Polygon Amorous – Using Virt-A-Mate to make 8K videos for Quest 2

Along with the best in real-life adult VR content and other perks a subscription to VRPorn.com Premium provides access to some of the best in adult VR gaming. Arguably the absolute best of adult VR gaming today is Virt-A-Mate, aka VaM.

VaM is easily the most impressive adult sandbox that currently exists for both VR and 2D. To make things even better, a premium subscription comes with VAMX. The VAMX add-on to Virt-A-Mate not only reduces the learning curve for VaM but also bundles a large amount of content. With VaM and VAMX, fans of Rule34 and other CGI porn can direct the action and explore a large and diverse selection of community created scenes.

The benefits of recording Virt-A-Mate

The biggest hurdle to this though is that VR users without the most powerful machines can’t see VaM at its best. Hair physics, for example requires a lot of processing power in VaM. With the hair resolution tripled from default, the 15 girl stress test by creator Redeyes runs in real-time on my PC at 7 frames per second in 1080p desktop mode. That would be an even more horrendous experience if running in VR.

Traditionally people created 2D videos with VaM by screen recording them. That limits the capture to be the frame rate that VaM can run at and the resolution to that of the monitor it was running on. Recording a screen mirror so the video is in 3D is even more complicated.

The way that lets everyone enjoy the content without reducing quality to manage system load is by not rendering in real-time. Instead, render the scene to be played as video at high resolution. Once the scene is a VR video, it can be enjoyed on a Quest 2, for example, at full 8K 60fps.

A plugin can render VaM scenes into VR video

The completely free VR renderer plugin by creator Eosin can create 2D and VR videos by rendering VaM in a similar way to a CGI tool like Blender or Maya. The plugin can render images and video up to 16K resolution and even beyond 60 fps video rate. Now the 15 girls can wiggle and jiggle in high-resolution with boob, hair, and cloth physics all enabled.

The downsides are the need to add the plugin to the scene, and the wait as the scene is rendered out (7 fps in this case) into however long a video you want. But now you can load the video on a standalone headset and watch it whenever you want, wherever you want.

This blog post is the start of a series about Virt-A-Mate. Especially making video content using it. So to start, we will install the plugin in a simple scene to try it.

Quick usage example walkthrough

We will not go through the installation and basic usage of Virt-A-Mate in this blog post. There are already a number of community resources for that. You should start with the “Getting Started” section of the VaM wiki and this Youtube playlist of VaM guides.

I’ll wait …

Now that you know the basics of VaM, let’s grab the render plugin and add it to a scene.

Step 1: Grab the plugin

The official website for VaM community created content is https://hub.virtamate.com. The VaM hub is accessible inside VaM itself; however, the plugin we want can’t be downloaded from there. You must go to the hub’s website and download it directly.

The plugin var file can be found at this link: https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/video-renderer-for-3d-vr180-vr360-and-flat-2d-audio-bvh-animation-recorder.11994/

Step 2: Copy the plugin into VaM

The standard package for VaM scenes, plugins, and other assets is *.var files. Underneath the main directory of your Virt-A-Mate install is an “Addon Packages” folder. Copy the var file from where you downloaded it into that folder.

Step 3: Bring up a scene

The scene we will use for the example is “Sim Cloth Hair Dance.” It is an older scene included with the base VaM install. Maybe tweak the character, if you know how already, to go bigger on boobs and butt for extra fun. For example, the character will stay its default from the scene.

Step 4: Select the “Window Camera”

The plugin has to be attached to a VaM scene atom, but the Entertainer VaM key can’t add new atoms to scenes. Every scene has a “Window Camera,” which is typically unused and conveniently using a camera icon. So we will attach the render plugin to that scene atom, but technically any scene atom that can use a plugin works.

If the VaM toolbar isn’t open, the “F1” key will show it. Clicking “Toggle UI” or the “U” key will open the VaM UI panel.

Select the “Edit Mode” or press the “E” key to enable editing within the scene.  The edit icons will then become available. Click the pointer icon, which allows you to select specific atoms (i.e., scene objects).

