Preset animated, multi-model "poses"

keymaster577

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keymaster577
For starters, I want to apologize if this has already been brought up/exists in some form/is in 2.0 plans. I've looked and was unable to find anything, if it's already out there please let me know.

Before discovering VAM I was using The Klub 17 (TK17). I switched because despite the mod community's best efforts, the game is built on a badly outdated engine. VAM is far more photo-realistic, with more sophisticated physics and much greater flexibility/fewer limitations, and is designed much better for VR while TK17 only has VR through mods. That said, TK17 does have its advantages, particularly in terms of user friendliness. In particular, if you download enough community content you can make a movie pretty easily without having to do any animation yourself. This is thanks to the way TK17 handles poses, as well as its sequencer. I've been seeing VAM mods emerge lately which function like the sequencer, so I'll focus on poses here.

In VAM from what I have seen, "poses" refer strictly to static preset poses which can be applied to a single model. In TK17, poses could be static or animated, and could apply to a single model or multiple models at once. So, for example, you could have a "pose" which snaps Person #1 and Person #2 into an animated missionary pose together. This means that if skilled animators within the community create and upload these preset animated poses, as has been the case with TK17, users without animation skills (or who just don't want to spend hours animating every time they want to make a scene) can download them and drop them onto the sequencer's timeline and then adjust the pose's positioning as needed.

Now, there are some key differences in TK17 from VAM that it utilizes to make this work, but also ways in which VAM's flexibility can likely be used to do this better. For example, TK17 has a hard limit on the # of models in a scene (originally 3, recently upgraded to 4). Each slot is numbered, and assigned to a model before loading the scene, so it's easy for poses to identify models by # for the sake of multi-model poses. I would expect that VAM's atom system can be used the same way, since it automatically numbers people atoms in the order they are added to the scene. A frustrating limitation of TK17's system is that the model order or models used by a pose cannot be changed within the scene, so a method to do this in VAM would definitely be a welcome improvement. Additionally, TK17 requires that a "pose" of some kind always be loaded, and model positioning cannot be adjusted, only overall "pose" positioning. VAM differs in being able to freely pose and move models at all times, and it would definitely be helpful to be able to do that after loading a preset multi-model pose.

That being said, does this seem like something that could be added to VAM in some form, perhaps in 2.0?
 
There are two projects right now that could allow that:

- https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/idleposer.203/
- https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/timeline.94/ (supports loading animations on multiple atoms so this _may_ be closer to what you want, though I'm the author of this one so I'm not in a good place to make actual comparisons - also, you might want to wait for 3.0 to come out since it supports automatic pose synchronization on multiple atoms)

Maybe Synergy (another animation plugin) could work too though I'm not sure about pose support.

Now for actual _movies_, while Timeline supports sequencing, it's not really a full blown clip sequencer, but rather you can define what clip to play after how much time. I know Meshed wants to support animations in 2.0 but it may take some time, as this is not just a "feature" but rather a full sub-program :)

If you do try one of these, please report back with your thoughts, everyone would like VaM to be "the best option right now" without any "buts" :D
 
Thanks for the feedback! I have both plugins, they're definitely fantastic additions to VAM which undoubtedly make life a lot easier for creators. What I'm suggesting, though, is something much simpler for the average player where you simply load a "pose" with one click and two (or more) models immediately snap into position relative with each other with animation. One click and suddenly your Person #1 and Person #2 are doing doggystyle, or cowgirl, or a bj, or just sitting next to each other holding hands. If you can then adjust the relative positioning and save as a new "pose", put pose changes on a timeline...then once a substantial library of animated poses is built up, making moves can be done really quickly and simply. I've seen a lot of the plans for 2.0 and am very excited about the future of VAM, just wanted to get this in as a suggestion for 2.0 before it's too late.

If it helps, I could make a short video showing the TK17 sequencer in action to give a clearer picture of what I'm trying to describe. I definitely don't think VAM should be cloning it, as it has the potential to be so much better than anything in TK17, but just to show the concept.
 
Making a short video would be great! And I will definitely add an option like this to Timeline down the road, it should be fairly straightforward to do, actually (I already support loading animations, so applying animations to multiple atoms should not be too complicated!)

I understand you're asking for this to be part of VaM 2.0, I just think this is a great idea too :)
 
So for reference, this is the opening menu of TK17. Obviously very different from VAM, you choose your 4 models, then choose the mode you want to go into. For the sake of this demonstration I chose the sequencer.

Model Select.PNG


Here's a video of the sequencer in action. Obviously the graphics are very lacking and it's all very simplistic - I can't imagine going back to it now - but it's also insanely easy to use and make a movie quickly. I think that's something VAM would greatly benefit from if something like it can be implemented. And I'm sure those of you who really know the system will likely have better ideas on how to accomplish this in VAM; the key is just being able to quickly make custom video content in VAM without necessarily having to create your own animations, while having the flexibility to do so.

 
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