GUIDE: Easy & quick music videos made with VaM (Patreon)

Difficulty: easy
Time: ~1 hour for a 30 seconds clip 

Doing animations in VAM is very complicated and I'm sure it puts off a lot of people who would love to do more creative stuff with their models otherwise. VR scenes are awesome, photos are nice, but there's something about videos, even small loops, that keeps them fresh over time, even more so when it's your own creative process & preferences. If you add some music to it, it's a full vibe. 

To help with that here's a different way of getting some cool videos to your own liking done extremely quick:

1. Have a pose switcher ready

Easy way. Use AEStudio to change poses. You click on the "?" to get a random pose. It has like a thousand poses or more. You can delete or hide the rest of the scene and keep just the person & pose panel and go from there

Advanced way. Make your own pose switcher using the QuickActions subscene from AEStudio like I did in the Δlî¢э demo scene for example. You can set your own poses or pick different packs that way. You only have to edit the top right text atom: create one action (like load pose_69), set "69" as the wildcard, and set the min and max values like 1-300 and it will automatically work with all 300.

Advanced 2 way. Mocaps or BVH animations of course but they're more difficult to find and to customize. With poses you can do a custom cool & unique pose in a few seconds and rely on the next step for the animation

2. Add cycle force plugin (5 minutes)

Add cycle force plugins to the Person (Scripts/MeshedVR/CycleForce.cs) and make the person vibe around a bit. In my demo videos i had like 10.

You can load the demo scene from Δlî¢э and save that as a Person plugin preset and then just Merge Load that plugin preset whenever you need lots of cycle forces added fast. In the demo video i used the Δlî¢э demo scene and just added one more cycle force for the head to nod a bit more. I'll probably add some of this vibing logic to Alive pretty soon to skip this step

3. Make the person more dynamic (5 minutes)

Add some plugins to make the character more dynamic. I used Alive for expressions & some extra body movement, Glance for eye movement & Hand Animator for the hands. There are others like ExpressionRandomizer, Silver Expressions, Life, E-motion, AEdoll, etc. For Glance it's best to add a few empty atoms in front of the character (i had 3) and add the Glance Target plugin to them so that the person will look around a bit more, you'll capture some cool eye movement that way

4. Film (10 minutes)

The way I did it was: I would pick a random pose that looked cool, rotated the camera a bit, captured the screen with OBS for 10 seconds without moving the camera. I did like 15 different poses, then changed some stuff around like taking the clothes off, changed the time scale and captured another 15 poses. So I spent about 6 minutes with this. For vertical videos you can keep the model on the right side of the screen while you film and still have menus and do stuff on the left because it will get cut out anyway.

4. Edit (20 minutes - 1 hour)

Piece the video together - there are lots of video editing software, the most basic one will do just fine. Start by setting a new video with the size that you want. I went for something weird like 600x990 because that fitted the area i captured: 

Example clip: https://vimeo.com/732976283

this is how I captured the videos. When editing I just moved the videos around so that only the clean right side is in the frame.

Then you just fit in the clips the way it feels right to you. The way I did it was to pick a short music clip and start with that. Then one by one added clips, moved them around so that the person was in the frame. I cut the clip off after a few seconds based on the beat and moved to the next. For this demo video i ended up using 16 pieces out of those 30 captured, it's best to capture more so that you have more choices when you edit and pick something that feels right in the moment in the video. It took me about 40 minutes to piece it all up. It could be done in 10-20 probably, I spent more time picking what to use and shuffling the cuts, I had no planning for the video to begin with, went with the flow

Optional: Free music

lots of free bangers on soundcloud. Search something then Tracks on the left, then under Filter on the left pick 'to modify commercially'. Quick link: https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds?q=a&filter.license=to_modify_commercially

The song I used was https://soundcloud.com/f1lxsxf/filosof-after-world . You can find the license of each song under the song tags

Tip: Let the model drive the animation, don't worry about what to capture, just go with the flow and capture cool shots as they happen. They happen every now and then on their own without no planning.

Recommended: PostMagic plugin to make VaM look better

Bonus: 30s demo clip posted on my redgifs account & on the hub