Plugins [Experimental] Alternative Futa

[Stopper]

Hi all,

So this has moved beyond an issue of code and more towards aesthetics, which is out of my expertise. I also need to pick a direction to focus on since it'll be more difficult making progress from here. I'm hoping this group can help me figure out where to go next..

First up is the question of what to do with the vagina...

1. Keep it.
   1. There's no other way to do both gens in VAM.
   2. Anus is built-in, and works with female physics
   3. It can potentially be hidden by other means
   4. Doesn't align well with the penis
      1. The natural position of the penis (with pelvis hidden) puts it far enough back to cover a good bit of the vagina, which isn't great. Even if things are moved around and rotated somewhat, the balls will still cover the clitoral hood, which might not be too bad.
      2. 
2. Hide it (use the base gens)
   1. Better blending with penis textures
   2. No anus
      1. Could be 'painted' on via texture, and then given depth via morph.
   3. Some community textures put random stuff in this region since it's usually invisible.

I like option 1, but it'll be a lot more work to get something that looks 'smooth' and with minimal seams. It'll also mean I need to learn how to do actual morphs.

I don't know how to do a poll on these forums so maybe y'all can just weigh in.

 

[3rdStoryline]

+1 for Vagina being included. And having the fully functional anus.
I feel, in the event of wanting no vagina for a character, I'd rather flatten it with morphs and have it hidden to a degree with texture edits, in order to have a fully functional Anus. Then to have perfected seams and zero option for intercourse. As the anus for the male character was pretty bad, so getting the upgrade of a fully functional anus, along with the Female Atoms Collision profile is definitely a bigger win, IMO. (option 1)

Getting a painted on Anus, with no usability what-so-ever, may not be a good trade off for gaining the collision profile of a Female Atom. As now there would be no sex, in a game that revolves around it.

As a side note, there is also the concern of performance. Technically with the supplemental colliders plugin, a male atom has less of a performance impact, then a Female Atom with Alternative Futa plugin.
So with option 2 you'd essentially be trading FPS performance, and the ability to have sex.. Just to be able to wear clothing with better collision, In a simulator/game where clothing is usually off during the main act anyway.
With option 1, you're gaining a fully functional clothing system, a fully functional Anus, with the trade off of having both a Penis and a Vagina, or having just a penis with some inaccuracies behind the scrotum.

 

[gghhoosstt123]

Hi all,

So this has moved beyond an issue of code and more towards aesthetics, which is out of my expertise. I also need to pick a direction to focus on since it'll be more difficult making progress from here. I'm hoping this group can help me figure out where to go next..

First up is the question of what to do with the vagina...

1. Keep it.
   1. There's no other way to do both gens in VAM.
   2. Anus is built-in, and works with female physics
   3. It can potentially be hidden by other means
   4. Doesn't align well with the penis
      1. The natural position of the penis (with pelvis hidden) puts it far enough back to cover a good bit of the vagina, which isn't great. Even if things are moved around and rotated somewhat, the balls will still cover the clitoral hood, which might not be too bad.
      2. View attachment 259499
2. Hide it (use the base gens)
   1. Better blending with penis textures
   2. No anus
      1. Could be 'painted' on via texture, and then given depth via morph.
   3. Some community textures put random stuff in this region since it's usually invisible.

I like option 1, but it'll be a lot more work to get something that looks 'smooth' and with minimal seams. It'll also mean I need to learn how to do actual morphs.

I don't know how to do a poll on these forums so maybe y'all can just weigh in.

I will definitly go for 1st option, what you have done is already a big thing in the 1st place which at one point everyone thought was not really possible to do in vam, i would say to also set hide female gen to off by default when applying the plugin. Don't need to rush anything maybe something in future comes handy which could be then applied to the plugin to hide female vagina so i would say definitly go for option 1.

 

[GordonShock]

I'll +1 option 1 as well.

@Stopper Quoting you here: Another option is hiding unneeded parts of the mesh triangle-by-triangle during grafting, and then pinning them to the base mesh (again, vertex by vertex). It's a chore I've been putting off.

I can help with that if you want. Just shoot me a DM, explain to me what's needed, and I'll do it the best I can. ✌

 

[Stopper]

I'll +1 option 1 as well.

@Stopper Quoting you here: Another option is hiding unneeded parts of the mesh triangle-by-triangle during grafting, and then pinning them to the base mesh (again, vertex by vertex). It's a chore I've been putting off.

I can help with that if you want. Just shoot me a DM, explain to me what's needed, and I'll do it the best I can. ✌

<3 , but I'll first need to build myself the tooling to do it. I'll keep you all posted.

 

[Stopper]

Ok, so first some good news. @WeebUVR made a morph that moves the bottom of the male pelvis to inside body.


There's still a visible seam, but it otherwise works pretty great!


