Naturalis v1.4-alpha6 (79.var)

After much ado, a new release is here 🎉

Summary:

• I ended up redoing the abdomen g-force morphs, it was easier than to try to fix issues with the previous morphs (more on that below).

• added and improved glute g-force morphs

• introduced thigh g-force morphs

• the way that g-force morphs jiggle can now be controlled with springs and dampers

• implemented morphing regions that allow adjusting the multiplier, spring and damper of g-force morphs per region of the body (although only some regions currently have morphs)

• plugin now loads poses during calibration programmatically (no pose files stored in var or VAM folder)

• UI development and some fixes

Redone abdomen g-force morphs

Some of the new abdomen morphs are combined for the entire abdomen rather than separated into lower and upper areas. The previous morphs caused the navel to stretch/compress too much due to different parts jiggling out of sync. On a model with more belly fat, it would make more sense to jiggle different parts of the abdomen separately though - a thicc morph set could be added in the future.

In addition, the new morphs look smoother at high g-forces and with higher multipliers, and have less effect overall (suits a the slim default model better), and less effect on the sides of the abdomen.

Redone glute g-force morphs

New morphs for the glutes region as a whole are included, allowing the entire area including the center line to move/jiggle as a unit. The previous side separated morphs have been tweaked and improved; should look better at high g-forces and multipliers.

Glute in/out (depth) morphs are also included, but only for the region as a whole (not side separated). One issue with morphing the glutes depth is that the model's rigging in VAM also causes the glutes expand or flatten, depending on the in/out spring value (in BootyMagic). This expansion/flattening doesn't really preserve volume at all, and it might be best to just prevent that effect as much as possible. With that in mind, the default glute in/out spring is doubled. The way that Naturalis morphs the glutes depth still needs work though, I'm not yet sure if that will mean more/better g-force morphs or only morphs for BootyMagic.

Thigh g-force morphs

The thigh morphs for left-right and forward-back directions are essentially bulge morphs - some volume is subtracted from one side and added to the other side. The up-down morphs basically just shift the area, but there's some effect on the glute under curve as well.

In contrast with CheesyFX's ShakeIt, these morphs are not rotational. ShakeIt's morphs are driven by rotational acceleration of the bone, and the morphs themselves are also rotational. I've tested ShakeIt with this new release, and you can definitely use it to good effect combined with the g-force morphs. However since the plugins work in very different ways and apply different springs and dampers, it would be better if a rotational thigh morphs were added to Naturalis. This would allow the rotational morphs to jiggle in sync with the current morphs, and to be affected by gravity realistically.

G-force morph spring and damper

You can now control the jiggle behavior of g-force morph using the spring and damper sliders.

I decided to not have the mass of the anchor joint as a factor in the morph value calculation. It made the spring and damper sliders too inconsistent, and didn't really make a lot of sense anyway; since the jiggle morphing is a way to fake soft physics, mass relate to density of the soft tissue rather than the actual mass of the region. Density is more or less the same in different parts of the body, and any differences in consistency can be sufficiently accounted for with different springs and dampers.

However, it still matters what the joint masses are. You can adjust those with Body Weight. A higher mass means morphs anchored to that joint automatically average the acceleration of that joint over a larger number of physcis updates, resulting in more inertia/delay in translating g-forces into morph values.

Regions

The main Shapeshift window shows regions vertical tabs. Each region shows which bones/joints are contained in it and how many morphs the region affects.

A morph can belong into two regions depending on the anchors that the morph's value is driven by. For example, the thigh morphs belong to Pelvis (anchor: lThigh/rThigh) and Left/Right leg (anchor: lShin/rShin).

Morphs by default use the region springs and dampers, but can also set those individually. Some of the included morphs have individually defined springs and dampers.

Play around with the multipliers, springs and dampers to see how they affect the morphing!

UI changes

• Aside from the regions implementation, the g-forces and angles overview windows are gone, in favor of morph specific Debug Values windows that are accessible in the morph's settings.

• In the G-force Morphs tab, added Spring and Damper sliders, Use anchor region spring and Use anchor region damper toggles, a reset button for resetting the morph settings to zero (although now that I think of it a Defaults button would be nice as well). Some changes to the layout.

• In the Bone Offsets tab, added Load defaults and Zero all buttons. For now, those do the same thing, since I haven't yet added any default configuration where bone offsets would be non zero.

Loading poses programmatically

This shouldn't have any effect on the user end, other than two things:

1) The fact that temporary poses will no longer be stored in your VAM folder. You can check VAM/Custom/Atom/Person/Pose/everlaster/Naturalis folder - there might be some old temporary poses that the plugin has for some reason failed to delete. Feel free to delete the entire Pose/everlaster folder.

2) There's a slight twitch that occurs at the end of calibration when the plugin loads the pose that the person was in before calibration. I'm not yet sure why that happens, it's not a massive issue but would be nice to get rid of.

Fixes & other

• Fixed silent error breaking the plugin when navigating to twist angle target window (introduced in the previous alpha)

• Fixed issue where adding the plugin caused some of the physics parameters in TittyMagic/BootyMagic to have some offsets already applied (introduced in the previous alpha)

• Uninteractable sliders show now show greyed out quick buttons

• Fixed "calibration pending" status set by a bone offset toggling pending or not pending based on the bone selected in the UI

• Fixed secondary anchor popup not showing the correct value when a morph config was selected

• Back g-force morphs are also redone (one up morph and one down morph for the entire back, using higher dampers to prevent jiggling)

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It's still a long way to the goal line. I'm trying to embrace the fact that v1.4 massive and will take much more time than previous versions to finish.

For the next alpha, I will be focusing on two things: chest area g-force morphs, and figuring out the details of the morphing systems of TittyMagic and BootyMagic and how those will combine with Shapeshift.

And after that, I want to implement joint angle morphs that affect the glute/breast regions, before starting to actually use the new morphing systems for TittyMagic/BootyMagic and adding new morphs into those systems. Looking at the glute g-force morphs and how they affect the mesh in different poses, it's clear that the joint angle morphs will assume that the included g-force morphed shape is the baseline shape on which the angle morphs will act. They will probably work unoptimally but still pretty well without g-force morphs.

-everlaster