Vam Model Rigging Guide

This guide will instruct on how to fix skeleton rigging issues caused but merging too many looks
together when remixing. This can manifest in all sorts of ways but the most common are eyes
popping out of the head when looking at extreme angles, Jaw/teeth angle issues, fingers getting all
messy and the hip area getting all foldy and nasty in many sex positions.

Prep

You will need the following plugins and programs to do this:

Daz studio and genesis2 essentials: Its clunky as all hell, makes no sense and we all hate it but it’s a
necessary evil. At least its free Get this installed now as a few things we are going to do in
the guide require daz paths to be present to work.

https://www.daz3d.com/

Morph Merge and Split – The standard merge plugin used by all, we will use this to make the
morph(s) to send to daz.

https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/vam-to-daz-2.888/

Chokaphs Vam to Daz – We will use this external software to back port vams morph to daz .dsf
format

https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/vam-to-daz-2.888/

Preparing the model.

Since we are going to merge your model to a separate head and body morph for daz we want to
ensure that you are happy the model is finished. Personally, I like to zero all eyelash and fingernail
morphs prior to merging as many clothing and eyelash hair assets don’t work well unless these are at
default and can easily be dialled back after the model is back in vam.

Another thing to me wary of is neck seam issues which will occur if you mix merged bodies together
due to slight differences in proportions between the models. Go to VAMs options and change the
smooth passes setting to 0. It will now be obvious if there are mesh issues.
Most users have their smoothing set to 4 because more is better right? Well in vams case this causes
too much smoothing ensuring you lose all fine detail. So, the solution is to dial in extreme morph
values to fight VAMS smoothing setting when in reality your actual underlaying mesh is horrible and
hidden by the extreme smoothing. I create with smooth passes set to 1 and use the tessellation
plugin which does a much better job.

The morph merge and split has options to fix neck seam issues but I find they can often compound
the problem. Fix the neck as best you can with these morphs.

https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/neck-fix-morphs.6749/

If its unfixable using just the neck fix morphs you can sculpt out the issues in blender if you want.

https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/vam-to-blender-to-vam.3759/

Merging the model

Once this is done load the Morph merge and split plugin on to your model, open the ui and merge
your model choosing to split the model into separate Head, Body and if needed Gens.
Once done hit the open morph folder button. Keep it open it will be useful shortly.

We have just created a set of merged morphs for your model. These come out as 2 files a .vmi and a
.vmb you require both for each morph.

Backporting morphs to Daz

Download and unzip Chokaphis Vam to Daz software and run it. You should see the path to your daz
libraries path if all is well. Drag the newly created morphs onto the female box. It does not look like
anything happens but trust the process. Click the box to see the ported .dsf file location.
Rigging in daz

Now fire up daz and load in the base genesis 2 female model this has to be done after the morphs
are created as daz loads morphs at model load. Select it, chose the all option in the parameters tab
and use the search to find your morphs.

Dial in the morph you want to rig, its important to only have one morph at a time.

Click the little cog on the right hand side of the morph and select parameters. We are going to
change the name of the morph so we can identify the rerigged version easily in vam. I appended
mine with _rigged
Switch daz into joint editor mode. Right click empty space in the viewport and select adjust rigging to
shape.

Now check the rig to ensure the bones aren’t obviously bad. This only ever happens on the top jaw
bone for me and I either adjust it manually or do an undo to revert to the default rig and untick the
upper jaw when you rig again so its excluded.

Now we need to save the updated rig data into the morph, this is called an ERC freeze.

Right click the morph and select edit mode

Then right click again and choose ERC Freeze

Click ok in the next dialog box.

Dial out your morph and repeat with any other morphs you need to rig. Once done dial out all the
morphs.

File -> Save as -> support asset -> Morphs assets

In the next screen we need to set our save location then find and check the morphs we want to save
in Actor -> Vam to Daz as below. Now all we need to do is send our morphs back to vam

Now all that left is to copy the newly saved morphs to Vams morph folder and refresh the morph list
in vam. Hopefully this fixes the rigging issues