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.

tldr:

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What you will need:

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

<todo: Setup>

Note on videos: They're h265 mp4s that might not play in a browser; download them. Also I will not activate windows.

Overall Flow

The process follows a pretty reliable pattern and that is from the Avatar_Creation_Process

1. Find a base model to start with.
2. Load this into Blender
3. Clean and modify the model to work with VRChat/Unity
4. Export this model
5. Load this into Unity
6. Configure and setup to be compatible with VRChat
7. Upload to VRChat and use

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 a general aesthetic I wanted, and that was 'goth gf'. So I look around for booths I can turn into that, and have a general aesthetic guiding process for changes to the booth.

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

Prep Blender

First, prep blender. Install (latest is fine), then install development version of CATS. This isn't super intuitive:

1. Go to https://github.com/absolute-quantum/cats-blender-plugin/tree/development and click "Code" at the middle upper right and 'download as zip'. This is how to get the development branch of CATS. It's not intuitive since there's download buttons everywhere else for the normal CATS release which hasnt been updated in 2 years.
2. Go to blender (I recommend https://www.blender.org/download/lts/3-3/ since it will stay the same for the longest time) and edit-preferences->addons and upload the zip.

Better fbx importer/exporter is recommended but optional; you'll be fine without it in most cases. It's a paid addon so I cant link it here.

Extract Glaze

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.

Video

First FBX import into blender

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/fpf821.mp4

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Mesh Editing

Part of customising a booth is going to be adding, swapping, and editing mesh to fit. The highest value and lowest effort mod is usually a hairswap. So long as the face isn't super distinctive you can make your avatar have a reasonable unique look. If the booth has face modifying shapekeys you can tweak those too and enhance that uniqueness.

Hair Swap

Swap the hair. Reasonably simple.

Adding any object will come in a number of distinct stages:

1. Clean up the object in a new blender window/file to get it ready for import into your main project
2. Append the thing you want to your current project
3. Use pose mode editing to get the object in roughly the right shape
4. Use proportional editing/sculpting to get the mesh exactly right
5. merge the armatures
6. Check weighting
7. Done

The exact techniques are the same as in Add_outfit

The videos below shows me doing this process. A few things to note:

• I accidentally chose a hair that was way harder than average. 90% of the time just pose-mode editing is enough for hairs.
• It's very similar to the existing hair, which is another kind of mistake, but oh well.

Video

1: Clean up the object:

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/e0v725.mp4

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2: Append the new hair to the base and (3) use pose mode to adjust:

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/w7gwjk.mp4

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4: Fine tune the mesh with proportional editing:

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/1bvzzn.mp4

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5: Merge the hair into the existing armature and (6) check, and (7) done:

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/ienq1g.mp4

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Texture Editing

One common editing process is to change the textures. The goal here will be to change the color of the hair (to black), and set a more goth colour scheme for the clothing too. I will also be altering the eye colour (I decide against it but the process is recorded).

To start with you'll need Photoshop. I'm using 2021, works fine. You can also use GIMP for most texture editing but you'll often find PSDs that use adjustment layers and GIMP just doesn't import those properly. It's a shame for me too because I am more familiar with GIMP. You'll be mostly working from the PSDs and editing those.

Texture Editing Workflow

The workflow is usually like follows:

1. Modify the PSD
2. Export the texture to PNG
3. Import it into Blender
4. Go to 1.

PSDs come in layers which allow for fine tuning and high-quality edits to the textures at the cost of not being particularly UV-aware. For more advanced texture work, Substance Painter is the tool of choice.

The goal for the video flow below is:

• Blacken the hair
• Change the skin tone to be more pale
• Considering an eye tone change
• Adding Makeup Modifications
• Modify outfit textures

Video

1: Recolouring Hair

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/p1cc1p.mp4

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2: Recolouring Skin texture

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/ibwh7e.mp4

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3: Changing Eye Makeup

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/z0w9te.mp4

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4: Changing Skirt Colour

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/4negoq.mp4

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Adding Clothing

Changing clothes is a fundamental of modifying a booth avatar. In this section I grab a shirt from booth and attach it to the model. Note that I've increased the difficulty; if you can pick a outfit item that is pre-made for your avatar you can skip posing, mesh modifications, and weighting.

This is going to have the exact same workflow as Add_outfit, and it is going to be as follows:

1. Find an outfit
2. Clean it up for transfer
3. Pose it roughly into position (s)
4. Proportional edit and sculpt (s)
5. Merge armatures
6. Weight to the new mesh (s)
7. Merge materials (Sometimes optional)

Outfit Finding

First I checked https://avatar-network.herokuapp.com/avatars/?word=glaze for outfits, no luck. I asked around and found https://beckenzi.booth.pm as a nice source for goth style clothing. I ended up deciding to affix https://beckenzi.booth.pm/items/4656108 - I'd ideally want to attach more but for tutorial sake I'm just doing one item. Note how this has compatibility with other bases but not this one.

I bought the fishnet top and got greeted with a unitypackage like below. This is common with outfits. I extracted it with https://pypi.org/project/unitypackage-extractor/ (or similar, there's a half dozen extractors out there) to obtain access to the FBX and texture(s).

