samoth, could you please explain your approach visually? I don't understand what kind of vector you mean.I am talking about the vector that you refer to as "normal" in your 5:05 post. Which I guess is somewhat kind of the correct term too, although this "normal" is not necessarily "normal length" in the soft body calculation. I called it "pressure" vector for that reason. Maybe "perpendicular" is a better term... but let's not dispute what we call it, if everyone knows what vector we talk about.
Either way, it's that vector one would be interested in, as it is already available for free and it points into the correct direction. If you imagine a straight line between two control points, then the smoothed point in the middle would be "pulled" outside in the direction of the normal (by a small amount, say, 1/3 of the normal's length, one would need to experiment what looks best).
Note that coincidentially, drawing the outline and smoothing is almost the same. Except for the outline, you will need to normalize the "non-normal normal".
As for "fast inverse square root in Java", this is probably a bit of a non-optimization. Executing half a dozen lines of Java code including two rounding operations is almost guaranteed to be much slower than to just tell the Java compiler to divide by a square root.
