@checkking I think it is amazing how much you grasped the concept of the plugin. In summary, what we are talking about is an abstraction layer between keyframe and animation. This abstraction layer allows animations to be built from actions (like “kiss”, “walk”, “talk”) instead of having to be always built directly from keyframes.
This is the same idea that allows software to be built from functions, classes, objects, instead of always having to be built from assembly machine instructions.
This is brought to animation: we want to write movies like we write scripts. We write a script, the actors understand the actions they ought to take and the lines they ought to speak, and everything works.
Of course, we don’t have AI on that level yet, so instead we can create random implementations of those “actions”, write a script, and then transform that script into an interesting scene by loading and positioning random animations that represent those actions.
Plus, we can also create random movies, that don’t follow a predefined linear script (but rather a large set of possible paths), which is great for porn.
I was surprised to see that every point you proposed is entirely possible in the current framework of the plugin, which means you pretty much grasped the concept.
The only thing left is to figure out the ui for all that and implement the code.
I have a list of features I think the plugin should have. The two most important right now is to have a button to save and load individual animations (the current save and load buttons are either for the layers or for the entire plugin state), and to have a tab of transitions between animations. The animations right now can be switched via triggers or via MacGruber’s state machine. However having it as easy to transition between animations as it is to transition between states would be amazing. Neither of these are very hard, and the combination of these features make the framework complete.
What can you do to make those features become a reality? Make awesome animations with the plugin and showcase them with scenes in the hub or videos in the reddit sub and discord server. I really went out of my way to program this and implement this basic framework, because I believed it was the optimal way to approach animations in virt-a-mate, and that was the best way I had to convince people of this. Now I see some people are convinced, and the way you guys can help is showing the rest of the community what now becomes possible. This will attract people with experience in Unity, C# and Vam plugin development. There is nothing more interesting to work on while we wait for vam 2.0, and nothing that will bring more value to the community as a whole. Vam can be used to create the most interesting humanoid animations with the least amount of effort in the entire animation landscape. So make some animations and scenes, share them to attract people’s attention, and we hopefully can bring a lot of people together to work on this. I could even create a trello board by then.
