VaM2 Progress Update
Hi all-
More details about what the video shows are further down in the post if you watched that before reading the post.
VaM2 Progress Update
We made a significant change in our VaM2 development work over the last few months which is why it has been a long time since the last progress update.
For those that are new to this project, VaM2 is the next generation VaM product that is currently in development. VaM has had a long life, but it was time to move forward into future technologies and assets, while also improving upon what VaM started. That is what VaM2 is. Please note VaM will still have a long life ahead while VaM2 is developed. We have stopped making updates and fixes to VaM so that we can put all focus into VaM2. VaM content continues to be created by our extremely amazing and active community (see https://hub.virtamate.com).
Here are the goals we have previously stated for VaM2, and these continue to be what drives us in development at every stage:
Improve visual rendering to next-gen AAA quality.
Improve physics. Improve collision accuracy. Improve realism of skin, body, clothing, and hair physics.
Improve performance. Scale better with high-core-count CPUs. Offer more performance options that allow VaM to run on lower-end hardware and still be enjoyable.
Improve usability.
What has changed? We were working pretty steadily on the VaM2 Core Application and were to the point that we were ready to make content to test the VaM2 Core Application with. As we started bringing in and making assets for testing, we realized we wanted to build all VaM2 content in the system we would eventually share with the community for making addon content. So we took a turn and started working on the VaM2 Addon Kit. This VaM2 Addon Kit is a Unity-based project that works separately from the VaM2 Core Application. The VaM2 Addon Kit serves the following purposes:
Easy creation of content for the VaM2 Core Application.
Easy deployment of created content for testing and for delivery to others
Robust plug-and-play system that allows content to easily connect to other existing content
Content that loads quickly in the VaM2 Core Application, and does not hang the application during load. Content should work as if natively built into the application.
The new VaM2 Addon Kit required significant work to accomplish. We did research into many different addon systems that are available, and ultimately built a custom system on top of a new asset system from Unity. This new custom addon system is now complete enough to build content for the VaM2 Core Application and meets all of the above goals. The primary VaM2 goals of improved usability and performance were met here as demonstrated in the video. In addition, this new VaM2 Addon Kit will allow creation of content that simply was not possible in VaM.
Video
The video linked here contains 2 parts.
The 1st part of the video shows the test application we created for testing content created with the VaM2 Addon Kit. Please note the interface and UI is just for testing and does not resemble what the VaM2 Core Application will look like or how it will function. All content shown loading in the test application in the video was created using the VaM2 Addon Kit. As you can see, load times are incredibly fast, and is reflective of how loading in the VaM2 Core Application will be as it will use the same system. The content streams in on a background thread so it does not hang the application while loading. And it streams in much, much faster than content did in VaM. The best part of all is community created content will use this same VaM2 Addon Kit and will have the same fast load times shown here. No more waiting minutes for scenes and textures to load as was a common experience in VaM.
The 2nd part of the video shows some examples of how the VaM2 Addon Kit works inside of Unity to create new addons. We will provide guides and tutorials on how to use this kit to make it as easy as possible. Hopefully the video captures how simple the process can be. And more complex addons, including fully rigged figures that can be animated and simulated with physics, can be built with this kit. The character models shown in the video were also created using this same kit.
The new VaM2 Addon Kit will be delivered to the community sometime after the 1st beta of the VaM2 Core Application. The first beta of VaM2 Core Application is our primary focus now and will include some content built using the VaM2 Addon Kit as shown here. We don't have a delivery date for the first VaM2 beta at this time. We stopped making estimates on delivery dates because we are always way off and we often change plans as we go that adds more time to development.
Thank you for your support and patience as VaM2 is developed. We could not be doing this without you!
Meshed and Team
Comments (37)
Can you share any new information to your customers please?
We are working on a VaM2 progress update that will be posted on Patreon soon. In the meantime, please join our Discord where I give out frequent information on the #vam2 channel.
how does it go on, does it go on?
Is the project dead?
No! We are working hard on getting the beta completed. Please join the vam2 channel on Discord if you want more information. I am also planning to give some updates here on Patreon, but for now Discord is the easiest way for me to communicate more frequently.
Any hair creation tools implemented yet?
9 months later and no updates... Could you spare 5 minutes and let us know what's going on? After 3 years and millions of dollars invested by your supporters, it seems like there should be a really solid beta version released, at the very least... Dead project?
