Other VAM Evolutionary Character Creation

[pinosante]

I am having touble with Step 4... the windows executable app lets me choose appearance folder and the appearance vaps i have in there load with no error. Then I go to choose template appearance in step 3. and it loads the one i choose fine... however on Step 4. when I try and choose the parent file source it says 0 apperances even though the contents of the folder loaded each one that was available in Step 2. with no visible errors. I tried each option in Step 4. (All, Favourited, Choose) but 0 available. Any advice?

Yeah, so what happens is, that you probably have single-morph appearances. They have one morph which determines the look of the whole character. Those appearances do not work well with the Evolutionary Character App, since that needs to copy and tweak a lot of single morphs (morph for the eye height, morph for the eye shape, hip ship, hip height, etc, 100's of morphs).

In the App I have a setting (option B: Min Morph Count) which is set to 150 by default. This is on purpose: it makes sure that only appearance files with more than 150 morphs (eg: appearance files which are absolutely not single-morph files) can be used. You can choose to change option B (Min Morph Count) back to 0, and then you will see the appearance files again, but I'm warning you that the App will create horrific appearances if you do that. I set the option B (Min Morph Count) specifically to 150 so that you only include Appearances which are not single morphed. Maybe you are lucky and there are some appearance files which become visible at 100 morphs or so, and they are not single morph appearances. (So try changing it to 100 for instance).

Unfortunately there is no way to change/split those single-morph characters back into the original morphs of the VaM.

Good news is: once you start experimenting with the Evolutionary Character App and create some characters of your own, you can use those again, to create even more.

 

[pinosante]

How to solve this issue?
View attachment 204259

It looks like one of your appearance files is faulty (the App can't read one of the bytes in there). I'll look into my code later today and look for a way to error handle this is in a different way so that it will show the filename. And then upload that version.

 

[Shoopdawoop7]

I am definitely a stupid one here as no one else seems to be asking, but where exactly do I obtain the app to use this...?

 

[pinosante]

I am definitely a stupid one here as no one else seems to be asking, but where exactly do I obtain the app to use this...?

Click the download button.

 

[MalMorality]

Hey. Here is the issue I'm having. I follow the steps to the letter, but I can only discover 4 appearance presets in the appearance folder. I tried lowering the morph count all the way down to zero, but I can't find any more. I have 12 presets in the folder as you can see in file explorer all the way to the right. Is the app not compatible with the latest version of VAM, maybe? The "Petal" and "Binna" looks, are merged morphs, so I avoid them, but I want all the "girl" presets.

 

[pinosante]

Hey. Here is the issue I'm having. I follow the steps to the letter, but I can only discover 4 appearance presets in the appearance folder. I tried lowering the morph count all the way down to zero, but I can't find any more. I have 12 presets in the folder as you can see in file explorer all the way to the right. Is the app not compatible with the latest version of VAM, maybe? The "Petal" and "Binna" looks, are merged morphs, so I avoid them, but I want all the "girl" presets.View attachment 205465

@MalMorality This is interesting. If they changed the way appearance presets are written to files, that could be the case. Could you please DM me that list of presets to see what's going on? I have to look inside those files to see if there are some differences.

 

[Chris_P_Bacon]

if you choose “select files” as an option, the limit is 20. If you choose“all” or “all favorites” you will get everything available. If you set min morph count to 150 (which you should!) it might be that some appearances are not shown, because they have less than 150 morphs.

Is there a reason why it is limited to 20? I imagine a listbox to select as many files as you like.

 

[Chris_P_Bacon]

Okay I understand why this is difficult.
Here is a theory how this could be solved - but ... it is VERY (!!!) complicated and requires messing with the binary morph format and understanding how it works.

• requires good knowledge on how meshes work in modern 3D engines
• find out which vertices (and the index of them) on the G2 mesh a are part of which body part
• find out how the binary .vmb morph files work to know which vertices (probably identified with an index) are used by that morph
• compare/cross references both morph indices and body part indices find out what body parts the morph affects and tag the morphs

I doubt anybody will be able to pull this off. It would probably be to slow to do this in real time, so the morphs would have to be 'pre-tagged' as head or body.

Hi, and many thanks for this info.

I am supporting Pinosante with his project as a programmer and was thinking about a way to tag morphs somehow for several reasons. Do you have a documentation about these files? I would like to take a look and check if I am capable to pull that off. Probably I am, with enough time.

This could be very helpful for a lot of tools:
- Tag morphs by region (head/body/...)
- Split full body morphy into "smaller" ones
- ...

