Grouping of different versions of the same morph, and grouping of facial expressions variations

[checkking]

For morphs:

The idea is to clear out the morph menu by only showing the latest version of a morph by default, but an option would be available to select an older version instead for a person atom.

For facial expression:

Main point is to improve the compatibility/portability of custom facial expressions in different scenes. For example, there are many differents smiles, but they could be grouped into categories, so look-alikes could have their own custom version of some facial expressions, and these custom versions would be specified in the appearance preset, which would make them ready for any scene using facial animations.

Also, I don't know how this is revelant to be done in vam and not in a plugin, but there should be a solver for the addition of multiple facial expressions that take into account some physical limits, especially for the eyes. Right now, an expression which requires the person to almost close their eyes, like "pain", is incompatible with blinking. I think that the eyes closing too much is one of the most immersion breaking thing that I have seen is scenes using multiple expressions. Many emotional expressions close the eyes too much, so using mixed expressions only works with very small values.

 

[Jarny]

Hey Checkking. I too have experienced this frustration. A workaround(s) I found, and maybe you did too, is to disable blink when expression = certain value. You can do this by dialing in your expression with a variable trigger, and adding a MacGruber value threshold Logic Brick to that. Set the value range to 100 (or whatever looks best) then set the threshold to like, 60% - set the action on 60% to Eye Control (i think it's called) > Blink Enabled > unchecked. This should make sure that when the expression reaches your set value, the person no longer blinks. You can then set another threshold for "down" which would re-enable blink at around 59%, this way they don't cancel each other out. Not ideal, but I wonder if people blink a lot when they have their eyes winced/almost closed anyways? Not sure on this one.

You also have the option of manually having your person blink using AcidBubbles Timeline. I have setup 4 - 5 different blink patterns of varying levels. Some closed more than others, some quicker/longer. For randomization you can again use logic bricks "random choice" and "random" timer. This can allow you more discretely control the intensity of the blink. Could take some work to set it up, but I think you could also set a modifier that when an expression was dialed in, the blink intensity would change, but I'd have to think about that a bit more. AcidBubbles Glance plugin also gives you discrete control over when the person blinks, so you could utilize this as well to increase the blink timer on expression use, or something, lessening the chance that the "too much blinky" happens when the expression is dialed in.

This doesn't give you "out of the box" dynamic blink adjustment, but it may be pretty fun to setup and could give you a decent end result. Good luck. Maybe VAM 2.x will be able to have control like this, natively.

 

[checkking]

Thanks Jarny for the workaround. It is good to know how to solve the problem with plugins.

My opinion is that having a solution doesn't mean it is a practical one. There are already so many things to know and do to make a good scene. Having these tools "out of the box" could drastically increase the quality of scenes for the amount of time spent. Facial expressions is one of those things for which having a turn-key solution could drastically improve the immersion in scenes.

 

[TToby]

Hi,
as you may know, one of the main aspects of VaM is the sandbox-tool style, that lets you use additional DAZ morphs or custom made morphs.
Once you will have 4000+ morphs like many of us, it would be impossible for VaM to sort out all the morphs automatically into categories with different dependencies aso.
I am with you, VaM is not very user friendly first and has a steep learning curve... most of this is due to the open sandbox framework.
You can see this as blessing or curse: If you would have only a fixed ammount of body and facial morphs, it surely could be made much more intuitive to use, like in some of the Illusion Games. Unfortunately you would most likely loose the limitless modability and the open framework that many of us like so much.
There are 3rd party VaM plugins out there that tries to limit and simplify the many options and therefore make it more easy to use for beginners. I bet there will be many more, once the future VaM 2.x will be ready. For this current version, it makes no sense to do such big changes anymore. Vam 2.x will bring many big changes. In the new version we will have for instance the new DAZ Genesis 8 facial expression system that uses several additional "helper-morphs", to partly answer a point of your original posting.

But as a workaround for the current version: maybe it would be helpful for you and others if you do your own categories and sort out the morphes as you like?
The sub-folders in the different morphs directories doesn't matters for sorting. The categories are set by an text entry in the .vmi morph file.
To make it much more easy, you can use a tool called "Morphology" for morph sorting and category naming.

 

[checkking]

Hey TToby,
I am with you with the sandbox framework, and these suggestions are for 2.x of course. The idea is not to restrict the morphs to a certain number, but to categorize them to improve compatibility with plugins that use them. I mean extending the framework to do more than simply putting all the morphs in the same container. Worst case scenario is that you will have a thousand of those custom morphs in the "Uncategorized" category.

That would be especially useful for expressions, or any morph that need to be updated during an animation. We could have for example 50 expressions categories (or more, make it extendable). Then, we could associate a specific expression morph to a look. Then when loading the look preset in a custom scene the right smile morph will be used for that look.

I think that most items (looks, morphs, poses, animations, cloths) would benefit from a universal and official category/tag system. By doing that, it will help modders to make better plugins and better use of existing content, improve the logics, and use the same shared tag system. That means enriching simple items like poses for example to give them a meaning and understanding about what is happening.

P.S. I was recently investigating the idea of making a plugin with some AI/logical and I ended up concluding that this would be a hard requirement, otherwise things could get very messy.