1.14 Release Update

Hi All-

I have been quiet lately because I had to put a tremendous amount of effort into the clothing sim system and could not afford time for much else. That is all I have worked on this last month. I have greatly enhanced the system I started out with. I started with an abandoned system closely related to the hair sim system. After tons of work, I now have a system that works in VaM and is better than the original clothing and hair sim system in nearly every regard. This is pretty typical when using someone else's work and adapting it to a project. I'm pretty happy with the results so far. What I have done this month is:

• Combined the previous clothing wrap system with the clothing sim system. It is the best of both worlds. The clothing complies to the skin and morphs like skin wrap and simulates loose areas in realistic manner to avoid the odd bending artifacts from skin wrap only approach. I plan to go back and add sim versions of clothing items that can benefit from it.
• Enhanced Person atom to have full GPU colliders. All hair and clothing use these, meaning skin-accurate clothing and hair collision. There is a bit of a CPU and GPU performance penalty to this addition due to the large number of colliders (100s) on the Person, but I didn't see another way given current constraints. If you don't use sim clothing or hair, this penalty is avoided. I'm already planning in my head what VaM 2.X would do differently in this regard to be higher performance and better physics. I have some crazy ideas for 2.X (more on that in future update)!
• Added ability to break clothing away from skin to allow undress and posing of clothing. Currently this state cannot be saved, but I will plan on this in future so you can capture that special look. Below shows one funny and accidental way I discovered of utilizing the undress feature. With undress settings low enough, the clothing sort of melts away on this particular outfit due to how it was designed with separate pieces! 

• Added GPU colliders to several other atoms, like capsule and floors/walls, to allow interaction with clothing without having to possess another character. GPU colliders are limited to capsules, spheres, and planes so won't work with more complex objects. I'll be working to add more collider types in future, although mesh colliders will never work in this system so some complex collisions will not be possible.
• Added 2 new sim clothing items, a new skirt (not shown) and a new tank top (shown here). Added sim version of previous micro/mini skirt that is shown in both shots here.
• Added pseudo-friction system to clothing. Still needs a bit more work, but helps tremendously in realism and allows clothing to stick to skin a bit.

I'm very short on time before holiday travel, but I will do my best to get something in your hands before I leave. It may be just what you see here and nothing more as I did not yet have time to complete the morph work I committed. I plan to spend some time on that tomorrow to see if I can wrap that up and then get the release out.

Cheers!

Meshed