Naturalis v1.4-alpha9 (84.var)

Shapeshift morphing system technical improvements

Alright. My goals with this release were to improve the thigh g-force morphs, and to implement glute undercurve morphs and anchor them to the thigh joint angle.

It turned out that simply implementing and configuring those morphs was not enough to get the effects I wanted. So I implemented a few technical improvements to the morphing system that allow more fine tuned control over how a morph's value is calculated. In short, each morph has a configurable curve for calculating the morph value, and the effect of a morph's secondary anchor can be adjusted.

Note that changes to the morph configurations themselves aren't yet loaded from saved data (in scene or preset). I'll enable that when the defaults for the configurations is closer to final, so probably in v1.4 beta eventually.

More comprehensive explanations:

Customizable curve

There's a customizable curve in the morph config UI for how g-force (or joint angle in the case of angle morphs) translates into a morph value. You can have a linear slope, an ease-in slope, an ease-out slope, an ease in-out slope (S-curve), or a parameterized S-curve where both the midpoint and the slope can be adjusted.

All g-force morphs adjust along a linear slope by default. The reason: g-force itself is now calculated along curve which enables all g-force morphs to automatically apply more sensitively near low g-forces, and less sensitively at g-forces. This curve is just in the background, it's not configurable in the UI.

Anchor ratio slider

The second improvement was a slider for adjusting how much of a morph's effect comes from its primary anchor, and how much from its secondary anchor (if it has one). In the case of thigh g-force morphs, I've set them up with 80% of the effect coming from the thigh joint and 20% of the effect coming from the shin/knee joint. Previously it was just averaged out (50/50).

New thigh g-force morphs

The up, down, side in and side out thigh morphs are recreated from scratch. The effect is more concentrated on the thigh muscle and doesn't extend into the glute under curve, and doesn't affect the genitals area much if at all. The up-down morphs change the shape of the glute morph (rather than just shifting the skin), and the sideways morphs are now mostly rotational which I think looks more realistic. In addition, the thigh morphs now use the region springs and dampers, and those are set up with higher springs (faster jiggles, which I also think looks more realistic).

Angle morphs for the glute under curve

The purpose of these is to dynamically adjust the crease as the leg is rotated backwards. Being able to configure a morph's curve came in handy, as there's separate inner and outer morphs for the under curve (inner being closer to the inside of the leg). The outer curve morph is applied along a steeper curve which means it will lag a bit behind the inner curve morph when the leg is rotated, but will then catch up towards the end of the rotation range. This simulates how the crease starts from the inside of the leg and builds up towards the outside of the leg as the angle increases.

Other

• small tweaks to spring and damper of abdomen and pelvis regions

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That's it for this release! I'm looking into improving the glute morphs next. It seems every region needs at least a second pass to ensure good quality. The current glute morphs are a bit too angular and produce ugly shapes in certain leg rotations. And then, of course, continuing with the work on breast morphing.

In other news - in case you missed it, I released some free stuff in this past week:

• subscene compatibility fix to FloatParamRandomizerEE

• four new plugins in the Snippets resource: BulkAllowPossessGrab, HairColorChangerEE, UISliderSync and UIToggleSync

Until next time.

-everlaster