How to activate a UIButton from a trigger in an animation?

[Zenra]

Hi all - I did some searching and tried different things but cannot seem to figure out how to do something that I expect is in VAM somewhere and that many, more experienced, creators have need to do. I’ve gotten in the habit of setting up UIButton atoms in my scenes to handle resetting several things that get triggered during my scenes, such as clothing sim parameters, alpha adjust, plug-in settings, etc. I find this especially useful during development, making it easy to reset things before testing animation segments (I make heavy use of Acid Bubbles excellent VAM Timeline for my animation segments). I find myself duplicating a lot of these, often long, lists of actions in different triggers, such as one for a “Reset” or even a “Start” button for the scene. It would be nice if I could have the latter, “Start” and “reset” buttons, simply execute the same list of actions set up for things like my “Clothing reset” and “Plugin reset” buttons, but I have not been able to find a way to do so.

Is there a way to invoke the press of a UIButton as the action of another UIButton, or is there a better way of accomplishing what I describe that I am simply not thinking of?

 

[atani]

There's no built-in trigger to trigger a UIbutton but you don't need that, what you need is Logicbricks, more specifically the Relay. In the relay you can place all the triggers you would in the button, and you can trigger it from anywhere. The relay doesn't have to be in a UIbutton, can be in any atom.
I find it useful to have some empty atoms as control atoms with a bunch of relays and other logicbricks that control many aspects of a scene. UIbuttons for example often only trigger a relay instead of having the triggers within, and if you have repeated groups of triggers all that can be in just a single relay being triggered.

 

[Zenra]

Perfect, that makes sense and thanks for the useful reply. I installed the logicbricks plugin some time ago and remember going through the tutorial, but for some reason just have not yet used it. Reviewing all that is there, though, makes it obvious I’ve been overlooking a truly valuable set of tools.