Naturalis v1.2 development underway

Hi,

V1.1 required quite a bit of patching after early access was over. I'm trying to make the v1.2 releases a bit less messy, so I'm avoiding the "alpha" nomenclature entirely this time around. The first release will be a beta. The goal is to only release features that work and to not break existing features accidentally, since fixing those is unnecessary extra work and affects the user experience.

I started development a couple of weeks ago by reducing duplication in the code base (mainly the UI was duplicated between TittyMagic and BootyMagic). With that out of the way, I caught the flu and took a break... Then, fresh off the meds and feeling good, I started experimenting and investigating possibilities, and my attention turned to soft physics first.

Investigating limitations in the current soft physics

Currently, not all breast/glute skin vertices have an associated soft physics joint. This is showing the vertices targeted by the breast physics mesh in Blender:

Stopper's inner vagina physics plugin could be used as a starting point for creating a custom soft physics mesh to replace the existing breast/glute soft physics meshes. A custom mesh could cover the targeted part of the skin with something like 50% better resolution.

Especially the resolution around the nipple area could be much better. More intricate soft physics in that area might fix the nipple getting easily pushed in and distorting the skin around it.

The physics mesh could also extend a bit further, e.g. a few skin vertices further around the base of the breast, and even covering the upper chest near the armpits.

In addition to better coverage, the mesh could also be configured differently. An example is the use of influence vertices that allow a joint to be influenced by other skin vertices rather than just the one it's anchored to. Using influence vertices could allow for better propagation of force in the mesh, but it needs further experimentation.

While this is not an item for v1.2, there seems to be potential here, and it's good to have a clearer view of the possibilities when it's time for v1.3+.

Improving hard colliders

What I really want is a larger number of custom colliders, but creating custom colliders that behave similarly to the existing hard colliders seems to be difficult. I'm sure it's possible, there's just a lot I haven't figured out yet. The current hard colliders are loaded as part of the Person atom prefab asset, and the decompiled VAM code isn't that much help in setting up new AutoCollider objects from scratch. I'm also running into the limits of my Unity knowledge which isn't too deep to begin with.

With v1.2, I don't want to go further into the direction of custom colliders for fear of not getting anything useful out of it. Instead, I will focus on improving the existing hard colliders: improve the positioning and scaling for different breast sizes, support different world scale and atom scale values, and try to make them adjust to the breast/glute shape in real time.

Changing which skin vertices the colliders are targeting or anchored is possible:

Setting these up properly should reduce the amount that I need to shift them around in response to changes in breast size/shape.

It should also be possible to adjust the Unity collider properties directly and circumvent the system VAM normally uses for positioning and sizing the colliders. That system has a performance impact that makes it unusable for continuous resizing and repositioning of the colliders relative to their target skin vertex, while the impact of adjusting the Unity collider directly should be negligible.

It's likely that the hard collider system will change enough that the radius and offset values set in previous versions of the plugin won't apply in v1.2. Hopefully the radius and offsets won't need to be manually tweaked as much, though.

Summary of v1.2 goals

(1) Improve the morphing system and breast morphs

• Investigation into the distribution of morph values over time
• Morphs UI overhaul
• Configurable edge smoother morph amounts
• Better "gravity offset morphing" i.e. preserve the original breast shape better before/after enabling the plugin
• Adjust amount of rotation, movement and shape morphing separately
• Configurable shape morphing: better support for different base breast shapes, e.g. breasts wide at the base should morph differently from breasts that hang

(2) Improve existing hard colliders

• More accurate automatic positioning and sizing of hard colliders, especially for large breasts
• Calibrate collider radiuses and positions for different poses/directions (similar to the multi directional calibration that occurs when local distortion physics is enabled), and adjust the actual radiuses and positions in real time to more accurately match the shape

(3) QOL

• Improve the calibration system to require fewer full calibrations: Load calibration data from memory/disk as a general rule when adjusting morphs or loading different looks, rather than only during scene load. This is especially important if the morphing and collider improvements end up requiring the more time consuming multi-directional calibration.
• Save monitored morphs list to improve load time. Currently, if monitoring morphs is enabled in the user preferences, the plugin will scroll thourgh all morphs in your installation and load their data into memory. This can take a long time with a large morphs library. The only purpose of this is to figure out which morphs need to be monitored, but that list could easily be saved to disk and updated periodically to potentially save a lot of time in 99% of plugin loads.

(4) Improvements to the clothing adjustment profile system

• Global user defaults for clothing profiles: Default slider values that are applied when there is no existing default profile to load. This would make it easy for all items automatically have at least some cleavage/pushup and physics adjustments, but configuring it would be up to the user. Some items would not look correct with the defaults, and in most cases you'd want to edit manually anyway, but it'd probably still be better than nothing.
• Automatic nipple adjustment - needs investigation
• Associate profiles with clothing presets - needs investigation
• Changes to the morphing system may also require updating how clothing profiles adjust morphs

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

Alright guys, 'til later.

-everlaster