From there I start attaching.

Video

1: Clean for transfer

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/k7w0ng.mp4

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2: Append to main blend project, Pose edit roughly to shape, modify mesh to the right shape, then merge armatures

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/jzywcw.mp4

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3: Tune weighting on shirt to match base. (Weight painting)

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/0cl1ic.mp4

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Prepping for Unity

While in blender the avatar will be in pieces and put together for ease of working on it, and not built to use in unity so much. When you are happy with how the avatar looks in blender, it is time to do an optimisation and ‘unity organisation’ pass. This happens after you make a decision, and the decision is this: What do you need from the avatar. Then you pare it down to that.

A clearer way to say it is are you making an erp avatar or a general avatar. If ‘fully functional’ (an ERP avatar usually), less optimisation is needed, but you still need to arrange the meshes so they are toggleable as you desire in VRC.

If a general avatar, a lot more optimisation needs to be done to make a general purpose hangout avatar that performs well for you and others.

Optimisation?

General rule of optimisation is to optimise down to what you need. For this tutorial I'll be doing some quick stuff to fix one obvious problem. I'm intentionally not optimising much because the goal is to make an avatar with lots of toggles and options that will only really be used in one on one instances and not general use.

If you want to split off and make an avatar that's actually optimised for general use, there's LOTS of info at Avatar_Optimization and there is an example linked on the page showing the process for an average booth.

Tasks for this section:

1. Simple material merge to fix one problem material
2. Final deletion of things I don't want
3. Scuff check

Video

1: Material Merge, Mesh Merge, And unwanted item deletion

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/uss0wf.mp4

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2: Adding root bones to bone sets in blender

Useful to make physbone configuration easier/more performant

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/s1cpkm.mp4

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Unity

Blender is more of a creative program while unity is more about configuration and setup. Only a few parts of unity need to be done in order; and then this is just import into unity and upload to VRC. Everything in between is free form and so this section will be split up a lot more. However, I will have an order I prefer to do things so it is worth following this if you don't have experience.

Note that you'll need to install the correct version of unity: https://creators.vrchat.com/sdk/current-unity-version

Packages I import include:

• Liltoon https://github.com/lilxyzw/lilToon/releases
• Pumkins avatar tools https://github.com/rurre/PumkinsAvatarTools/releases
• Combo Gesture Expressions (CGE) https://github.com/hai-vr/combo-gesture-expressions-av3/releases
• VRCFury (Install in Creator Companion with the package API: https://vcc.vrcfury.com/ )

Tasks for this section:

1. Export from blender
2. Create Unity Project and import needed project components
3. Import Avatar Items: Mesh (fbx), textures (images), material caps, normal maps, skin maps, etc etc. Animations, etc.

Out of order items:

Video

1: Exporting to FBX from Blender, Creating new Unity project, Importing basic items, and a quick unity UI demo

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/v73rl0.mp4

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2: (setting shapekeys), Material configuration: Texture, matcap, normalmap, Alpha masks

In this I set shapekeys (which should be set in blender if optimising, unity 2022 soon though..). I also set Material settings; I pick the liltoon shader ( https://github.com/lilxyzw/lilToon ) (I use 1.3.6 but latest should be fine). I use the original glaze as a reference, but the overall process is set a texture then tweak settings until it looks good. I demo setting matcaps and the use of masks for them

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/v73rl0.mp4

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3: Configuring VRC Avatar Descriptor

The VRC avatar descriptor allows vrc's sdk to identify and operate on avatars to make them work in VRC.

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/mstywk.mp4

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4: Using Combo Gesture Expressions to set/create gestures

Combo Gesture Expressions (CGE) is an awesome tool that is the only way I'd create or set gestures for an avatar. You use it to set animations in slots, as well as use it as a graphical editor to blend shapekeys into the gestures you want. Then you set an FX layer and it builds all the gestures into a couple layers for you in a blend tree.

(I also add an alpha mask to a material)

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/sac5rx.mp4

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5: Configuring Physbones

Physbones make things wiggle. In this I set hair, boobs, and skirt physbones. The settings in the video are pretty rough and if you work from them you should expect to do tweaking; but in most cases settings depend on your model anyway.

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/hfdrmi.mp4

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6: Toggles

Toggle things on the avatar, like clothing, or fun objects.

Note that the more layers you have in your animation controller, the less optimised it is. It is actually very important to reduce layer counts as much as you can as it eats CPU, which is a common VRC bottleneck.

Basic Toggle:

A basic toggle can be made for a single item to just turn it on and off. The video goes through some basics of how to put together a menu, parameters, animation controller, animations, and test it all at the end. Understanding the flow of (top down) menu item --> changes vrc parameter --> Changes aniamtion controller parameter --> condition is met for transition --> transition occurs and changes animation --> animation plays and causes the toggle to trigger is important for debugging more complex arrangements. A basic toggle like this uses a layer per item, which is not advised.

VRCFury and similar tools can just make a toggle for you automatically but I only recommend doing this after understanding how to do it manually. I will rarely advocate for spending more work on something, but when the auto tool doesn't work for you, you don't want to be in the dark.

LINK: https://files.catbox.moe/6ownkz.mp4

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