I just need to understand how morphs work exactly and what the file format is. Any hints are appreciated.

 

[pinosante]

Is there a reason why it is limited to 20? I imagine a listbox to select as many files as you like.

GUI reasons basically, but a listbox to select more would be fine too, if it is manageable/user friendly to work with.

 

[Chris_P_Bacon]

GUI reasons basically, but a listbox to select more would be fine too, if it is manageable/user friendly to work with.

I am going to think about it.

 

[JohnM68]

I am a complete novice with Vam. I just wanted to share one of my evolutions...Not that it is the best end result, but the "before" and "after" pictures show what's possible with Vam ECC with practically no tweaking. I randomly generated a number of females from within VamX to use. I filtered most of them for my tastes, but then decided to throw a few others in (This was one of them). (I still threw away a good number of very poorly generated characters.)

 

[BoriskovIvanslav]

This doesn't work for me I've got the app in place and my files and everything are right, but it just doesn't work - the App loads and I get to step three, but it can't find any appearances to use for the template, even counting me saving the default girl of the actual scene to use as said template, so I'm completely stumped as to what's going on except that I'm using a slightly older version of VAM at 1.20.77 - is that version incompatible?

 

[pinosante]

This doesn't work for me I've got the app in place and my files and everything are right, but it just doesn't work - the App loads and I get to step three, but it can't find any appearances to use for the template, even counting me saving the default girl of the actual scene to use as said template, so I'm completely stumped as to what's going on except that I'm using a slightly older version of VAM at 1.20.77 - is that version incompatible?

Older Version should be compatible.

These are the most likely reasons for it not working:
1. Do you have the appearances directory selected?
The appearances directory is located at:
C:/YOUR_VAM/Custom/Atom/Person/Appearance

2. Does the appearance directory actually contain appearances (not Looks!)? Appearance have the .vap extension

3. The appearances are single morphed (with only a head and a body morph for the whole character). Those appearances are not usable by the app. You can check this by loading the appearance in VAM, going to female morphs, and looking how many pages you hvae. If you only see a few pages, it's single morphed.

Here is an example of an appearance file which contains a lot of morphs (and you should be able to see in the app):

Looks - Mia

hub.virtamate.com

 

[pinosante]

I am a complete novice with Vam. I just wanted to share one of my evolutions...Not that it is the best end result, but the "before" and "after" pictures show what's possible with Vam ECC with practically no tweaking. I randomly generated a number of females from within VamX to use. I filtered most of them for my tastes, but then decided to throw a few others in (This was one of them). (I still threw away a good number of very poorly generated characters.)
View attachment 209196View attachment 209197

Awesome, so is the above the before and the below one the after?

 

[Morderath]

Hey guys - I'm really confused.

I'm newish to VaM and basically what I've done is downloaded a bunch of .VAR files and slammed them into AddonPackages. Then discovered VamX, and installed that.

I haven't really done ton of creating my own appearances. It seems like they have to be organized into one folder for this tool to be useful, is that correct? Or am I missing what folder to point it to in Steps 3/4 to get more than 1 or 2 items in some subfolder somewhere?

Or do I need to spend some time and create (Or save from VamX the ones I like) a bunch of appearances and stick them in the same folder?

Thanks!

 

[pinosante]

Hey guys - I'm really confused.

I'm newish to VaM and basically what I've done is downloaded a bunch of .VAR files and slammed them into AddonPackages. Then discovered VamX, and installed that.

I haven't really done ton of creating my own appearances. It seems like they have to be organized into one folder for this tool to be useful, is that correct? Or am I missing what folder to point it to in Steps 3/4 to get more than 1 or 2 items in some subfolder somewhere?

Or do I need to spend some time and create (Or save from VamX the ones I like) a bunch of appearances and stick them in the same folder?

Thanks!

Hi, welcome to the VAM community!

Whatever you do, you need to have appearances in the following directory:

C:/YOUR_VAM/Custom/Atom/Person/Appearance

The simplest way to do this, is to load appearances (looks) you like from the hub and open the scene. Then click on the model (girl or guy) and click on appearances in the menu on your left hand side, and choose save preset as (choose your name). This will automatically save the appearance preset to the correct folder:

C:/YOUR_VAM/Custom/Atom/Person/Appearance

Once you have saved like 10 or so appearances like this, you can start playing around with the app as intended. In most cases (unfortunately) the appearances are single morphed, so they have only a few morphs. This means that the app can't really use them, and won't show them when you start the app. Once you have enough appearances downloaded and saved, you will have more appearances the app can work with, but you don't know in advance if an appearance is single morphed or not.

