Avatar Hypertutorial

This page will link and describe an entire process of turning a booth avatar into a customised, fully kitted, and highly functional avatar.

What you will need:

Blender + CATS
- Better FBX importer recommended
Unity Hub
VRChat Creator Companion

<todo: Setup>

Finding a Booth

First, find a booth you want. There's plenty of choice:

Go to Avatar Museum
Ask around
browse sites liek https://avatar-network.herokuapp.com/avatars/
"site: booth.pm <booth name>" in google

For this tutorial I had the following goal: Goth GF.

I chose 'Glaze': https://booth.pm/ja/items/2040115

Piercings, kinda close style. Will do some modifications to get it to goth mode.

Then check what outfits are available with https://avatar-network.herokuapp.com/avatars/?word=glaze

No outfits. Great.

Primary modification recommended is a hairswap. Changes the profile of the booth a lot, unless it has a very distinctive face (which the glaze does but whatever)

I chose lilium hair:

Loading up and starting

First, prep blender. Install (latest is fine), then install development version of CATS

<todo how to do this but tl;dr download development zip, Edit-> Preferences -> load addon. Same with better fbx importer but this is usually options.>

extracting the glaze I got this:

FBX: Contains the files to import into blender: Mesh data.
PNG: Pre-exported textures and matcaps and such
PSD: Photoshop projects that are layered versions of textures. If you don't have PSDs, choose another booth.
UnityPackage. This is a prepack that can be loaded into unity directly. Contains lots of the animations, materials, and basically everything preconfigured. If you want to do no customisation at all; you can load this into unity directly and skip to the unity parts of the tutorial.
VRM: A VRM is another prepackaged format 'avatar package' that's a more common open standard. Cool to see but rare.
Some PDFs: I didn't even open these.

This is where the videos start. The following shows how to load an fbx into blender, and prep it for starting:

Load FBX into Blender
Fix materials for viewing
Check out the model: Textures, shapekeys, weighting.

The below video walks you through (my) process of loading an fbx into blender. I first fix the textures on the materials so it looks reasonable, then I check the weighting by wiggling bones, then check the shapekeys to see what I'm working with, then I check the UV map. The goal here is to get a feel for what is on the booth, how the meshes are split, and so on.

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