Around 100 piercings for each gender in a single var that are resistant to morph deformations, and have physics!
(This was so much work
)How?
Piercings are CUAs set up as clothing items. When you enable one, a hidden CUA will be loaded and attached behind the scenes thanks to Stopper's plugins (and a lot of custom code to add shader vamification, scaling, and re-coloring).
This is still a hack trying to work around VaM's limitations, so it currently has some flaws. See below.
Known Issues
Initialization
When you enable the item for the first time, you'll get a permission pop-up, which disrupts the clothing plugins' initialization, so the item won't load. You need to disable the clothing item, go to "Control & Physics 1" tab, click "Unload inactive objects" button (bottom right), and then re-enable it, after which all should load fine. This only needs to be done once.
Performance & attachment points
In the ideal world, all piercings would be attached to a point on a skin (vertex). This unfortunately currently costs a couple FPS for each piercing item, so only the piercings that absolutely need to be attached to a skin vertex are using this method. These are:
- Mouth Lips
- Nipples
- Navel (belly button)
All other piercings are attached to bones. This also means that their position ignores your morphs, and if the body area they are attached to is morphed too much from default, it'll cause the piercing to sink in or float outside the body. You can tweak piercing positions manually in CUAClothing plugin that manages it, which can be found here:
Though there is an issue with doing this, see below.
Saving piercing customization in scenes & presets
When you edit piercing's position, rotation, scale, or color in its managing plugin UI, these settings DO get stored with scenes and presets, but unfortunately they currently do not get re-applied on scene load. This is a bug in Stoppper.ClothingPluginManager plugin. If he returns from hiatus and fixes it, just update the plugin, and it should start working.
There's a workaround for loading presets by loading them twice - the customization will get applied on the 2nd load. Though this obviously won't work for scenes.
Troubleshooting
Nipple piercings are sunken into the chest
You don't have nipples. Add Nipples morph.
Can't see piercings after enabling them
They are probably inside the body. Most piercings (head & genitals) are attached to bones and oblivious to morphs. You need to change their offsets. See screenshot above to see where to find the UI for it. But keep in mind this currently won't be restored properly when reloading the scene, see explanation in Known Issues above.
Piercings are jumping around like crazy
Your morphs are probably making some of the body colliders extend too much from the body, pushing the piercing into a position it can't physically satisfy while maintaining its attachment point, making it impossible for it to settle.
You have two options here. Either use a piercing that doesn't use physics (for nipples that would be bars, pins, studs/spikes), or add a ColliderEditor plugin to the person atom, and tweak the offending colliders causing this issue.
Piercings look all grey and ugly
Reflective materials look only as good as the environment map they are reflecting. Easy fix is to try and play with these values:
Or you can install some of the better skyboxes / reflection probes available on vamhub, and combine them with MacGruber's SkyMagic Loader (part of MacGruber.Essentials package) to apply it as a reflection probe to materials in a scene.