From the list of scene objects, you want to select the “Window Camera.” Then to the right of that, you want to select the “control” sub-element of the of the “Window Camera”

Warning: Reflections cause problems with the cameras. In the red “Camera” tab, uncheck the window camera so that it is off regardless of whether the plugin is attached to it. The plugin doesn’t need that camera being turned on.

Step 5: Add the VR render plugin

Select the “Plugins” tab of the Window Camera then click “Add Plugin”. It will add a new blank plugin slot to the list. Click “Select File” to bring up a file chooser.

A list of addon var packages is on the left side of the file chooser. You can scroll down for Eosin.VRRenderer.15 (or higher). Selecting that will open up the directory of that package. Select the Eosin_VRRenderer.cslist file to add the VR renderer to the new plugin slot on the Window Camera.

Step 6: Setup the shot

Once the plugin is enabled, a preview image will pop up in the bottom right corner.

The blue axis array of the Window Camera movement handle is the direction where the camera is looking.  You can drag the camera around to point wherever you like. You can even animate the camera using the Timeline plug, but we won’t be doing that here.

If the render preview is empty or appears stuck on one image, make sure the Window Camera is disabled (unchecked) in the red Camera tab.

Take test shots

At this point, the renderer is installed. At the top of the plugin panel are the buttons that also show the keyboard shortcuts for taking individual images or capturing video. It’s good to start with individual images to dial in the image quality and scene framing you want.

Take some static shots at 8K and above, and then look at them in the headset. You can get clarity and detail that isn’t possible with real-world cameras getting closer to the native resolution of the headset.

Looking at 16K images crashed Oculus TV on my Quest 2 when I tried it. The Play’a app, though, could open and show 16K images without a problem.

So many settings!

The plugin has capabilities that go beyond rendering 2D and VR, so many settings can be ignored. Here are some notes that might help.

Note 1: PNG files take much longer to process and save on disk than JPEG. Unless you really need PNG’s color accuracy or alpha channel for post-processing of the images/video – JPEG is faster and good enough. You can set the JPEG to 100% highest quality.

Note 2: The standard resolution and MSAA settings of VaM and the plugin settings aren’t related. To make VaM run easier while setting things up, you can completely turn off MSAA and cut the render resolution to .5 in the main VaM settings.

Note 3: “Cubemap/Panoramic Side Resolution” is the render resolution VaM will use for each camera shot for VR180 or VR360. Those shots are combined together and then output in the Output Resolution. Having a higher resolution for the camera shots than the output resolution is effectively supersampling.

For 2D video (Flat), the side resolution isn’t relevant. There is a specific “Flat Supersampling multiplier used.”

Note 4: MSAA uses more VRAM than increasing the render resolution and supersampling.

Note 5: You can have a combination of settings that will cause the render to grow beyond your available VRAM. The plugin estimates the VRAM usage based on your settings. The estimate will change colors indicating the danger of crashing from overloading the VRAM.

A stack of image files

The plugin places static single-shot images and video capture output in in “VR_Renders” directory under the “Saves” directory of Virt-A-Mate.

For video render output, the plugin doesn’t include an encoder but instead creates sequentially numbered image files and an audio file separately in a named directory.

I won’t provide instructions for encoding the images into a video in this blog post. The free version of Davinci Resolve video editor is what I use. There are other commonly used options like AVISynth and FFMPEG.

Just the beginning

It may appear daunting initially, but using Virt-A-Mate to render your videos is easier than using a dedicated CGI content tool like Blender. There are a lot of free content assets from the community that can be pieced together versus doing it all by hand yourself. VAMX especially opens the doors of content and customization.

In the next blogs, we will explore my favorite scenes, characters, plugins, and techniques I use to create content for watching in 8K on my Quest 2.

Credits

Virt-A-Mate by Meshed VR

“15 Girl Stress Test” scene by RedEyes
See the scene hub page for more credits. The “NC” clothing and hair assets were removed and replaced by assets included with VaM.

“Sim Cloth Hair Dance” demo scene is included in VaM

VR Renderer plugin created by Eosin