Question How do I make a package actually pack the hidden/non rendered contents?

[CorresT]

Hello!
I'm newish at VAM and now that I think I'm over the essentials, I decided to start messing around with scenes, animations as this was my goal from the start, and check packages for maybe doing some content in the future, but I found a problem that I don't know how to solve;


I made a simple test scene with a male, a female and a presets.
I made four UIButton atoms, two hide their clothes and two hide the people.

So the setup is like this
Person 1
Person 2
UIButton P1C -------------------> Trigger as ToggleOn for the clothing (which I saved as presets)
UIButton P2C -------------------> Trigger as ToggleOn for the clothing 2 (which I saved as presets)
UIButton
UIButton


Last two for the people.



It seemed to work just fine, the buttons did what I wanted, until I did a package and opened the scene from the package, I noticed that UNLESS I hit the buttons and make all the toggles as on since the start, the package/scene won't actually save and package the assets being used.
So for example Person 2 has a dress and shoes clothing preset and then the naked default, UIButton on the scene works just fine to toggle it on and off, but if I package it all when they preset is not rendered and open it on another vam instance the presets are not saved.

Same thing happens with the textures of the male, unless the male is rendered and showing at the base scene then the package manager will not add its textures.
I tried manually adding the .vap files on the package manager but once I press the button they just don't load.



I'm sure this is a dumb little mistake but I just can't find a fix, I'll appreciate any help on the matter, thank you and apologies if I'm breaking a rule here.

 

[atani]

Textures are not loaded if the atom is off. This is by design I think.

The packaging process looks for paths in your scene and does the following:

• Local files will be packaged inside the VAR and changed to "SELF"
• VAR paths will stay as VAR paths

You usually don't need to do anything manually when packaging besides selecting your resource, in this case a scene, if there's some kind of information to call the vap file somewhere, for example in a trigger, package builder will take care of that.

 

[CorresT]

I see, at this point I can only think of two things

Is there a difference between UIButton and UIToggle?

I'm using UIButton which sends a toggleOn between the two clothing presets for each character, is the vap itself something different from the clothing preset and hence why it's not being packaged?


Thank you for the answer.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

A UIButton is a trigger. It says, "Do this" when pressed. A UIToggle is an on-off switch. It's used for turning lights on and off, enabling or disabling plugins, etc. The file type .vap is used for all kinds of presets, clothing, appearance, pose, and so on. If the scene wasn't set up properly, the package builder might not have seen it as required. You can manually include clothing presets in a package, but if it's called correctly from the scene, it should be automatic. If you're using clothing presets, those should be UIButtons. You can do a merge load on clothing presets, if needed. You could have one UIButton labeled, "Fully dressed" and another "Bedroom clothes" for example. Each of those would load a full clothing preset. If you had one with just jewelry or accessories in it, that might be better with a merge load.

When the package builder throws the message that it needs to fix local references by including them, accept that prompt. That's probably what @atani is referring to above. It should see them, if they are called correctly.