GUIDE: Alive starter guide (Patreon)

HOW TO USE

In VAM (ideally the latest VAM version) go to the Session plugins screen: 

And load the main Alive cslist file from the Alive version you're using:

PERSON AUTOMATIC BEHAVIOR

Everything should work by itself and by default all VAM characters should have automatic behavior (change expressions) when Alive loads. You can toggle ON/OFF automatic behavior on each character by pressing the play/pause button for that character

For advanced users that want to set specific rules to when Automatic behavior loads and not for specific scenes, there are a couple of extra scripts in the var in the Plugins folder: "AliveAlwaysOff (person plugin).cslist" and "AliveAlwaysOn (person plugin).cslist". You can add these to person atoms in specific scenes to have control over the Alive auto behaviours taking over. So you can have Alive auto behaviours turned off by default and then just add AliveAlwaysOn to specific characters and have it work like the old Alive person plugin.

DESKTOP UI

After adding this plugin, the UI should appear as a sidebar. You can toggle it on/off with F2 on desktop. For more advanced users you can also switch the desktop UI from Alive > Settings > UI to Floating Sidebar. That works better for bigger monitors and it allows setting any width/height to the desktop UI, as well as change the position from the Desktop UI tab of the vam plugin interface.  I kept those sliders outside the Alive UI to make aligning it easier in case you accidently move it outside of view and can't move it back in view:

The default sidebar mode is the recommended way of using it on desktop and what I test most. This mode also has a very useful maximize functionality. If you click on the top right maximize icon, the UI will turn full screen, making it easier and giving more space to interact with some of the Alive apps.

VR UI

in VR the UI should appear next to or above VAM's UI and work like VAM's UI panels. You can customize the size from the Settings app in the VR UI section.

DESKTOP + VRUI (desktop mode in VR vam)

The Alive UI work in either VR or Desktop mode for now. If you run VAM in VR mode but play it on desktop, the UI will not appear both in VR and in desktop, just in VR mode or things might get mixed up. You can use Vam's 'Vam (Desktop Mode).bat' to run VAM in desktop mode.  And 'Vam.exe' or 'Vam (OpenVR).bat' are for running VAM in VR mode.

CONTROLS

Alive adds a few extra controls to VAM like copying atoms, deleting them, quickly moving the person to the camera and more. You can find the full list inside the Help app in the Alive UI.

SAVING

You don't have to worry about presets, saving settings, etc. To make it as simple and intuitive to use as possible, when you change Alive settings, they automatically apply and save as global settings. 

PERFORMANCE

Performance decreases in vam the more lights you have in the scene  (especially if they have shadows enabled) and how high you set Pixel Light Count in vam's settings. Alive has a feature that adds Head Lights - persistent lights that follow the camera -  so that you don't have to manually add lights:

When using this feature you might get performance issues if your scene already has lights. Because lights stack up, you might end up having 5 or 6 lights in your scene and that requires lots of resources. To help with that you can:

A. quickly disable other lights in the scene with the Turn Off button, or
B. enable "Headlights only" and use only Alive's lights when Alive is running

It's also recommended to turn on Desktop Vsync in vam's Performance settings, to prevent vam from trying to render as many frames as possible.

SET ALIVE AS A DEFAULT PLUGIN

To have Alive always automatically load in the session plugins when you run VAM you can add it as a default plugin:

USING IMAGE AI

Check my guide here. Make sure to enable it in the Settings app in the Services tab.

USING TEXT AI

Check my guide here. Make sure to enable it in the Settings app in the Services tab.

USING SPEECH-TO-TEXT & TEXT-TO-SPEECH

You'll need my free TextAudioTool. More info here. Make sure to enable it in the Settings app in the Services tab.

TROUBLESHOOTING

There's one error that gets reported a lot:

If you see that error with "LoadedSceneName" in it and Alive fails to load, it is because of one of two things:

1. You're running an older VAM version.
Solution: Update VaM

2. You used Reshade in the past, renamed vam core files and later updated vam which caused problems with those renamed files.
Solution: Either start vam through it's default exe and shortcuts (not the ones you created for reshade), or redo the reshade tutorial steps again if you want to continue using Reshade

QUESTIONS 

If you have any problems, questions, bugs, just let me know!