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Hi. I've made some good progress on the technical side and UI. Not much progress on the morphs yet, however I'm pretty confident that the acceleration based morphs won't take long to create.
The joint angle based morphs are more labor intensive to do because of the requirement to start the sculpting of each morph from a different pose (specific joint at a specific angle), and those poses can't be done within DAZ on the base Genesis 2 figure because of how the bones are positioned and rotated in DAZ compared to VAM. I need to export the object from VAM in the correct pose and then sculpt from there, otherwise it won't look right when imported back into VAM. The joint angle morphs are also technically more difficult to sculpt, and involve more background research into reference poses etc.
I'm aiming for the next release to have acceleration morphs (maybe not the final versions, but something close to that), and then the releases after that to add the joint angle morphs into the mix.
The next release will also have a new feature called Bone Offsets.
Bone Offsets
In VAM, morphs can contain bone morphs (aka bone formulas) which are just position/rotation offsets that target specific bones in the skeleton. You may be familiar with the red cog symbol shown on some morph sliders in the Female Morphs tab which indicates that the morph has bone morphs.
Turns out, it's possible to apply these offsets programmatically (on the fly) without requiring actual morph files.
In the Bone Offsets window of the upcoming Shapeshift module, you can configure every major bone's x, y and z position and rotation. Current UI with some test adjustments applied:
The reason for including this in Shapeshift (as opposed to a separate plugin) is because the positions and rotations of bones can have a drastic effect on the shape of the skin mesh around the bone/joint. The plan is to include a default setup that's optimized for the plugin's built in joint angle based morphs, or rather that the morphs will be optimized for.
An example of such an optimization would be shifting the shoulder bone closer a bit towards the collar bone so that the shoulder bends more naturally by default. The angle morph targeting the shoulder's rotation along each rotational axis will then be based on this new bone position:
Other completed tasks
Acceleration morphs will be known as g-force morphs, and all acceleration units will be expressed in g's (1 g = 9.81 m/s^2)
Storing g-force morph and angle morph configurations in plugin data (and restoring from)
Multipliers on the overall effect of g-force and angle morphing
Implemented a somewhat intuitive visualization of the current amount of g-force in the direction relevant to the selected morph configuration, as well as a similar visualization for the change in angle of the selected angle morph configuration. I will demo these in a video that explains the basics of how to use the system.
Table formatted overviews of g-forces and angles affecting the whole body (helps with forming an understanding of the system, and for debugging angles at different poses etc)
(a bunch of polishing of the Shapeshift codebase)
Thanks for reading!
-everlaster
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