Focus on body animation like @noheadnoleg
Very useful, thank youThe question is pretty generic, so I'll try to give a generic answer, hopefully it'll be helpful
Check out the wiki and read about the options: https://github.com/acidbubbles/vam-timeline/wiki - this contains tons of information, and it also contains a quick walkthrough.
You might also want to look at the YouTube tutorials I made, they aren't perfect but they should get you up and running:
But if you never did any animation before, you might have a small learning curve with keyframes and curves. If you're serious, learning animation is an art that you can learn by looking at people making them in other software too (blender, SFM, etc.) though a ton of those techniques might be software-specific. Also, VaM animates targets, not bones, so there's a delay and collisions that you need to keep in mind.
Really, if you're able to move a hand left and right, the rest is just practice and experimentation. There are tons of animations you can look at, you can do mocap if you have the VR hardware, you can manually animate everything (which is what I typically do) too.
Have fun <3
For newcomers like me who just began this adventure yesterday, this is what I needed to get going. The timeline plugin/feature! I was too confused reading so many tutorials telling me to "To install ___, download ___. You first need ____, then ____, and if you dont know ____, read more at ____, you might want to download the newest version at _____. You might want a fresh install of VAM to make it small and fast because having so many of these plugins might slow down the loading times. Also support these patreons providing these with donations click HERE" what? so god damn confusing. I just wanted to make a 5 second animation first so I know what they all mean later because I don't know if I even need these "looks" or 50 custom scenes or all of these other terms until i feel like my "movie"/"animation" needs more in it. We already get to started off in a scene with a girl and a dark background. I read through the beginner youtube tutorials that is recommended in the front pages but it's all the same thing! They just talk about the UI and how to add more atoms/textures/scenes/looks/hair/skin etc but they don't mention how we can make this all go live with a 5 second animation! I had to sit silent and think clearly for a minute and tell myself "Why is it so difficult to start off? What am I REALLY wanting to see? Oh... the end goal! How to make a video/animation!" Then I typed in "vam animation" on google and voila this thread showed up on the first result. Now VAM is starting to make sense. Why don't any of the beginner tutorials put any focus on the general goal? It's like all of these tutorials are for people who've already been using VAM for years and already know the bits and pieces and can follow up easier than the ones who get bombarded with all of these downloads/terms/donations without first going straight to making something go live.
A new user should watch the tutorials and enjoy first a little of the immense amount of content others have produced. Using content is very different from making content, not only in VaM but in everything else. You can see movies without having a clue how they're made, and rest assured, the demands for making a movie are immensely larger than the ones for seeing one. And when I say movie I can change that a load of bread, same concept, consumption is much simpler than creation.
All those people that told many things you needed to do before you can make a scene, even a simple one, they were rightfully telling you that you need to know plenty of things and devote time to do, learn, break, fix, redo, and so on. Being able to make a animation that goes for 5 seconds requires more or less the same knowledge and experience for making one that lasts 5 minutes. Picking up the bread example again, you can't make 1 small bread with just flour, you need the same ingredients as 1000 breads would.
You can make a animation with just the default girl in the black background. There's a Scene Animation tab that you can use, or animation patterns, or Cycleforces. There you go, no extras, built-in stuff.
Naturally you need to learn how to use these, but that applies to everything new. You can either figure it out by yourself or find information about it.
The above are not keyframe animation like Timeline does. If you want this other way of animating things you need to add that plugin in the scene. AcidBubbles created and shared this amazing plugin to have a new way of doing animations in VaM. But wait, there's yet other ways to make animations that are not built-in, other VaM users added new options to offer more options to the VaM community.
You see, the content you find in the Hub is 99.99999999999% community made. You can do some animation with a plain VaM software, but by using the other things the community created your options grow exponentially. This content includes the guides you see, and a whole host of people in the forum, Discord, etc, helping others.
You're not brave or special for saying that it's difficult to use, everyone knows that or quickly realise it. Yet, your first interaction with the community is bitching about why you can't immediatly know everything or expect this to be a 5 minute tool to learn. Sorry, but this isn't Candy Crush.
I can tell you that VaM has a steep learning curve. If you don't want to accept that then you can go do something else. However, if you're willing to devote time to learn, seeing the tutorials, experimenting, talking with the community, seeing how people do things, then you will quickly learn how to do the things you want to do, and I hope too you could help others do the same.