From here, my next thought was to use VAM's 'pinning' implementation to help smooth out the seam. What I mean by 'pinning' is the auto-deformation that you'll see with the full male pelvis where its edges try to line up with the rest of the body, i.e.


So I wrote some separate scripts to roughly auto-map the penis to the closest point on the gen and realized that the graft line would not be smooth. Not great but oh well.


But, naturally, it didn't work. I looked deeper into the code and it looks like you can only pin to the 'base' mesh. So it can work if you hide the vagina (disregard the black/missing triangles, I can probably fix those)



But if you show the vagina it'll cause it to always have a gap since it expects the body to meet it halfway.


I've beat my head against this for a bit and I don't see a way around it. It's not even just a matter of re-writing the grafting code, since the same limitation applies to how vertices are updated at runtime.


My next move is going to be trying to change how the full pelvis is pinned to the body. Specifically:

• Unpin bottom edge that typically half-covers the vagina
• Pin the area just behind the testicles to the body.
  • Something like this, but likely further in front of the clit
  • 
• Fix the black/missing triangles
• Otherwise clean up the pinning and clipping

If anyone's got any better ideas let me know.

 

[gghhoosstt123]

Ok, so first some good news. @WeebUVR made a morph that moves the bottom of the male pelvis to inside body.
View attachment 260184View attachment 260183

There's still a visible seam, but it otherwise works pretty great!


From here, my next thought was to use VAM's 'pinning' implementation to help smooth out the seam. What I mean by 'pinning' is the auto-deformation that you'll see with the full male pelvis where its edges try to line up with the rest of the body, i.e.
View attachment 260185

So I wrote some separate scripts to roughly auto-map the penis to the closest point on the gen and realized that the graft line would not be smooth. Not great but oh well.
View attachment 260181

But, naturally, it didn't work. I looked deeper into the code and it looks like you can only pin to the 'base' mesh. So it can work if you hide the vagina (disregard the black/missing triangles, I can probably fix those)

View attachment 260192

But if you show the vagina it'll cause it to always have a gap since it expects the body to meet it halfway.
View attachment 260193

I've beat my head against this for a bit and I don't see a way around it. It's not even just a matter of re-writing the grafting code, since the same limitation applies to how vertices are updated at runtime.


My next move is going to be trying to change how the full pelvis is pinned to the body. Specifically:

• Unpin bottom edge that typically half-covers the vagina
• Pin the area just behind the testicles to the body.
  • Something like this, but likely further in front of the clit
  • View attachment 260204
• Fix the black/missing triangles
• Otherwise clean up the pinning and clipping

If anyone's got any better ideas let me know.

Holyshit! This stuff looks so complicated you doing some madness out here XD

 

[Stopper]

Stopper updated [Experimental] Alternative Futa with a new update entry:

Various Geometry Fixes

I played around with various setups for 'pinning' the gens to the pelvis, but none ended up looking great. In the end, I went with just unpinning the perineum so that WeebUVR's morph worked on it correctly.

• The default setting is now to show the vagina and male pelvis.
• Added "AltFuta Hide Perineum" morph created by @WeebUVR
• Added "AltFuta Gap Fix" morph created by combining a few built-in morphs
  • Can help tighten the gen area to hide gaps
  ...

Read the rest of this update entry...

 

[MvFF]

thanks for the plugin, it is getting quite close to being really good
i am holding out hope you can handle the seams eventually. but they're hard to see unless you get very close.

 

[kurowan]

.14 version doesn't match body color anymore for me. It wasn't a problem on .13

 

[Stopper]

.14 version doesn't match body color anymore for me. It wasn't a problem on .13

Oof, not sure how I broke that but I'll take look.

 

[3rdStoryline]

Another thing that might be worth looking into, is being able to hide the Penis along with the Female Genitalia, when Disable Anatomy is activated on a clothing piece. As right now there isn't really a way to hide Alternative Futa when Clothing is being worn. The only way I found was using Hide Material option, but that isn't available to trigger in events, and SSS will just make it visible again anyway.

As a side note, I thought maybe triggering the plugin on and off would work, but while trying that(to hide the Penis Gen) I think I may have found a bug with it? So, I was editing a pre-created character, with this plugin already enabled on it. After changing various textures both in the plugin, and on the Female Atom's Skin, Disabling Alternative Futa, and re-enabling it, reverted all changes I made to the Female Atom's Skin, but not Alt Futa. However, this method for hiding the Genitalia while wearing clothes wouldn't exactly work anyway, because of the loading of all the textures, and pauses that occur when enabling the plugin.

 

[kurowan]

Correction*
I tried downgrading to previous versions but none is matching the skin color anymore. I'm not really sure why, as it worked in the past. It always load in the kind of default skin color

Conclusion:
It seems to only work with the Lexi skin. That was the problem.

