As many of you will know VAM didn't always have the current VAR system in place and many of us will have tons of content from the dark days of VAC packaging and content installation being folder merges.
I for one have been fed up with the large number of duplicate morphs showing in my morph browser for quite some time due to the old content so I decide this morning to deal with this one and for all.
EDIT : 22/01/2021 - Since this guide was written the community has discovered that vam performance is degraded quite significantly by loading morphs even if not in active use - in my case my desktop performance is degraded from 180fps to 140fps with all my legacy morphs and the VAR morph packages loaded vs a clean install. Whist we found that VAR morphs degrade performance more than legacy morphs its become clear that it is a great idea to reduce you morph library as much as possible.
So here I present to you Juno's guide to cleaning up and deduping morphs from the legacy folders.
Thankfully each morph has in internal unique identifier (UID) and vam will automatically find a copy of a referenced morph by UID as long as its under the root morph folder. This allows us to use some dedupe software to find and kill dupes.
DISCLAIMER: You are following this guide at your own volition, deletion of files CAN cause looks to look wrong and generate errors in the log. Ensure you fully backup your current morph folder before proceeding. I have found many morphs with identical names that are not the exact same morph and caused looks to be different from what I expected.
Step1. Navigate to: \VAM Folder\Custom\Atom\Person\Morphs\female and back up this folder somewhere safe. Don't create a backup folder under this path, put it far away.
Step2. Head to http://www.clonespy.com/?Download - Install this software and run it.
Step3. Add the file path in step 1 to the Pool 1 window in clonespy by clicking the ADD FOLDER button next to Pool1.
Step4. The first run of clonespy will deal with the identical duplicates so set the options as I have in the above image. Click Start Scanning. At this point we will see a log file with the duplicates has been created, cast your eyes over the log and see if anything jumps out as being wrong. If all looks good then update clonespys options to do the delete this time as shown below.
I have chosen the older files to delete but seeing as this pass is going to delete duplicates it should not matter if you choose older or newer files.
When I ran this stage out of 13,000 morphs a good 4000 were deleted
Step5. In this next pass we are going to have clonespy search for and dedupe same named morphs. This is when you can can potentially have issues with different version of the same morph. Set clonespy as below.
Again we are going to do a dry run exporting a list so we have have a look and see if anything stands out as being horribly wrong. Once you are happy then you can set the delete options. I chose to keep the newer files on my end but you can pick older if you feel that's the thing to do.
Now run this scan and the morphs with identical names will be cleaned up.
Step6. Test in VAM, When I did this I got a bunch of errors saying failed to import some dsf morphs due to meta data issues. I find this can be safely ignored as its just vam getting confused after the dedupe trying to reimport some dsf. You might want to restore the vmi/vmb for these to get rid of the error but Iv found its not a problem so far. Now try some older looks and see if they look funky and get errors on load, if so you can simply restore the individual morphs from your backup.
Hopefully you now have far less duplicate morphs clogging up your VAM.
For me I started out with 13.5k morphs and d im now down to 7k without the mass duplications.
I for one have been fed up with the large number of duplicate morphs showing in my morph browser for quite some time due to the old content so I decide this morning to deal with this one and for all.
EDIT : 22/01/2021 - Since this guide was written the community has discovered that vam performance is degraded quite significantly by loading morphs even if not in active use - in my case my desktop performance is degraded from 180fps to 140fps with all my legacy morphs and the VAR morph packages loaded vs a clean install. Whist we found that VAR morphs degrade performance more than legacy morphs its become clear that it is a great idea to reduce you morph library as much as possible.
So here I present to you Juno's guide to cleaning up and deduping morphs from the legacy folders.
Thankfully each morph has in internal unique identifier (UID) and vam will automatically find a copy of a referenced morph by UID as long as its under the root morph folder. This allows us to use some dedupe software to find and kill dupes.
DISCLAIMER: You are following this guide at your own volition, deletion of files CAN cause looks to look wrong and generate errors in the log. Ensure you fully backup your current morph folder before proceeding. I have found many morphs with identical names that are not the exact same morph and caused looks to be different from what I expected.
Step1. Navigate to: \VAM Folder\Custom\Atom\Person\Morphs\female and back up this folder somewhere safe. Don't create a backup folder under this path, put it far away.
Step2. Head to http://www.clonespy.com/?Download - Install this software and run it.
Step3. Add the file path in step 1 to the Pool 1 window in clonespy by clicking the ADD FOLDER button next to Pool1.
Step4. The first run of clonespy will deal with the identical duplicates so set the options as I have in the above image. Click Start Scanning. At this point we will see a log file with the duplicates has been created, cast your eyes over the log and see if anything jumps out as being wrong. If all looks good then update clonespys options to do the delete this time as shown below.
I have chosen the older files to delete but seeing as this pass is going to delete duplicates it should not matter if you choose older or newer files.
When I ran this stage out of 13,000 morphs a good 4000 were deleted
Step5. In this next pass we are going to have clonespy search for and dedupe same named morphs. This is when you can can potentially have issues with different version of the same morph. Set clonespy as below.
Again we are going to do a dry run exporting a list so we have have a look and see if anything stands out as being horribly wrong. Once you are happy then you can set the delete options. I chose to keep the newer files on my end but you can pick older if you feel that's the thing to do.
Now run this scan and the morphs with identical names will be cleaned up.
Step6. Test in VAM, When I did this I got a bunch of errors saying failed to import some dsf morphs due to meta data issues. I find this can be safely ignored as its just vam getting confused after the dedupe trying to reimport some dsf. You might want to restore the vmi/vmb for these to get rid of the error but Iv found its not a problem so far. Now try some older looks and see if they look funky and get errors on load, if so you can simply restore the individual morphs from your backup.
Hopefully you now have far less duplicate morphs clogging up your VAM.
For me I started out with 13.5k morphs and d im now down to 7k without the mass duplications.
