Naturalis v1.4-alpha11 (88.var)

Hi, I've finally made enough progress to release a new version. This release includes important changes to the g-force morphing implementation, but no new morphs yet; see end of post for info on the next release.

G-force morph "Rotation reference"

TLDR: In practice, the butt jiggle is noticeably better looking (I don't have a comparison for you, but you can check it out for yourself 😉), and this improvement will also come into play when implementing breast g-force morphs.

Technical explanation

An issue in previous versions has been that anchoring g-force morphs to the LGlute and RGlute joints would cause the morph values to be greatly dampened even at high accelerations because the joint itself would rotate/jiggle, and kind of prevent the plugin from getting the correct amount of acceleration up/down or left/right. LGlute and RGlute are the physics simulated joints that VaM's (and therefore BootyMagic's) glute physics are acting on. Those joints unlike other joints in the body don't stay locked in their rotation when forces are applied.

In this version, it's possible to make the anchor joint use the rotation of a different joint. The amount of g-force is still based on how much acceleration the anchor joint is experiencing, but how much of that force is on the y-axis, x-axis or z-axis depends on the rotation of the rotation reference joint. The glute g-force morphs are now using the hip joint as a rotation reference for the LGlute and RGlute anchor joints; the hip joint rotation stays fixed and doesn't wobble due to forces.

Fixed calculation of acceleration value

TLDR: morphs scale properly beyond 1 G of force again.

In v1.4-alpha9, I implemented a customizable curve for how g-force morph values are calculated, and mentioned that the g-force a.k.a. the joint's acceleration value itself is calculated along a smooth curve. Unfortunately, alpha9 caused the morphs to max out at 1 G when they should go all the way to 2.5 G. It took me quite a long time to realize this issue even though I could tell something was off in how the morphs were being animated.

This is now fixed, the acceleration itself is no longer smoothed in any way, each morph just uses its own smoother curve.

Calibration triggers

The calibration triggers are part of overall Naturalis instance rather than separate for the different modules (since calibration itself is shared between the modules).

The triggers execute every time you calibrate, regardless of whether it goes through the full calibration, or if it calibrates from a cached result, or if it loads the calibration data from the scene save file. In the case of loading data from the scene save file, the end actions execute immediately (on the same frame) after the start actions.

Filters for the morph configs dropdown

Show all, built in, packaged or local:

Obviously since custom morphs aren't supported yet there's not going to be any local or custom package morphs.

Region filter:

Minor fixes and other changes

• Fixed issue where opening the BootyMagic UI before first time calibration had begun would prevent the mass from being calculated and it would be stuck at 1 kg (I had already implemented a fix in an earlier v1.4 alpha but it turns out it didn't work)

• Fixed issue where the pause toggle in Female Morphs / Male Morphs had no effect

• Clothing profiles: fixed issue where toggling off "symmetric" didn't initialize the right side profile correctly with the left side profile's settings

• In Shapeshift's bone offsets tab, the bone origin positions are visualized on the model

• There's now a calibration keybindings action "Naturalis.Calibrate", rather than each script having its own calibration action.

• Prevent offsetting physics parameters via trigger during calibration

• Various small UI fixes and layout changes

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Some info on the next release after this one:

I'm working on producing a "proof of concept" of how TittyMagic's and BootyMagic's morphing will work with Shapeshift's g-force morphing. This won't take long to do now.

The different morphing systems can't just be added on top of each other because that will produce extreme shapes, instead different sets of morphs (in both TM and BM) need to be anchored to different g-forces on each axis, with the assumption that Shapeshift is applying its own morphs at the same time. It gets a bit complicated to explain in a way that would be easy to understand, but you'll see how it works. I'll produce this first concept only in BootyMagic since there's currently no morphing in BootyMagic itself, and there are very visible glute g-force morphs that BootyMagic will need to take into account.

Once this is done, I can move on to design and implement g-force morphs for breasts and then the morphs that TittyMagic will use on top of that. Breast morphs will be the main focus of next month.

I mentioned in the last development status post that my morphs guy was working on versatile new tools for creating breast morphs. While they did make good progress, unfortunately they had to step back for a bit and the tools won't be available for a while. This means I'll be using the same method to produce breast morphs that I used for the glutes. It's a DAZ setup where D-formers are used to manipulate a weight painted area of the mesh. With the glutes, I found the results to be much smoother and better quality than when using Blender's transformation and sculpting tools.

-everlaster


Credit: MacGruber Utils used for the triggers implementation (CC BY)