Unable to find certain looks when replacing one in an existing scene

[fartdoctor]

I'm new to VAM so apologies if this is a newbie issue, I've been unable to find basically any centralized documentation for this software and even the tutorial video series recommended by the Patreon is very out of date. I want to replace actors in various scenes with different actors, and have been able to do this to some degree of success through both the Load Look option and the Appearance preset option. My issue is that many of the looks I have installed do not appear in these menus, and are only accessible as their own scenes. Where are these looks/characters/actors/whatever stored and how can I access them to swap them into existing scenes? Thank you for your help!

 

[WrongTamago]

That's mostly a problem with the look itself. Some authors only include a scene and don't include a loadable Look or Appearance Preset. There's a thread about it here:

Look distribution in VARs

Why are nearly all looks distributed as a VAR containing a scene? I get that creators want to demo their looks in a nice environment with lighting, but with the majority of shared content being Looks you end up with loads of "Scene" VARs that only contain a character with a look and no easy way...

hub.virtamate.com

What you can do to fix it is to load up the scene from the "look", then save it as an Appearance Preset (not as a Look). This will save it into your Custom\Atom\Person\Appearance folder as a .VAP file (which is just a renamed JSON file). References to VARs and loose files will be kept intact, so it doesn't take much space. Just don't delete the original look after.

 

[fartdoctor]

Thank you for the information, this basically gets me where I want to be. I'm now able to replace actors in a scene as I want, but some Appearance presets load without hair, while others load fine. Is this an issue with the way the look was constructed, or am I saving the preset incorrectly?

 

[WrongTamago]

It may be the look itself. Some looks (especially older ones) use the CustomUnityAsset atom for hair. This was done before custom hair was a thing. Looks may also use them for wings, tails, etc. An Appearance preset won't save the CustomUnityAssets attached to it, because it doesn't actually belong to the Person.

To get around this, you could use Blazedust's CUAManager plugin. Basically, you save the CustomUnityAssets that are attached as another preset, and then load it after loading your Appearance. It does mean extra steps, but it works.

 

[fartdoctor]

You're a gem, thank you so much for the detailed and helpful information.