Naturalis v1.0 alpha 5 release

Hi. Developing this version involved solving some rather challenging technical problems and took a lot of effort just in terms of the hours spent. I really hope you'll like it!

This version includes significant improvements to butt morphs, automatic calculation of glute mass, glute mass based scaling for glute joint physics parameters and some others that need it, and a lot of other changes and fixes.

BootyMagic morphing

Test the new morphs and physics in the demo scene: https://www.patreon.com/posts/80113654

Glute morphing now works much better and looks much smoother.

The glute shape in up/down and left/right directions no longer distorts the glute in an ugly way, it should look pretty good in every pose and should respond well to forces.

Added several new morphs which I made by combining built in or freely usable morphs and/or splitting such morphs to left and right components in Blender.

Basic Depth Out morphing is implemented, it uses a single glute scale Z morph.

While this should be a pretty big improvement over the previous morphing implementation, there's still a lot that could be improved. There are a few caveats to the booty morphing. While finish up Naturalis v1.0, I'll only pluck the low hanging fruit and fix the most critical issues, and leave further improvements to later down the road. Some of these issues are listed in the end of the post.

BootyMagic glute mass

Mass is now calculated automatically from glute volume. It works for a pretty wide range of glute sizes, as you'll see in the demo scene. However it doesn't accurately reflect the size of the butt, and it's not meant to - it's purely based on what looks good in animations.

Hard colliders get a portion of the mass that is estimated from glute volume during calibration. The larger the butt, the more mass is put to hard colliders instead of the glute joint. You can further tweak the amount of hard collider mass in the Hard Colliders tab to increase or reduce inertia of the glute joint without increasing weight (since gravity doesn't affect colliders). Unlike the glute joint mass itself, hard collider mass has no effect on any other physics parameters.

The maximum glute joint mass is 3.00 kg, down from 4.00 kg because for such a heavy butt, almost 1 kg of additional mass is applied to hard colliders.

BootyMagic physics changes

• Glute joint physics parameters now scale with the glute joint mass.
• Gravity physics: Removed adjustment of damper with glute joint angle (at least for now, it just wasn't doing anything useful)
• Gravity physics: Up/Down and Left/Right target angles are now adjusted more the higher the glute joint mass
• Soft Physics: Fat Spring gradient adjusted: higher outer multiplier, 1.00 center multiplier.
• Soft Physics: Fat Collider Radius and Distance Limit now scale pretty well with glute size.

UI changes

• BootyMagic softness and quickness sliders are disabled since they don't do anything yet.
• Improved Settings UI layout
• The pause morph updates toggle in Male Morphs and Female Morphs tab is now shared between BootyMagic and TittyMagic
• Both calibration buttons are now squeezed to the left side above the "Isolate Edit This Atom" button, taking less space. The calibration buttons show a "Calibration done" text for a short duration after calibration, and the calibration buttons are visible but disabled when the plugin is disabled.

In the future it'd be great to hide the buttons if there's no calibration pending or ongoing, unless in the plugin UI.

Hard Colliders tabs:

• Updated info texts
• "Base Collision Force" slider renamed to "Base Mass Multiplier"
• Collider specific "Collision Force" renamed to "Mass Multiplier"
• The actual collider mass is shown below the slider
• in BootyMagic, the mass slider color no longer changes

Calibration

• The person's pose pre-calibration is now always stored with Store Root Node In Pose unchecked, Store Bones In Pose checked, and Store Pose Morphs In Pose checked. (The original values for these checkboxes are restored at the end of calibration.)
• The calibration pose now zeroes all pose morphs, preventing pose morphs external to the plugin from affecting the calibration result.
• Small tweaks to the calibration pose itself.
• Calibration data saved to the scene includes a few additional required bits of info, thus scenes saved with alpha 4 or earlier aren't compatible with alpha 5 (in case you like to delete the previous version and then load a scene saved with it). Just calibrate after loading should be enough, or reload.

Local distortion physics is now off by default

The "Local Distortion Physics Default On" toggle in the plugin's User Preferences is now off by default. However, note that the previous alpha version will have created a prefs file for you where it might be enabled since that was the default then. This version uses that same configuration file.

I decided that this was the best way to go because of the performance impact. It's more important that people can reach a smooth framerate in order for the morphing to look good. And I don't want the local distortion physics to be an aditional reason for users to disable soft physics.

It's also a better user experience that the calibration doesn't take as long, although the longer multi-directional calibration cycle is something that could easily become the default in a future version.

Still, I hope LDP is something that will be used to enhance the experience when possible. Especially for breast physics. For the glute physics it's probably not as impactful.

Other changes

• Calibrate On Plugin UI Closed is now off by default in the plugin's User Preferences
• The triggerable calibration action name is changed from "Calibrate Physics And Morphs" to "Calibrate". It will also now always calibrate breast/glute mass. This makes it reliable to use when triggering a change in morph value and calibration simultaneously (with e.g. a button in the scene).
• Renamed Breast Mass -> Breast Joint Mass, Glute Mass -> Glute Joint Mass to more clearly distinguish those from the masses of breast and glute hard colliders
• Glute hard collider mass base multiplier is 1 by default and with range of 0 to 2 (up from default 0.5, range 0 to 1.5)

Fixes

• Fixed issue where breast/glute mass would not be updated during calibration if calibration was already pending when the size was changed with morphs or atom scale.
• Fixed bug where the friction UI elements were not shown in Skin Materials 2 if the person had a Dummy skin when the plugin was added, and skin was then changed to non-Dummy.
• Fixed various UI related issues when one or both plugins are disabled in the saved scene/preset.
• Fixed issue where Fat Spring and Fat Damper were not synced to soft joints when loading a scene with soft physics on and local distortion physics off.
• Fixed issue where the currently used pose preset would not load correctly when using the Load button in Pose Presets tab (or when loading that pose via a trigger). This was caused by the calibration pose switching done by the plugin.

______________

So, that's where we are now! Things are looking more and more like a beta than an alpha.

Remaining glute morphing issues:

• Morphing with soft physics off can look robotic and "linear" in a way, this definitely needs tweaking
• Some poses can be problematic for the glute shape
• Increasing the amount of morphing beyond a multiplier of 1.00 (in Morphs tab) can still cause jittering/oscillation, especially in the downward direction.
• While the Sideways Out morphing looks better than before, it still needs work
• Upward morphing could also be improved, it tends to slightly reduce glute volume and cause the glute under curve to shift up and down a bit too much.
• In general, the morphs could be higher quality and more realistic in shape, and more complex. I feel like the current system is still a bit simplistic and much less polished than the morphing in TittyMagic.
• While the Depth Out morphing helps preserve glute volume, it doesn't do a very good job at that. For a proper solution here, it's necessary to build a secondary morphing system that adjusts glute morphs purely based on the bone angles rather than differences in angle from a "zero" pose - something similar to Joint Correct but specifically for preserving butt volume in a way that scales correctly  for different butt sizes. This system would be beneficial for targeting specific poses like a doggy style pose, legs spread vs legs together, etc.

I'll take a few days break now, then continue putting in the remaining pieces of the puzzle.

-everlaster