Do you ever feel like the scenes you can create in VaM are mostly animation viewers with no real interaction?
Do you sometimes wanted VaM to be more like a game and less like an engine?
Do you feel like you're missing out the experience by not having a VR headset?Well, we are.
Then you have come to the right place, my fellow VaM user!
In this quick guide I'll show you how to create FPP POV scenes with a more interaction-focused approach. That is, you actually have use WASD for lateral movement, ZX for vertical movement, mouse movement to look around and keybinds to do actions with characters in a scene. To do this, as far as I know, we unfortunately do not have a dedicated plugin (and don't ask me how to create one, I know nothing about that). However, using some magic by combining different plugins and intelligent use of triggers, we can create some very funky stuff. I've included a very simple demo scene which showcases everything I'm showing here, if you want to check it out yourself.
The first step is creating the poses. The poses will dictate which body parts move with your camera movement, and which don't. Pose your character in the scene however you like, then use position and rotation "Lock" to whichever part of the body you want static. Parts of the body that are ok to move you can either leave position and rotation "Off" to completely follow your head movement, or use "On" to give some resistance, but not impede your head movement. Using the "Lock" in the character's chest is a terrible option because then the head cannot move properly, so it should always be left either "On" or "Off".
For example, if you want to make a cowgirl scene and have your hands move with your head, you have to lock your hips and feet (otherwise they'll move with your head), and setting your chest to "On", adjusting the desired position and rotation, or "Off". Now here comes the magic. Let's say you want to grope the girl's titties while she rides you. Then you have to position the hands in relation to your face however you like, select the atom you want to possess as "Link To Atom", then "Link To" head. The final pose can be something like this:
Notice that the knees, feet and hip are set to "Lock", while the chest is set to "On". The hands are symmetrically positioned relative to the face, and set to follow your head movement. Make sure to constantly save your poses, TRUST ME.
Now, for the control of the head and hands, instead of using VaM's built in possession, we are going to use @Acid Bubbles's Embody plugin. There's a few settings you need to configure before activating to not screw everything up. Set profile to Improved Possession, go to Trackers, disable "Use Profile", "Restore pose after possession" and "Enable hands", and set everything to 0 on this screen (should be by default). Like this:
Everything else in the main page should be left as default, unless you are creative to try some interesting things, like simulating 3rd person perspective. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Now, there's one problem: If you activate Embody and then deactivate it later, it's going to move your head thereby screwing the position and rotation of your default pose. So, to avoid this, we are going to create a trigger upon deactivation of Embody that restores the pose. Such as:
Now you might be asking yourself, why aren't we using the "Restore pose after possession" setting we disabled earlier? Well, it turns out that this setting only restores control to "On", so we loose the movement of our hands upon deactivation of Embody. So, we need to create the trigger ourselves.
Now that this is done, you can safely turn on Embody without screwing your pose. It should look like this:
So I guess you already know where this is going. Load up a hottie, set up an animation and test to see how it is. If your hand positioning is wrong, simply reload the pose and adjust it accordingly. Here I'm using @Vinput's AutoThruster to animate her hip movement, for the sake of simplicity, but you can do it with @Acid Bubbles' Timeline as well. Check it out:
Now is the time we can get really creative. What if we did a set of different poses, each with different moving body parts, and then tying either keybinds or button presses to load each pose? Yup, doable, like creating a button that does this:
But there's some problems associated with this:
First, when you load a new pose, Embody automatically deactivates, so you'll need to also include into the trigger to reactivate Embody every time you load a new pose. This is easily solvable.
Second, remember that we set the Embody trigger to load the first pose when it deactivates? Yeah, well, you'll need multiple Embody plugins for this to work. Each Embody will be tied to a certain pose, which will be tied to certain animations, and this is the first limitation we encounter. Your character will be bloated with Embody plugins depending on the number of poses in the scene. I currently know no other way to circumvent this. Unless, of course, @Acid Bubbles can make a version of the plugin which adds an option that when restoring the pose after possession, it keeps the nodes that were Parent Linked. That way, you would only need one Embody plugin.
