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What would you have loved to know when you started?

Wolforano

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Greetings!

I plan to start using Vam after my holidays and I already read a lot in the forums and this hub. I can't wait to dive into what vam has to offer.

I wondered if there are tips you could share, that you had to find out by trial and error, that you would have loved to know when you started back then.

Thanks for sharing, exciting to see what comes together here :)
 
Def worth watching a few Youtube vids on how to use it.
When boot it up seems quite complicated, but once get use to the UI it's fairly simple.
 
For me the biggest step forward was getting to know how the atoms work and how they can interact with each other. Meaning: you wanna have the hip stay in position (position: on) but wanna vary the angle (rotation: off) and you want a genital (which one could that be??) keep moving (position: off) but wanna keep the angle (rotation: on), then you now know how this could work.

Also you could bind the rotation of the hip to the rotation of a genital ("link atom" in the same menu: control) via physics link for example. If you understand how this works then you have a good base understanding of the physics in game.

Another essential step is the use of plugins, they change the game drastically. And getting to know how the physics of clothings is working, essential.
 
you will want to spend $3 on this $5 on that... oh a commission here and there. You will sub to a creator for just one item or get addicted to another and stick around all year, next thing you know you dropped hundreds on Vam and wont even realize it lol
 
PRESETS. Presets are your favorite looks, hair, skin etc. Example...you have a scene that you like but you don't like the model so you change the model with a preset, you don't like the hair change it with a preset. Learn how to save and apply different Presets there are videos on the subject and it's quite easy.
 
Thanks for your input, great tips so far. If anyone has tips concerning file management (I heard that one gets a bit confused about all the downloaded stuff and the large folders piling up) from scratch, feel free to drop those tips as well :D
 
What to know for newcomers?

First: Despite of all those pay-stuff, you can go very far without buying one single item but only using free stuff. I am using VaM for years and have only buyed one single thing. Mind that in many cases, the preview-picture is the thing that looks best on that pay-stuff.

Second: VaM is not an easy to use sex-game... it is much more! It is an sandbox tool with endless possibilities. Therefore the learning curve is steep, and you will need to tinker around, learn some advanced things, and do your own stuff to get the full enjoyment. If you want an easy casual game, keep away... if not, don't give up! It's worth all the pain.

Third: Switch off VR-hands collision while creating hairstyles. ;)

Fourth: VaM V.1 is very heavy on ressources, especially in VR. A power PC cant help much about that. Multiple lights in some scenes are doing a big deal to that. Delete all of them and add a single standard light. This will make it look worse, but it runs much smoother.
 
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I enjoyed the learning curve, finding something new each time I use it is a perk. My regret however is not having a proper organisation method from the start, stuff just keep pilling up and it's near impossible to organise it anymore and it is proper hard to find specific stuff. I will do things differently in 2.0
 
Is there a tutorial or are there tips on how to organize from scratch?

I didn't find anything. I could also use something like this. Like a way to cull the numbers of folders, as sadly finding anything with the in-game browser is atrocious, I really hope they make a better system for brosing stuff in 2.0. Right now I just make sure to add stuff I use to favourites so I can press show all, wait a good 30 seconds for everything to load in and then go from there. Also I create a lot of presets with stuff like plugins, I find plugins the hardest to find, no way to know what is already in therte. And then I just use merge to get the setup I need.
I have presets for most stuff that I then merge, like one with my favourite configured underwear items, specific dresses and such. I also adopted a naming scheme for my looks (as you can tell from my username I spend most of my time collecting, modyfying and dressing looks into character presets. I tend to start with character name if given, creator name and some descriptor like 'pet' for petite, 'milf', 'asian' and so on to find specific type of model I might need. Otherwise finding one specific model in a pile of thousands takes forever.
 
I would suggest creating a folder in the customs/saves/scene for your own creations, just one example. Also, like @LooksHunter said, make favourites, like from assets.
 
You can also create sub-folders in the addonPackages folder. For instance like "Looks, Scenes, Clothes, Morphs, Plugins, Hair,..."
If you move Var files into this folders: due to the way VaR files works, VaM will find them there and does not have issues with the file path! It doesnt matters where they are, as long as they are in the addonPackages folder. This will help a little bit if you want to search for a certain Var by browsing manually through the folder hierarchy, but unfortunately not for the usual filtering method.

