Updated plan for Naturalis v1.2 & v1.3

Hi guys,

I'll be moving some of the features planned for v1.2 into v1.3. Essentially, v1.2 will be a smaller intermediate version. The pressure model and planned morphing improvements are moved to v1.3, and v1.2 will be rounded out with the remaining smaller features.

The internal pressure model, important as it is, will require a lot of work, and the rest of soft physics and the morphing system needs to be adapted to it, so I didn't want to just add it to the plan for v1.2 which was already quite packed.

Also, it's clear that the pressure model needs to be almost completely implemented before it makes sense to revamp the morphing system and create custom morphs. Working on morphs too early just risks wasting time and effort - it's not yet clear what the limits of the pressure model are and exactly what morphs will be needed once it's complete. In an attempt to mimic realistic physical behavior, morphs are only used to compensate for the shortcomings in the physics simulation, so any improvements to the physics simulation will reduce the role of morphs.

v1.2

• Improved hard colliders [✔ beta1]
• Add joint motion and rotation limit physics parameters [✔ beta1]
• Calibrate and dynamically adjust joint motion and rotation limit physics parameters
• Breast joint physics tweaks: adapt to calibrated joint rotation limits, tweak springs etc. to improve large breast physics
• Nipple collider settings
• Investigate: Bone rotations (demo in this post). Rotating the pectoral bone could be a great way to preserve the original breast shape
• Investigate: Automatically preventing nipple clipping with clothing
• Investigate: Linking clothing adjustment profile with clothing item preset
• Improve the calibration system to require fewer full calibrations
• Cache monitored morphs info to improve load time
• Global user defaults for clothing profiles
• Finish up atom scale support (the main issues are with morphs and clothing profiles, I think)
• Ensure world scale (Scene Misc setting) doesn't mess things up

I'll try not to take too long on v1.2 - anything that feels like it's not progressing smoothly I'll probably just move to v1.3 because of the importance of implementing the pressure model.

Trello is updated: https://trello.com/b/AcnDeqFr/naturalis-public-roadmap

Nipple collider settings

The "Nipple collider settings" item is new. Myself and some others have noticed an issue where the nipple moves due to collision that is clearly not touching the nipple skin or the visualized soft physics collider. Disabling collisions on the nipple soft joint's rigidbody helped here, I'm probably going to make that a toggleable option. There are also nipple hard colliders that aren't currently part of the hard collider adjustments, but it would probably be pretty easy to expose some parameters for those and if adjusting them could improve the accuracy of collision in the nipple area. I'll play around with that a bit.

v1.3

• Soft physics mesh volume compensation via internal pressure
• Soft physics settings tweaks: Adapt soft physics settings to the internal pressure model and core rigidity implementations
• Improve the soft physics mesh: create a custom soft physics mesh that covers the skin more accurately with a larger number of joints and colliders
• Breast core rigidity (dynamic adjustment of fat spring, a bit like local distortion physics)
• All of the moprhing system and custom morphs related items that were part of the v1.2 plan originally, see https://www.patreon.com/posts/naturalis-v1-2-90893582 , but adapted to the internal pressure model

Revising the early access model

Version 1.2 will be a Patreon exclusive until v1.3 is done. I want to move away from the end-date bound early access model entirely when it comes to the development of Naturalis, but I still want to release free versions eventually to the larger community.

The main reason is that I don't feel the early access model suits plugin development all that well. It works great for things like custom looks or scenes - a creator can work for a few days to a week on a model and release it with an EA period of e.g. one month. There's no pressure, the creator has plenty of time for putting out additional releases within the month. Even if a new model took two weeks to create, they can put out two additional models within the month and that's great.

With Naturalis and TittyMagic before it, putting out a new finished release has regularly taken much longer than the early access period that was set on the previous release. I'm not sure if I've ever had a full new release ready to go when the previous one's EA period ended, and that's always bothered me a bit.

So to tackle that, once v1.2 is done, it's the latest finished version but still only available on Patreon. And once v1.3 is done, that becomes the latest finished version, and v1.2 becomes free - from that point on, subscribers will always be at least one full version ahead of free users (along with the usual access to alphas and betas for the next version in development). Genius, I know!

I'll be posting a demo on progress made on the pressure model pretty soon. :)