New Feature — Manage Templates Screen
Lighting rigs are now built around reusable, named
templates instead of one-click in-code presets. Open
Lights → Manage Templates to see every built-in rig alongside any you've saved yourself, or build a brand new one from lights already in your scene.
How to use it
- Go to Lights → Manage Templates
- Click a template — built-in (e.g. ThreePoint, Sunrise, Moonlight, Cyberpunk) or one of your own
- Pick the atom to light under Apply To Atom, then click Apply to Atom — the screen stays open so you can apply the same rig to more atoms right away
- To build your own: click Create New Template, stage lights from the scene with Add Light / Add All From Object, name it and click Save Template
What this replaces
- The old one-click preset buttons under Add Atom Lights (3 Point, time-of-day looks, Candlelight, Cyberpunk) are gone — the same rigs now live as built-in templates in Manage Templates, applied to whichever atom you choose
- Add Atom Lights itself still works exactly as before for building a custom ring rig from scratch
Improvement — Save Confirmation for Templates
Saving a template under a name that's already in use now asks you to confirm before it overwrites the existing one, instead of silently renaming it.
Under the Hood — Save Data Now Uses a Companion File
Plugin data is now also written to a small companion file saved alongside your scene, instead of relying solely on the data embedded in the scene file itself. It's around 80% smaller than the old embedded data for the same settings — a fully-configured light, for example, now saves in about 227 bytes instead of roughly 1,075 — and needs more than 15× less memory to build and read than the old JSON path, so saving stays light even on a busy scene. It's also built so future plugin updates are far less likely to break an older save. Existing scenes upgrade automatically the first time you save them — there's nothing to configure and nothing you need to do.
This same save format is what powers the new lighting Templates above — a template is just this kind of save, given a name so you can re-apply it later.
Improvement — Confirmation Before Deleting or Overwriting
Buttons that permanently remove or overwrite something now ask you to confirm first — a stray tap no longer instantly destroys data. Click
OK to proceed or
Cancel to back out with nothing changed.
Covered by this
- Data Store → Load from Clipboard
- Lights → Manage Lights → Remove Light
- Lights → Manage Lights → Remove All Lights from Scene
- Lights → Configure Template → Delete Template
- Scene Control → Passthrough Control → Remove (per atom)
New Feature — External API for Triggers & Other Plugins
The plugin now always publishes a small set of hidden actions and value params usable from VaM triggers — no menu needed. Light Warmth, Ambient Color, applying a lighting template to an atom by name, and removing a light (or every light) are all exposed this way. See
External API in the full reference above for the complete list. A read-only
HK Integration Version param is also published, for plugin authors who want to detect this plugin is present.
Calling
Remove Light or
Remove All Lights From Scene through the External API skips the confirmation dialog above — it removes immediately, the same as before this update.
New Feature — Recover Your Saved Data On Demand
Two new buttons in
Data Store let you pull your saved settings back in without reloading the whole scene:
- Restore Scene Save — reloads this scene's own saved data from disk and re-applies it. Handy after re-adding the plugin mid-session (for example, after an update, or swapping between a debugger build and the release build), since the automatic restore only happens on a scene load.
- Load from Scene Save — opens a file browser so you can pick any saved scene and pull its plugin data in, even a scene other than the one currently loaded. If there's more than one match (for example, several saved presets), you'll get a button for each to choose from.
Both ask you to confirm before overwriting your current settings.
Change — Data Store Menu Simplified
Copy to Clipboard and
Load from Clipboard have been removed — use the new
Restore Scene Save and
Load from Scene Save buttons above instead.
Save All Data now only appears once you've saved the scene at least once; before that a note reminds you to save the scene first.
New Feature — Live Preview Before You Commit a Lighting Rig
Add Atom Lights,
Add Camera Lights and
Configure Template now show you the rig right in the scene as you set it up, instead of only after you click the action button. Adjust the atom, sliders or colour and watch the rig update live; nothing is actually added to your scene until you click
Add Atom Lights,
Add Camera Lights or
Apply to Atom. If you leave the screen without clicking that button — Back, or switching to another menu — the preview is discarded automatically and nothing changes.
New Feature — Colour Controls for Light Rigs and Templates
Add Atom Lights and
Add Camera Lights gained the same colour picker as the single-light editor:
Overwrite Global Color gives the whole rig its own colour, and
Clear Custom Color returns it to the global warmth.
Configure Template gained three new sliders —
Hue Shift,
Saturation Shift and
Value Shift — since each light in a template already carries its own colour. These shift every light's colour together while keeping their hues relative to each other, so you can retint a whole rig (a warmer sunset, a cooler moonlight) without editing each light by hand. Leave them at 0 to apply a template with its original colours.
New Feature — The Play Dock
A small new floating panel — separate from the classic plugin panel — now appears alongside your view: fixed to the screen edge on desktop, or attached to your chosen VR hand. It carries one-press play controls for everything below (Animations, Presets, Lights, Passthrough, Sub-Scenes, Embody POV), so you don't need to dig back into the classic panel mid-scene. Configure its hand, offset, angle, size and visibility from the new
Scene Control → Custom UI Dock menu; in VR, hiding it tucks it onto the back of your hand as a small "watch" instead of leaving it floating empty.
New Feature — Animation Groups
Name a group of Timeline animations across one or more atoms and start them all together with a single press. Set groups up under the new
Animation tab (
Animation Groups →
Configure Group: name it, then add atom/plugin-instance/clip entries — clip choices include Timeline's own "{groupName}/*" random-pick groups too). Each group gets a
Play button on the play dock that starts every entry together in sync, plus one scene-wide
Stop All.
New Feature — Atom Preset Groups
Name a group of atom presets — Appearance, Pose, Clothing, or any other preset category any atom exposes — and apply them all together with one press. Set groups up under the new
Presets tab; each group gets an
Apply button on the play dock.
New Feature — Light Groups
Lights can now belong to named groups (checkboxes on the existing
Configure Light screen), managed under
Lights → Light Groups. Each group gets a
Toggle button on the play dock that flips every member light's on/off state at once. Lights not in any group are never affected by a group toggle.
New Feature — Atom Collider Groups
For multi-piece custom props (a bed or sofa built from several separate atoms) that jitter against their own seams,
Collider Groups lets you name a set of atoms whose colliders stop interacting with each other, so the pieces behave as one combined object. Set up under the new
Collider Groups tab — this one has no play-dock presence, since it's a one-time scene setup rather than something you toggle live.
New Feature — Embody POV
If you use the community
Embody plugin, the play dock's new
Embody POV screen lists every Embody instance in the scene with a toggle — switching one on deactivates every other instance, including one activated from Embody's own VaM UI.
Improvement — Passthrough Toggles on the Play Dock
Passthrough Control's atom list now also mirrors onto the play dock as one on/off toggle per atom, plus
All On/
All Off buttons, so you can flip passthrough on and off mid-session without leaving Play mode. Adding, removing or changing an atom's passthrough mode still happens on the classic panel.
