Breaking animations out of the .json file

[ESC]

I am SUPER new to VaM, and have only interacted with .vac files as a legacy thing. I love the new .var files and how the avoid hard drive consuming duplication of assets. I would probably have abandoned vam (or had to buy some used hard drives) if it was that insanely bloaty.

That said, the .json file seems to store all the animations, which normally does not seem like that much, but as creators get more and more into motion tracking, sometimes with several motion tracked people, this .json file for some scenes is nearing 200 mb. I find this really annoying if I want to just take that base scene, swap out the look of a few things, add and tweak a few plugins like Embody and then save that (with a name that helps my organization). So just a few tweaks that should be just different pointers now requires a duplication of 200 mb of hard drive space.

Is there any reasonable fix to this? It is really annoying to constantly have to do 20 some 'clicks' in VR every time I want to view a certain scene again or commit to wasting 100-200mb of hd space for the convenience.

Thanks! Even is the answer is 'no'.
This community has really surprised me with how nice it has been overall.

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Timeline does this too because it's practical to bundle everything in the scene... but it's also a problem since at some point, it crashes VaM when saving with very long animations So saving animations in an external file is on my list, though I don't know when yet. But the idea is like you said, except referencing animations is going to be tricky (probably that would mean manually saving changes to your animations to avoid deleting important animations by error)

 

[ESC]

I think it is something that was maybe overlooked when .var was breaking out re-used assets. That animations and timelines are pretty scene specific, but a user might want variations on a base theme.

I suspect it won't really get fixed unless the VaM devs add that functionality to .var format, which they probably won't do at this point with all the work on 2.0, and I think the focus on 2.0 is the right move.

I don't know how much of a 'typical user' I am though.
For me there are just certain things I want to do to almost every scene.
Add Embody (typically I will just delete and put it back on since it will then give me my default prefs)
Adjust Embody (either modifying the x rotation or setting up the view target)
Adjust models
Adjust clothing

Then I want to save that with a name/directory structure that facilitates searching.
I explicitly avoid doing this to especially large animations as I don't want to double up on that space and then I am left making those adjustments every time I open the scene.

Going to have to learn addon scripting so I can make a session script that sets up my scripts, as they are typically automatable I think. Remove all Embody, put it on the first guy will usually be correct. Add first guy look target locked to first female head. Add about -6 x rotation. If female model has no hair, add in a randomized hair from a list (for some reason I get a lot of bald females in scenes even if I am missing no dependencies, I think they are referencing them as presets and I don't want to add a ton of presets to my custom folder)

 

[Acid Bubbles]

Well you can already make this much faster by using Keybindings and setting up shortcuts for those operations. You can bind a shortcut to add Embody, to open the plugins UI, the appearance tab, etc. so at least this whole thing takes less clicks (on Desktop at least).

Plugins - Keybindings

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hub.virtamate.com

While scene animations (mocap) will certainly not receive changes, Timeline-based animations might. But another option is to buy a huge disk and stop worrying about space

 

[ESC]

I didn't know keybindings could add plugins. I am going to have to re-read the docs for that. Must have missed it. Thanks!

 

[Acid Bubbles]

It's an extension for Keybindings, but it's included in the same .var

 

[Jiraiya]

There is mocap switcher plugin which takes animations and lets you save them. I have had varied success with it however. I believe the final scene still just has the anim 'baked' in though but it does allow you to move animations around between characters and scenes.
I am particularly interested in this sort of thing at the moment as I was just testing the Kinect full body capture (I posted a demo scene) and I can imagine making a lot of animation data in scenes very easily will make them balloon in size rapidly.

 

[ESC]

Yeah, it is one of those things that I wish was done when .var was brought in, as the cat is out of the bag now and for it to be useful, the scene developers would have to all be using it. Hopefully something like this can make it into VaM 2.0 because size is going to be an issue there with the HUGE discussed jump in texture size. Skins and clothing are going to balloon in size.

 

[ParticlePinnacle]

hmm, if its just clicks you want to avoid... just either look for the simple sign in the scene or add it, and then put on timeline, then look through the layers and uncheck anything you see as "autoplay on load" Minus maybe a breathing animation or two.

After that you can just save the scene where you want it to start and it should load up in the same place as far as animations