Third, when you have two Embody plugins in the same scene, even if you activate only one of them, the simple fact of having two of the same plugins in the scene enabled messes with possession. As such, every time you enable one Embody, you have to remember to both deactivate and disable other Embody plugins (they're not the same thing, enable means it is succeptible to triggers, active means you are currently possessing). This was a problem in my recent Intimate Frontseat Dock scene where multiple Atoms have Embody, and you have to disable all the others to Embody one Atom properly, which is now fixed! Go check it out.
Now that this is out of the way, let's do a doggy pose. Again, you want your feet locked, but your hips and chest must move with your head. Hands should now be also set "Parent Link" on the girl's hips so they follow her ass. Here's the pose (and remember, they only have to look good in FPP):
And here's the action:
Notice how easy it is to switch where you target! Incredible stuff, endless possibilites my dude.
Now, I have one final nice thing to show you before we part ways. Let's say your hand got tired (of moving your mouse, I mean), and you want stuff to be automatic for a while. Can you combine your movement with AutoThruster or Timeline? And the answer is... Yes! You can! Just slap that plug in, add a keybind to that bad boy and boom, it takes control over your hip. You can even toggle it back in case you want to take control again. You can even do something like combining the two plugins: Animate other parts of the body with Timeline, while your hip is free for you to control when you want, and automatic via AutoThruster when you desire as well. Check it out:
There's much that I've left off. For example, you can use AutoThruster to animate hands as well upon keybind toggle. That means that you can place one hand where you want, activate the animation, then go and place the other hand in another place, and toggle the second animation with a second keybind. Now both of your hands are locked doing an animation while you are free to move the rest. Pretty cool stuff.
Hope you can use these insights to create your next scenes!
I recently started to create scenes in VaM. My content is and will always be FREE, under CC BY license when possible. Your support would be greatly appreciated! Check them out here.
- Huge thanks to all the creators that made it possible!
@Acid Bubbles
@everlaster
@JaxZoa
@MacGruber
@ToumeiHitsuji
@Vinput
Do you sometimes wanted VaM to be more like a game and less like an engine?
Do you feel like you're missing out the experience by not having a VR headset?
Then you have come to the right place, my fellow VaM user!
In this quick guide I'll show you how to create FPP POV scenes with a more interaction-focused approach. That is, you actually have use WASD for lateral movement, ZX for vertical movement, mouse movement to look around and keybinds to do actions with characters in a scene. To do this, as far as I know, we unfortunately do not have a dedicated plugin (and don't ask me how to create one, I know nothing about that). However, using some magic by combining different plugins and intelligent use of triggers, we can create some very funky stuff. I've included a very simple demo scene which showcases everything I'm showing here, if you want to check it out yourself.
The first step is creating the poses. The poses will dictate which body parts move with your camera movement, and which don't. Pose your character in the scene however you like, then use position and rotation "Lock" to whichever part of the body you want static. Parts of the body that are ok to move you can either leave position and rotation "Off" to completely follow your head movement, or use "On" to give some resistance, but not impede your head movement. Using the "Lock" in the character's chest is a terrible option because then the head cannot move properly, so it should always be left either "On" or "Off".
For example, if you want to make a cowgirl scene and have your hands move with your head, you have to lock your hips and feet (otherwise they'll move with your head), and setting your chest to "On", adjusting the desired position and rotation, or "Off". Now here comes the magic. Let's say you want to grope the girl's titties while she rides you. Then you have to position the hands in relation to your face however you like, select the atom you want to possess as "Link To Atom", then "Link To" head. The final pose can be something like this:
Notice that the knees, feet and hip are set to "Lock", while the chest is set to "On". The hands are symmetrically positioned relative to the face, and set to follow your head movement. Make sure to constantly save your poses, TRUST ME.
