behavior changes!

The main attraction is probably increasing the depth effect for Fat Spring. You'll probably want to increase collider mass and possibly collider spring as well to compensate for the fact that when soft physics becomes more rigid when the mesh is pushed in, it will resist movement.

You can set depth physics to be on by default in Naturalis User Preferences:

The update rate is shared between depth physics and local distortion physics - these are grouped together under the "dynamic soft physics" term.

You can also use depth physics simultaneously with local distortion physics. I haven't done much testing in that regard yet but it should work, the plugin just sums their adjustments per soft joint at any given time.

Improved morph monitoring

As you probably know, the plugin listens for changes to morphs that affect the chest/hip area (excluding pose morphs), and puts calibration to pending when a change is detected.

Previously, all morphs needed to be cycled through and checked if they affect the chest/hip area on every plugin reload. Now, these are predetermined when it comes to built in morphs as well as some popular free morph packs. Let's call these "known morphs".

Custom local morphs (i.e. saved into the VAM installation rather than loaded from a var) as well as morphs from packages other than the ones mentioned below still need to be checked on every plugin reload. Basically, the plugin still has to check body morphs from look vars. (The check per morph should be quicker though.)

As a result the overall amount of work that the plugin needs to do should be far less than before for most users, and should improve the load time especially on the first time initialization in a given scene.

Not only that, but each known morph has a tolerance range according to how much effect it has on the chest/hip area. In other words, morphs that only have a small effect can be adjusted more without triggering the pending calibration state. The amount you can adjust goes up to a morph slider value of about 0.150 for morphs that have a small effect, and down to 0.005 for morphs that have a major effect. Previously, any monitored morph would trigger the pending state when adjusted +/- 0.001.

List of packages with known morphs:

• Damarmau.DAMAR_morphs
• everlaster.Eva
• kemenate.Morphs
• QBase.AutoMorphsFromEasyMate
• Spacedog.Import_Reloaded_Lite
• TenStrip.Morphs
• TToby.arms_morph_collection
• TToby.body_morph_collection
• TToby.chest_morph_collection
• TToby.foot_morph_collection
• TToby.head_morph_collection
• VamTastic.Morphs_Collection_mix
• WeebU .My_morphs

(These vars or their morph files are not referenced directly or depended on by the plugin, the plugin just matches data to morph file and folder names. In theory those names could be from any var package, but that's unlikely.)

Summary of UI improvements

• improved navigation tab style
• full width tab groups for secondary level tabs, full width return button
• Naturalis user preferences divided up into sections
• all info texts are at the normal font size now (apart from Clothing -> Soft Physics tab)
• some info texts have been rewritten and restyled (e.g. bold removed), some have been deleted
• renamed "Hard Colliders" tab to "Colliders" and Clothing's "Forces, Hold & Dampening" tab to "Joint Physics"
• "LDP" acronym is not used anywhere in the UI, the full term "Local Distortion Physics" is always used
• centered headers where possible
• larger buttons in Physics tab (no gaps)

Other

• tiny memory use optimizations
• soft joints can be visualized for left, right or both breasts/glutes
• only the soft joint visualization that applies to the currently shown tab is active, e.g. in depth physics tab only the depth visualization is active, and the gradient and local distortion physics visualizations are inactive
• added option to user preferences to not show the gravity simulation controls by default

-everlaster