Question What's the cleanest way of saving looks and scenes without dependencies?

[kinski]

Hello,
how can i save looks and/or scenes in a way that the resulting file/folder includes all dependencies?

For favorite scenes and looks i would prefer to have all files at one place instead of having them sprinkled across the custom folder for easy backup. (If i'm not mistaken a file that i have saved could have dependencies in other saved scenes or to an endless amount of custom files in the custom folder, wich is difficult for back-up and general maintanance).

Also, while i see the beauty of the var system for managing dependencies, it has some flaws: I have, for example, downloaded a free look by n3d (which is technically a scene), which had dependencies to some other free asset packs, which i also easily downlaoded and it worked flawlessly by simply dropping them into the addon-folder (nice!). However, i decided that, i'm not keen on the asset packs and modified the look to use vanilla assets (hair, clothing). Since those asset packs are quite big and are containing a lot of assets, that "clutter" the ui, i would rather delete them, but when i do, i'll get constant errors for missing dependencies of the original look, while my customized look would'nt even use those assets.

Therefor wouldn't it be better, if i could somehow save my customized look with all dependencies and delete the original var-files? Maybe make my own (local) addon-package somehow?

Also, after moving some files, opening a scene/look with dependencies might not work correctly and spam the error log with "not found" messages. Could i somehow manually locate the files so that vam updates their new location?

Help much appreciated! Thank you!

 

[TToby]

Hi,
the whole idea behind the new VAR packing system is to avoid duplicates with adding dependencies. It is great, but I see the same issues you mentioned. There are not many postings on this issue, because most of the users seems to have unlimited disk space and don't care about size reduction. ;-)
IMHO it makes no sense to store every file for every scene seperately. This would blow up the VaM folder even more.
For morphes there is even a mechanism to delete duplicates with the same unique number.

BUT for some scenes and large Var files it could make sense:
You can simply unzip every Var file with a Zip editor. I even have linked the .var extension with my 7zip in windows, so a double click will open it.
In this, you can see the virtual folder structure (Var files will be temporarely unpacked on the fly only). If you want to pick only some parts from the Var file, you can unpack and move them to the corrsponding folder, or edit the content to make it smaller (textures!) and repack it. I do the last for most of the looks and clothes.

Be warned, that for some reasons this might not work on every content and some creators of the original Var files don't like this. If you remove stuff from a Var, this will probably break scenes, looks, and clothes. It is only for your personal use.

If you really want to save some scenes with all dependencies in one file/folder, you should take a look at the old Vac file creation. But I think this might be removed at some point.

 

[kinski]

thanks a lot for the answer. i was unsure, if i maybe got something wrong, so it's good that you see the "problem" as well.
i think many don't care because they are happy, when things are just working, which it does - and with the var system it's quite user friendly even.
while i'm less concerned about disk size (i'm very slective with what i want to keep), i don't like when i'm loosing track of where things are and i don't like it when my file structure is a mess - even though my content might still work.

that said, i'm still learning how scenes/addons/presets are made up and i'll probably be more relaxed about error spam from missing dependencies, if i have a better understanding of vam in general (have i done something wrong, or was the original creator just sloppy when packing the var/vac? etc.)

allow me to ask some more related questions:

1. what is the "AddonPackagesUserPrefs" folder intended for?

2. is there anything wrong or stupid about having subfolders in "AddonPackages" to put downlaoded vars into? I do this to have an easy way to backup all vars that did not ship with vam and just to make it more tidy.

3. is the "saves" folder in any way special? does vam treat it differently than other folders? therefore is it advised to keep to a special structure in it? i use it both for downloaded and unapcked vac-files and my own saves. When i reorganized the folder, i lost my dependencies which linked to it. Is this expected, or could vam autoscan it, as long as you keep a certain structure in it? I assume, it is just manual and you're just supposed to not change the file names / structure after you've created dependencies, correct?
as i understand it now:
"addonpackages" - autoscanned, automanaged
"custom" - autoscanned, only managed for morphs in some cases
"saves" - just a filedump for your stuff

4. is there a way to show all dependecies of a scene? for example list all (!) custom files, that are not within the json or within the the json's file tree? i think this makes it a little bit daunting for newcomers, actually. If this does not exist, such a feature should be included.

5. if i decide to just roll with all the addonpackages that i don't want - but need to avoid dependencies error spam - is there a way to hide them in the UI, or make them less visible? I have donwlaoded a very nice look, that had dependencies to a custom hair pack and two different clothing asset packs, both with 5 or 6 clothing items in them. Maybe one could include an option to semi-activate var files, where they serve their dependencies, but their content does not show up independently? (found that one out by myself. there is a hide function, which i somehow did not notice before.)

thanks a lot!

 

[TToby]

You are welcome. I am a bit of a "collect them all" guy. At the beginning, I collected every free stuff that seems barely useful... now I am a lot more picky, but my VaM folder is huge (!) and slow. So I do a lot of texture optimization with every new look or cloth.

1) This should be for user preferences with addon packages, according to the name. Mine is empty and I never created a single Var package file for sharing. I don't know this for sure, sorry. Maybe you want to ask MeshedVR for this.

2) You can add subfolders to the AddonPackages folder as you like. I did that with folders like "morphs", "hair", "look", "scenes", ... absolutely no problem, because the main folder is autoscanned. This is even confirmed by MeshedVR.
If you want to do some advanced sorting, you could even unpack a Var file to a folder and name it "name of original file.var". It is planned that this folder should be treated like a var file. Never needed it, because unziping the Var files is so easy.

3) The Save folder is one of the oldes structures in VaM. It is not auto scanned and a filedump like you said. If you rename or move stuff, you will break the dependencies saved in scenes. In the other direction, the scene files can be moved and renamed. You can add folders to it as you like, as long as you correctly link your scenes to it.

4) No, there is no build-in way, AFAIK. But I am not sure if there is a plugin to do this... I have something like this in the back of my mind, because this was discussed many times... Though, that would be one of the not-so-well-known ones, or it was planned but not completed. AFAIK "VAMInspector" is only for VAC files. Nevertheless, you just can open the scene files with a text editor and look (and change) for the dependencies yourself. AFAIK all dependencies should be in the json file. In the other direction you can not search for all dependencies a hair file has, for instance, without those questionable plugin. I know that Meshed VR is aware of this and wanted to do some automatic managing tools, maybe only for Var files because this is actually the new and prefered way.... but this is somewhere in the very long waiting list.

 

[kinski]

Thanks again TToby. You are a great help. I think i can make it from here...

2) You can add subfolders to the AddonPackages [...]
If you want to do some advanced sorting, you could even unpack a Var file to a folder and name it "name of original file.var". It is planned that this folder should be treated like a var file. Never needed it, because unziping the Var files is so easy.

This sound like a great feature. Wouldn't this be super helpful for having stuff automanaged that did not ship as a var? You could take an old vac file and unpack it or take stuff that's supposed to go into "custom" and put it into addonpackages. This would leave the save folder for stuff that is not expected to be referenced a lot.

 

[TToby]

Bitte bitte... und das nächste Mal vielleicht auch in deutsch. ;-)

(Realized that both are Germans after cumbersom English conversation).