Hello, will the new version be updated recently? I have to check it every day
Hi, Morph Capures selection is too slow, maybe limit range in fav will be better?
Hey guys, virt-a-mate has always been very detrimental to my health. A long time ago, I decided it wasn't good for me and that I should stop it, but the AnimationPoser project made me keep going because I felt I owned people to finish what I had started. Truth is I never intended to make the project from start to finish, I just wanted to show other plugin creators the ideas I felt were missing in animation in general, but the complete lack of support from other plugin creators has made me have no other choice than finishing the plugin by myself, or else dropping it and disappointing a lot of people.
Right now, the plugin is 95% complete. But this last 5% stretch is being impossible for me since it is not just about code, it is about seeing things working in a screen, putting together a huge demo that could show everything the plugin is capable of in a heavy multi-character scene, etc. This demo alone would demand weeks. Not to mention the unfinished wiki, which would take a lot of time and effort. And I just don't get a kick anymore for seeing 3d characters in a screen. Every time I try finishing the plugin, I end up wasting time with other stuff in the game and regret it because of the very bad effects it has in my health. This week I went through a very scary health issue, which had nothing to do with vam, but which made me think very seriously about how I want to spend my time from now on.
I'd be willing to guide someone who wants to finish the plugin, since there are very few things missing. But as for myself it was a hard but very important decision to finally decide to move on, because I felt enslaved to this here for far too long.
The next steps for the stable release are:
-(Optional) refactor the UI file code so that there is less repetition of code and UI bugs are not as common as they are right now, plus making it easier to add ui components.
-Refactor Messages so that they are per plugin instance, instead of per animation. It is too much overhead to add the same messages to every animation, which is by far the most common case.
-Roles are per animation, because animations can be reused with roles switched. Buttons for saving and loading a list of roles then becomes very handy.
-Add a button to connect all states of a layer in a chain (as in a timeline: State 1 -> State 2 -> State 3, etc), and another to fully connect all states (make transitions between all pairs, coming and going, with the transition defaults coming from the arriving state).
-Test everything and fix bugs
The next steps for the "VamAutomata" plugin, which would be the finished version of AnimationPoser with all intended features:
-Make transitions become a timeline of keyframes. Keyframes can be captured, etc, just like states. But they always form a timeline, meaning a deterministic linear sequence of keyframes, coming from a starting state and going into a finishing state, which is conceptually nothing else than a transition.
-Add a button to import and export transitions to/from the VamTimeline export/import format.
-Add interpolation for better fitting a curve to the keyframes in 3d space (splines, bezier, whatever).
If someone wants to make that final 5%, I'm all here for help. If you can't code, try to convince plugin developers to work on this. I really wanted to show what would become possible with this plugin, but unfortunately I lost the passion for 3d animation before being able to finish this.
let's not be too dramatic now surely you've thrown a healthy fap or two at Ridley Weed 2.0. there's nothing wrong with vam (except for sucking big for not being an actual game but that's another story). Whatever you expected to get out of doing this huge task for free for a very cold community and wasn't satisfied is the real fault. And it's good to own our own faults so that we don't repeat them. If you want collaboration and software engineering, you do open source libraries and you know that. vam is smut and vam1 is coughing buttons and sliders on its death-bed anywayvirt-a-mate has always been very detrimental to my health.
@haremlife sorry to hear about that, I hope your health got better and things are ok now
I feel bad now for not being more coherent with my warnings about going too software-engineering about it, I had a feeling your approach was going to be a very very unsatisfying and hard path to take considering how the support around here goes. Also I feel bad for not joining to help when invited, maybe could've helped you avoid some of the troubles, at the time I was trying to do my own animation system as you know and then I left for a while
let's not be too dramatic now surely you've thrown a healthy fap or two at Ridley Weed 2.0. there's nothing wrong with vam (except for sucking big for not being an actual game but that's another story). Whatever you expected to get out of doing this huge task for free for a very cold community and wasn't satisfied is the real fault. And it's good to own our own faults so that we don't repeat them. If you want collaboration and software engineering, you do open source libraries and you know that. vam is smut and vam1 is coughing buttons and sliders on its death-bed anyway
@cdgczta8 I wish you good luck bro and hope you don't fall in the same trap
Playing virt-a-mate once a week is enough for a HUGE impact in my libido and overall energy and lifestyle. Those adverse effects have shown themselves as completely unavoidable for almost two years now. I stopped some months ago, and I gained incredible amounts of weight at the gym, recovered libido and overall health, opened a new business, etc. It is a whole new life for me. Of course those effects are personal and I'm not preaching for anyone to stop virt-a-mate. It has a lot to do with how I approached things and what I wanted out of the game. Last wednesday I tried investing some time in the demo scenes, and all of a sudden I have again lost all libido, etc. So I decided I don't want to go back there, I don't feel like it. Developing the demo scene is something that would take dozens of hours of creative, passionate work, since there is not yet a community library of animation pieces to draw from, and I don't have that passion anymore, which makes it difficult to develop the "stable release", given I'm not myself a user anymore. But I'm here to help.
However @SPQR I would encourage you to try seeing the plugin through another angle, because it goes a lot in line with your game-like goals.
Of course the plugin has a lot of buttons and UI, in the same way as any game while it is being developed. But, once animations are developed, it becomes very much game-like, without the need to interact with the plugin. It becomes basically The Sims, with the characters walking around the house, doing actions, interacting with one another, etc.
There has been an IMMENSE amount of development since the last version!
-Implemented an intelligent path finding mechanism whereby switching from an state to another makes the character go through a path of intermediate states that are connected through transitions. This is fully integrated with messages: this way, a message needs only to tell where the character should go (the destination state), and it finds by itself a path there through transitions and intermediary states.
-UI has been...
Very promising, thx for the effort.
But it needs a tutorial or a manual. I'm experienced with idle poser but don't really get how to use the additional functionality animation poser provides.
@haremlife Thank you so much for the great effort you are putting into this plugin.
Imo the next step or I should probably say the very very very next step should be to finally create a package of pre-built animations which can be directly loaded and used.
I'm sure if you start sharing the countless animations that you surely did work on while creating and improving this plugin the community will start to contribute too. And I don't mean this in any bad way. But despite being very powerful, it is a rather complicated plugin which offers you zero content at the start. You have to start from scratch. It would be so great if there where walking, jumping, dancing, etc animations already included. People would start to modify those and surely soon start to create entirely new ones.
But thanks again! It is a great plugin!