Yes, I guess besides all those learning-curve related questions, the content organisation is the least obvious, but later the most difficult thing.
Think about this situation:
- You downloaded a big bunch of stuff like looks and scenes.
- To make them work, you have to download a maybe even bigger number of dependencies (some days ago I saw a scene with more than 60!!!! dependencies).
- In those Var files you will have for instance included stuff like textures, morphs, plugins, hair, environments, looks, clothes, aso.
- If you start to create your own stuff, you therefore are able to choose from a large pile of different content. Lets say you will create a ton of looks, each with hundreds of morphs, hair, clothes, makeup, etc from different Var files.
- After a short while you will have a lot of useless stuff, duplicates and different versions of the same item and your SSD space is running low.
- Now you want to delete some of the Var files... but each of them may be a dependency of an other one, or you have used some of its different included contents for your own creations like in the example above.
- Once the number of Var files is big enough, it is nearly impossible (or an enormous amount of work) to go through all of the files to find those dependencies, cross-links and stuff without breaking a lot of content by deleting some of them.
- If you absolutely don't want to put your precious own creations and favourite stuff into danger, you might give up and buy a bigger SSD instead :( like me.

The only way IMHO to avoid this is eighter to be extremely organisated, or to keep yourself away from mindlessly downloading too much stuff.

We desperately will need some sort of install- or content manager, which can scan not only Var files, but all of our own created stuff and presets, and through stuff installed in the custom folder, too. Maybe someone is able to create one.
 
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One thing that helps me a bit is that when I download a scene with a new look once I'm happy with it - maybe changing skin textures, hair, clothes, maybe even morphs and save it as a preset I make sure to press 'hide' on the scene so it does not show anymore and clutter things, but is still in the system if something depends on it.
 
Just learned a new trick haha. I am sure it's been done, but I didn't know about it.
So I was possessing a male look and parented the penis mid and tip controllers to the hip . Then I put an empty controller in front where it's easy to grab. Then parent the hip to the empty controller and by grabbing the empty controller you can get a really easy hip thrust with good penis control. I am also using miscreated's body bundle plugin with balance enabled , because I sit and play.
 
Is there a tutorial or are there tips on how to organize from scratch?

I actually took the time to organize my var files, ~3000 vars. I started checking one by one the contents and clasifying them in different folders like morphs, hair, textures/skin, assets, looks, poses, clothing, etc. The vars that contained big scenes I put them in a separated folder classified by their creator.

I also deleted duped morphs, hairstyles and clothing with CloneSpy, Juno has a guide on how to use it.

Took me a long time, I watched netflix while I was doing it but it was totally worth it.
 
About a year and a half later just realized the site has a built-in image editor.
I have still no idea what you are talking about :D

@Curviloft
I started sorting everything when downloading stuff: clothings, scenes, assets, hairstyles and so on. Cause I know right from the beginning: this will be a mess otherwise. So I have all the downloaded stuff where I need it.

But of course this has nothing to do with the mess ingame. I think there will be a time where I make a fresh installation and start from scratch, then I'll organize stuff. Or with VaM 2.0. I already did a fresh installation just for creating looks so that all this morph-mess is gone, and it works great. Then I copied all clothes and hairstyles and there you go. I can tell it runs smoother then my totally messed up installation. I think this is the way to go in general: one installation for downloading everything, one for the good sorted content.
 
I have still no idea what you are talking about :D

@Curviloft
I think this is the way to go in general: one installation for downloading everything, one for the good sorted content.

Good tip, I also made a second clean copy as a part of throubleshooting the sluggishness of my client and yeah it really helped. Opting for a separate 'play version' and 'editing version' might be optimal.
 
I have still no idea what you are talking about :D

@Curviloft
I started sorting everything when downloading stuff: clothings, scenes, assets, hairstyles and so on. Cause I know right from the beginning: this will be a mess otherwise. So I have all the downloaded stuff where I need it.

But of course this has nothing to do with the mess ingame. I think there will be a time where I make a fresh installation and start from scratch, then I'll organize stuff. Or with VaM 2.0. I already did a fresh installation just for creating looks so that all this morph-mess is gone, and it works great. Then I copied all clothes and hairstyles and there you go. I can tell it runs smoother then my totally messed up installation. I think this is the way to go in general: one installation for downloading everything, one for the good sorted content.

When you upload images to the site it has a basic built in editor with stuff like crop and zoom.
Been on the site for I donno, year, year and a half, and just noticed it a week or two back.
 
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