VaM2 is mentioned in both the 1.21 and 1.22 post updates: https://www.patreon.com/posts/vam-1-21-77428912 https://www.patreon.com/posts/vam-1-22-79065136 Due to the vamX partnership and length of time it was taking to develop VaM2, we decided to do more 1.X releases. We are back on VaM2 full time now. The beta is still a ways out. If you want more frequent information, please join our Discord server (you can link to it on the Patreon settings pages). I frequently post on the vam2 channel there. That is our preferred communication method. We are planning a VaM2 update post here as well, but for those that cannot wait, there is a ton of information in the vam2 channel on Discord.
Will 2.0 backwards compatible? I only ask because there are some great scenes and a lot of hard work from the content creators that would be missed if we could only view them by logging into predecessor version of VAM. It's probably a tall ask, but thought I would ask anyhow. Thank you for all your hard work!
2.X is not backwards compatible. A big reason for the creation of 2.X was to move to more modern models and technologies and fix performance issues. All of that required breaking backwards compatibility. In some cases, creators would use external tools to adapt their content to work in 2.X. For instance there are tools available ton convert Daz3d Genesis 2 clothing (what 1.X uses) to Genesis 8 clothing (what 2.X uses for the included models).
This is really great stuff and taking the time to build it right is the right way to go. Its already miles ahead on performance so hopefully all these changes add up to good framerates.
Is VAM coming on steam? Would we get a steam code?
i know right how much longer this is taking forever
Blazing!
Hi. Future plans for a pass through feature , now the the quest Pro is on the market?
Yes. I have a Pro and I will be looking into this. I plan for 2.X to support VR, AR, and mixed.
That addon chair was exported extremely fast and looked great... did it also include collision info so was pretty much ready to use?
Yeah it had a mesh collider, but we are going to push for objects to use primitive colliders as they are much faster to use in the physics engine and also can be supported in clothing and hair physics. It may also be required for the skin physics system, but we won't know for sure until we work on that more. We may develop a system that can easily convert mesh colliders to a set of primitive colliders that will work well in the 2.X physics system.
This will be a game-changer for Vam....
Looks great, I really hope you'll ship the Addon Kit sooner rather than later, so that we can start experimenting with our own content, even with unstable APIs. Demo content is always so limiting. Would be really great for productivity to not have to restart the application every time, even with the improved speed. Is that on your agenda? Would be even greater to have an option to automatically reload / re-instantiate changed content for fast iteration, especially in bigger scenes. Also scenes: Are you planning on enabling scene authoring in Unity Editor as well? The perfect situation would obviously be being able to edit in both Unity Editor and VaM and have them sync, but that might be a bit of an ask :D In any case, looks great. I'm really looking forward to this!
i mean you have a lot of crashes so you have to restart every time. I upped my memory from 8gb to 32gb and all my crashes were gone after that.
I hope 2.X will support Eye tracking for the newer VR Headsets? Please release it soon :) we need a new and better version of VAM! :)
Yes we are planning to add eye tracking support. I have a Quest Pro on the way and will also try out their face tracking to see if it is possible to also incorporate that for face animation.
Would it be at all possible to have some sort of import mechanism in the Addon Kit, that can adapt at least some existing content to 2.X (for example looks, clothes)? There's great content out there of creators that are no longer active, so there will likely no be first party ports to 2.X of those, and it would be cool to have a chance to keep them around.
1.X content won't be directly adaptable to 2.X. 1.X uses new models and new materials not compatible with 1.X in any way. Some clothing may be able to be adapted by original creator using tools provided in DAZ Studio for this purpose (Genesis 2 -> Genesis 8)
Dlss3 support?
If Unity adds support for it, yes. Note that it isn't supported in VR yet, and might not ever work well in VR.
is there support for fun script?
MESHED VR PRESIDENT !!!!
lol 😂
great show...thank you
Awesome! Do you recommend I learn Unity? I have not used it before.
I actually disagree; writing plugins for VaM requires a huge amounf of guesswork, but Unity has buttons to make discovery easier, and lots of documentation and online examples, blogs, videos, etc. I'd say it'll probably be much easier for novices to use than what we currently have. But we'll see when it's out :)
Looks good and advanced. Looking forward to the full release.
When's the IPO?
Very cool.
I love the idea of the Addon Kit, hopefully that will give many more people a way to create stuff for the game!