 

[gghhoosstt123]

This could be a start of something! it looks great as i tried it, check this out if you haven't yet https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/base-resources-for-futa-creation-on-female-model.36036/

On a side note i noticed there are to sliders for Z offset i think it might be here by mistake? or is there actually an alternate usage to this as i am curious ?

 

[Stopper]

This could be a start of something! it looks great as i tried it, check this out if you haven't yet

I have! Haven't gotten a chance to play around with it too much but it looks great. BooMoon went in another direction (literally) by shifting the vagina towards the testicles whereas was trying to close it from the sides.



My plan is still to actually buy the female gens and learn to use blender enough to custom-make this morph (this one's just a combination of various other vagina morphs). I think closing the vagina from the sides will stretch the textures less.

I also pinned one vertex at the base of the testicles to go around the clit, which probably made BooMoon's life a bit harder. I should have made that configurable at least....

On a side note i noticed there are to sliders for Z offset i think it might be here by mistake? or is there actually an alternate usage to this as i am curious

No, just a copy/paste error that my brain somehow didn't register even as I looked over the UI for the billionth time.


Otherwise I'm still not sure what to do about the seams.


I don't think there's a 'good' solution unfortunately.

• Custom texture for the female gens + Custom morphs that align the two perfectly
  • Custom textures would suck, since it would mean only a handful of textures are compatible
  • The morphs could be created at runtime, theoretically, and auto-adjust based on the geometry.
    • This would likely be easier for me than learning how to blender..
• A cloth covering around the seam that acts as spackle
  • This cloth could be transparent around the edges for better blending.
  • It'd be a pain to wrap correctly, but this idea is part of the reason I wrote the ReWrapper
• Morph/stretch the perineum all the way to the anus, and pin it in place.
  • Downside here is that the texture might not look great stretched that much
  • There'll also be gaps around the sides that'll be hard to close, since those are actually the vagina mesh (which I can't pin to)
• Auto-generate a decal around the seam that blends the two textures.

Most of this is out of my wheelhouse but I'll keep poking at it...

 

[gghhoosstt123]

I have! Haven't gotten a chance to play around with it too much but it looks great. BooMoon went in another direction (literally) by shifting the vagina towards the testicles whereas was trying to close it from the sides.

View attachment 262249

My plan is still to actually buy the female gens and learn to use blender enough to custom-make this morph (this one's just a combination of various other vagina morphs). I think closing the vagina from the sides will stretch the textures less.

I also pinned one vertex at the base of the testicles to go around the clit, which probably made BooMoon's life a bit harder. I should have made that configurable at least....



No, just a copy/paste error that my brain somehow didn't register even as I looked over the UI for the billionth time.


Otherwise I'm still not sure what to do about the seams.
View attachment 262255View attachment 262256

I don't think there's a 'good' solution unfortunately.

• Custom texture for the female gens + Custom morphs that align the two perfectly
  • Custom textures would suck, since it would mean only a handful of textures are compatible
  • The morphs could be created at runtime, theoretically, and auto-adjust based on the geometry.
    • This would likely be easier for me than learning how to blender..
• A cloth covering around the seam that acts as spackle
  • This cloth could be transparent around the edges for better blending.
  • It'd be a pain to wrap correctly, but this idea is part of the reason I wrote the ReWrapper
• Morph/stretch the perineum all the way to the anus, and pin it in place.
  • Downside here is that the texture might not look great stretched that much
  • There'll also be gaps around the sides that'll be hard to close, since those are actually the vagina mesh (which I can't pin to)
• Auto-generate a decal around the seam that blends the two textures.

Most of this is out of my wheelhouse but I'll keep poking at it...

Yea i figured with the ReWrapper that the cloth idea might be in the process for the altfuta plugin, and yea its a tricky task to jump into blender specially with the costs that comes with it, well at the very least i am sure many would be pretty satisfied with this new morph coming into play and it doesn't look that bad either infact will definitly prefer to implement it for the time being instead of the default, you guys are doing some madness out here!

 

[Krauser]

hmm, how about a way to add genital normals to it, I tried converting a normal map into a bump map but it didn't seem to work with the bump, or maybe I screwed something up, is this possible?

 

[MvFF]

I've been saving "General" Presets for looks using this plugin,
it doesn't seem to load the texture settings correctly, specifically specular and diffuse bumpiness get set to 0 when i load the preset.

 

[Stopper]

Hey all.

Apologies for the lack of updates. I've had some project deadlines to meet for my actual job.

I've continued to iterate on this, though. There've been a lot of false startsbut I've made some progress...