Now, for the control of the head and hands, instead of using VaM's built in possession, we are going to use @Acid Bubbles's Embody plugin. There's a few settings you need to configure before activating to not screw everything up. Set profile to Improved Possession, go to Trackers, disable "Use Profile", "Restore pose after possession" and "Enable hands", and set everything to 0 on this screen (should be by default). Like this:
Everything else in the main page should be left as default, unless you are creative to try some interesting things, like simulating 3rd person perspective. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Now, there's one problem: If you activate Embody and then deactivate it later, it's going to move your head thereby screwing the position and rotation of your default pose. So, to avoid this, we are going to create a trigger upon deactivation of Embody that restores the pose. Such as:
Now you might be asking yourself, why aren't we using the "Restore pose after possession" setting we disabled earlier? Well, it turns out that this setting only restores control to "On", so we loose the movement of our hands upon deactivation of Embody. So, we need to create the trigger ourselves.
Now that this is done, you can safely turn on Embody without screwing your pose. It should look like this:
So I guess you already know where this is going. Load up a hottie, set up an animation and test to see how it is. If your hand positioning is wrong, simply reload the pose and adjust it accordingly. Here I'm using @Vinput's AutoThruster to animate her hip movement, for the sake of simplicity, but you can do it with @Acid Bubbles' Timeline as well. Check it out:
Now is the time we can get really creative. What if we did a set of different poses, each with different moving body parts, and then tying either keybinds or button presses to load each pose? Yup, doable, like creating a button that does this:
But there's some problems associated with this:
First, when you load a new pose, Embody automatically deactivates, so you'll need to also include into the trigger to reactivate Embody every time you load a new pose. This is easily solvable.
Second, remember that we set the Embody trigger to load the first pose when it deactivates? Yeah, well, you'll need multiple Embody plugins for this to work. Each Embody will be tied to a certain pose, which will be tied to certain animations, and this is the first limitation we encounter. Your character will be bloated with Embody plugins depending on the number of poses in the scene. I currently know no other way to circumvent this. Unless, of course, @Acid Bubbles can make a version of the plugin which adds an option that when restoring the pose after possession, it keeps the nodes that were Parent Linked. That way, you would only need one Embody plugin.
Third, when you have two Embody plugins in the same scene, even if you activate only one of them, the simple fact of having two of the same plugins in the scene enabled messes with possession. As such, every time you enable one Embody, you have to remember to both deactivate and disable other Embody plugins (they're not the same thing, enable means it is succeptible to triggers, active means you are currently possessing). This was a problem in my recent Intimate Frontseat Dock scene where multiple Atoms have Embody, and you have to disable all the others to Embody one Atom properly, which is now fixed! Go check it out.
Now that this is out of the way, let's do a doggy pose. Again, you want your feet locked, but your hips and chest must move with your head. Hands should now be also set "Parent Link" on the girl's hips so they follow her ass. Here's the pose (and remember, they only have to look good in FPP):
And here's the action:
Notice how easy it is to switch where you target! Incredible stuff, endless possibilites my dude.
Now, I have one final nice thing to show you before we part ways. Let's say your hand got tired (of moving your mouse, I mean), and you want stuff to be automatic for a while. Can you combine your movement with AutoThruster or Timeline? And the answer is... Yes! You can! Just slap that plug in, add a keybind to that bad boy and boom, it takes control over your hip. You can even toggle it back in case you want to take control again. You can even do something like combining the two plugins: Animate other parts of the body with Timeline, while your hip is free for you to control when you want, and automatic via AutoThruster when you desire as well. Check it out:
There's much that I've left off. For example, you can use AutoThruster to animate hands as well upon keybind toggle. That means that you can place one hand where you want, activate the animation, then go and place the other hand in another place, and toggle the second animation with a second keybind. Now both of your hands are locked doing an animation while you are free to move the rest. Pretty cool stuff.
Hope you can use these insights to create your next scenes!
I recently started to create scenes in VaM. My content is and will always be FREE, under CC BY license when possible. Your support would be greatly appreciated! Check them out here.
- Huge thanks to all the creators that made it possible!
@Acid Bubbles
@everlaster
@JaxZoa
@MacGruber
@ToumeiHitsuji
@Vinput
