Question Noob question: why so many duplicates?

[Jocks3D]

When I go into edit mode to start changing things on a model (a Look) I am seeing a lot of the same items showing up. For example, there must be three or four dupes of all the pubic hair options. This takes more time to scroll through everything. I don't understand why this is happening. Any ideas? In the folders I do see several file versions (vab, vaj, vam) of the same item. Do I need all these and if not, which can I delete and which must I keep?

 

[DTB247]

You may have multiple update /versions of the same var file . I would make note of the creators name for the pubic hairs that are dupped then sort your addon packages folder by name to see if you have multiple versions of that creators pube vars.

 

[atani]

It's many things that lead to that.
Before VARs you would share everything needed to get the scene, model, whatever, to work. As you can imagine this lead to many copies of the same thing, especially hair. With VARs you're supposed to reference things so that you don't end up packaging repeated assets. This is the goal, but in practical terms people do it in many ways and some better than others.
Unfortunately there's no simple solution to this. Some have created a few deduplicator programs but I never used any, so don't really know if there are caveats in those approaches. For myself I resorted to manual cleaning of assets I keep and hiding repeated content to prevent myself from using it and complicating my cleanup. This manual approach is dangerous and I would only suggest someone already familiar with VAM assets and packaging to use it.