• I've figured out how to pin the two gen meshes to each other (typically you could only pin them to the base mesh)
  • The solution was to pin both to the base mesh at the same point. Go figure....
• I've built myself some better vertex selection tools specifically to help with pinning.
  • I've used this stretch the perineum around the vagina.
  • Also fixed the various gaps
• I've figured out how to hide individual vertices, so now the female pelvis doesn't render behind the male pelvis, and the vagina doesn't render at all if hidden.
• Tracked down why there were gaps between pinned vertices, even if I did it right. Turns out it's a tesselation issue and Hunting Succubus' tesselation mod fixes it.

The end result is a fairly smooth geometry that can be further improved with morphs if need be. Unfortunately, the textures do not align and there's no easy solution for that.



Next step is to figure out how to do the pinning and hiding for a version that shows the vagina. I'm hoping this'll be a lot quicker now that I know what I'm doing.

Hoping to have an update out sometime this week.

 

[MvFF]

Nice, it looks great.
I briefly tested exporting the Atom as an Obj, which i do for texture painting. it doesn't work with the plugin active, which i expected. the genitals export as a mess of vertices.

Is it possible to create your own obj export tool?
if we can export the female mesh with the male gens attached into blender, we can create textures that blend correctly.

 

[Stopper]

Nice, it looks great.
I briefly tested exporting the Atom as an Obj, which i do for texture painting. it doesn't work with the plugin active, which i expected. the genitals export as a mess of vertices.

Is it possible to create your own obj export tool?
if we can export the female mesh with the male gens attached into blender, we can create textures that blend correctly.

Odd... It seems to work for me. Looks fine in DAZ.



Not sure what I'm doing differently.

 

[MvFF]

Odd... It seems to work for me. Looks fine in DAZ.

View attachment 270061

Not sure what I'm doing differently.

oh, wow, maybe i did something wrong, i will try again.

*EDIT*
it worked for me this time, not sure why it broke previously, guess i was messing around with other stuff.
regardless, excited for the next release of your plugin

 

[gghhoosstt123]

Hey all.

Apologies for the lack of updates. I've had some project deadlines to meet for my actual job.

I've continued to iterate on this, though. There've been a lot of false startsbut I've made some progress...

• I've figured out how to pin the two gen meshes to each other (typically you could only pin them to the base mesh)
  • The solution was to pin both to the base mesh at the same point. Go figure....
• I've built myself some better vertex selection tools specifically to help with pinning.
  • I've used this stretch the perineum around the vagina.
  • Also fixed the various gaps
• I've figured out how to hide individual vertices, so now the female pelvis doesn't render behind the male pelvis, and the vagina doesn't render at all if hidden.
• Tracked down why there were gaps between pinned vertices, even if I did it right. Turns out it's a tesselation issue and Hunting Succubus' tesselation mod fixes it.

The end result is a fairly smooth geometry that can be further improved with morphs if need be. Unfortunately, the textures do not align and there's no easy solution for that.

View attachment 270056View attachment 270053View attachment 270054View attachment 270055

Next step is to figure out how to do the pinning and hiding for a version that shows the vagina. I'm hoping this'll be a lot quicker now that I know what I'm doing.

Hoping to have an update out sometime this week.

This is just getting better and better with every new update, can't wait to test it out once it comes out ?, with time everything will come through with this one!

 

[giallone]

This looks really promising...
Just my 2 cents on the textures aligining problem, maybe i say something stupid or that you already tried but, what about having an alpha option for the border of the genitals parts? i mean in particular the genital pelvis, where it meets with female textures, etc. Could help a bit with the blending maybe
Thank you for all the great work you do!

 

[Stopper]

This looks really promising...
Just my 2 cents on the textures aligining problem, maybe i say something stupid or that you already tried but, what about having an alpha option for the border of the genitals parts? i mean in particular the genital pelvis, where it meets with female textures, etc. Could help a bit with the blending maybe
Thank you for all the great work you do!

It's not a dumb idea and I've played around with it. Two issues:

1. You'd need to always position the transparent texture in front of the solid one. The two bodyparts are affected by different sets of morphs so that'll be something that needs to be re-configured for every look.
   1. This also means I can't use 'pinning' to have VAM align the vertices together. That'll make the two textures line on top of each other and z-fight.
2. VAM doesn't have a shader that allows for both transparency and tessellation (smoothness). Apart from looking a bit more blocky, aligning a non-tessellated texture with a tessellated one will cause visible gaps.

There might be a clever solution there that I'm not thinking of, but I've abandoned that path for now.

Something like this might work:

GitHub - zfergus/seam-erasure: Seamlessly erase seams from your favorite 3D models.

Seamlessly erase seams from your favorite 3D models. - zfergus/seam-erasure

github.com

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sliu11/seamless/Seamless-small.pdf

But that'd take a whole lot of work. I'd need to adapt it from Python, as well as make it work for disjoint meshes.