This is an example of an apperance that is not single morphed and good to use with the app:

Looks - Mia

hub.virtamate.com

Good luck!

 

[Morderath]

Ah gotcha! Thank you - Answered my question perfectly. And thank you for the welcome!

And one more time, thank you for the link to the multiple morph model. Do you have any other tips for discovering non-single morphed looks? For example, I downloaded all the recommended but optional content packs for VamX as per their guide - Do you know offhand if most of those are single morphed or is it really just a crapshoot?

For other posters reading - Maybe Looks we know are compatible can be linked here and a quick list could be built for say, a default 10-look recommended list or something?

Cheers!

 

[pinosante]

Ah gotcha! Thank you - Answered my question perfectly. And thank you for the welcome!

And one more time, thank you for the link to the multiple morph model. Do you have any other tips for discovering non-single morphed looks? For example, I downloaded all the recommended but optional content packs for VamX as per their guide - Do you know offhand if most of those are single morphed or is it really just a crapshoot?

For other posters reading - Maybe Looks we know are compatible can be linked here and a quick list could be built for say, a default 10-look recommended list or something?

Cheers!

When I have some more time, I will look into creating a starter pack of sorts with 10 looks. I think that should help a lot.

 

[pinosante]

Ah gotcha! Thank you - Answered my question perfectly. And thank you for the welcome!

And one more time, thank you for the link to the multiple morph model. Do you have any other tips for discovering non-single morphed looks? For example, I downloaded all the recommended but optional content packs for VamX as per their guide - Do you know offhand if most of those are single morphed or is it really just a crapshoot?

For other posters reading - Maybe Looks we know are compatible can be linked here and a quick list could be built for say, a default 10-look recommended list or something?

Cheers!

Btw, you can get a feeling if an appearance you are looking at in Vam is single morphed, by clicking on the male/female morphs tab to see how many pages of morphs there are. If there are only a few pages (or 1 even), it is single morphed. If there are 10+ or so, it is good to use with the app.

 

[hazmhox]

Yo!

You can ignore my dumb ideas ... but I'm starting to understand the thing and work properly with it. I know it's hard with the morph categorization, but it would be insane if we could do this:

- Have a checkbox at the right of the generation panel "Generate head + Generate body"
- If you have one or the other checked, you only produce the generation on the head or on the body or both

This could help working on the head only without having to rate some generation bad (or good) just to keep some settings, and potentially have to do several generations to get the proper mix.

Another thing would be an option to set the default score. After 20 generation, generally I'm scanning all the good ones and only marking them 3/4/5, the rest is always 1 : D

 

[pinosante]

Yo!

You can ignore my dumb ideas ... but I'm starting to understand the thing and work properly with it. I know it's hard with the morph categorization, but it would be insane if we could do this:

- Have a checkbox at the right of the generation panel "Generate head + Generate body"
- If you have one or the other checked, you only produce the generation on the head or on the body or both

This could help working on the head only without having to rate some generation bad (or good) just to keep some settings, and potentially have to do several generations to get the proper mix.

Another thing would be an option to set the default score. After 20 generation, generally I'm scanning all the good ones and only marking them 3/4/5, the rest is always 1 : D

Yeah the head body split is actually high on the wanted list. There is another long term cool idea I want to do. In this idea you have a neural net which looks at the morph values of a model as input and the score you rate the model with, as output. This neural net is just observing the voting process to “learn” how you vote. When generating a new generation before showing the user the new models, the neural net is asked to predict the user scores. Only the highest predicted ones are shown to the user. This goes on and on, and the neural net will get better and better at predicting the highest scoring models according to the user. At some point it can just generate good looks in 1 generation because it knows the users favorite combinations of morphs.

 

[hazmhox]

That's a really neat idea for the neural net!

I'm currently updating the UI position to fit more my use on desktop btw... you'd be interested to see what I came up with?

 

[pinosante]

That's a really neat idea for the neural net!

I'm currently updating the UI position to fit more my use on desktop btw... you'd be interested to see what I came up with?

Of course! But if you are changing the python code, @Chris_P_Bacon is working on a complete overhaul of the code. So when that is ready the codebase will be completely changed. It will be the exact same app, but the code will be split into classes and improved a lot.

 

[MalMorality]

curious to see what improvements you guys made, love this generator.

 

[pinosante]

curious to see what improvements you guys made, love this generator.

This will take at least a few months probably, so you have to be patient . I’m glad you like the app!