1.15 Update Preview (Patreon)

1.15 release is all about improvements to physics simulations and performance. Everything mentioned here is already completed, and I'm very happy with the end results. The video showcases most of what has been done.

I'm going to take about another week to finish up 1.15 release (a few notes at end on what is left), but I wanted to give an update of some of what is in store. 

Improved soft-body physics

• Improved fast movement reaction
• Fixed jitter/flashing
• Max soft-body movement range param added to allow more range of movement
• Added fine-control of 4 breast zones with spring and damper multiplier params. Allows more variety, increased realism, and ripple control.

Greatly improved cloth physics

• New "fiber" joints. Much less stretch. Better shape hold, which helps with thin strips and folds. Faster than previous elasticity joints: 2 iterations give better results than 5 iterations of old sim. All sim clothing comes with new defaults due to changes.
• Improved fast movement reaction. Less clip through of skin.
• Fixed physics vibration and instability

Greatly improved hair physics

• Elasticity system completely redone. Now have more control over root to tip rigidity with 4 new parameters. 
• New "cling" system added with adjustable parameter. This helps hold the style without locking hair in place to head as the previous elasticity system did. 
• Added new spread limit with adjustable param which helps control clipping of hair through body.
• Optimizations. Simulation part of sim hair is much faster. Rendering is still the bottleneck (further work on that mentioned below)
• New hair benchmarks added to isolate simulation and rendering to help with further optimization in future. Existing hair benchmark is a muddled mix
• Fixed physics vibration and instability

Performance improvements

• Main CPU-bottleneck reduced. >10% increase in performance on worst benchmark "CPU High Physics". Other benchmarks show even greater increase.
• Increased parallelism/threading for character tasks. Results in less thread-wait time in some cases

Plans for this week to finish the release

• Try to further improve sim hair render performance as that is biggest reason for sim hair running slowly at this point. Physics simulation is now very fast.
• Bug fixes. I'll revisit the bug reports out there.
• Add more sim clothing.