A Basic Material/Shader Setup for your VRChat Avatar

hi in this video I want to show you how to make a basic Shader or material setup for your VR Avatar even if you have no clue about shaders the goal of this is to have a solid setup that looks good in any environment or any world a basic Shader alright so we'll start from the very beginning in case you have no idea how to even get your materials this assumed you just have your fbx with your model imported it into Unity into a new scene new project whatever and then it looks like this it's white there's no textures no shading and you have no idea how to get it done properly so at the start I usually create a folder called materials if you then select your model down here in the project and go to the tab materials here you can choose extract materials select your material folder select it and then it will extract all of the materials on your model into this folder and already assign it properly to your model now I want to put all my Textures in my case I only have three materials three textures you might have a couple more also in the same folder now we can select our materials and put our texture into each material you want to put it into Albedo texture color this all kind of means the same thing and there's basically the base texture so we do that for all of our free materials one thing I also want to mention is that at the moment everything is already correctly assigned but in case it is not for you you can also just drag the material onto the model and then it will assign it or otherwise you can also go to the mesh select it here and there you have materials and then you can drag your material in there as well and it will do it also if the extracting doesn't work you can just right click create material and then you have a brand new material that you can also drag onto the model good now you need to know we can edit multiple materials at once so I can select one control and select others now I have all three materials selected and can edit them at the same time so I want to change the color to white which is also important we don't want it to be influenced by anything else it should be just the texture now we have these three materials all using the standard Shader which for the Archer and Anime stuff doesn't look too great so I'll be using poyomi it is a Shader that can be very basic and optimized but it also has a lot of features if you want to experiment around so I will be using an old version because I'm comfortable with that 7.3.50 uh the link to this is down in the description um at the moment the latest release which was just 17 hours ago also contains the 7.3.50 version if it does not in your case you can just scroll down to the different versions and eventually you will find one version that for example this doesn't have it uh scroll down 7350 and download this I already have it downloaded here and will drag it into my Unity project this will give you a small window click on import and now this will take a while I'll fast forward this could take up to five minutes or something this is fine okay now that we have that imported we select our materials again and if we click on standard we now have the option poyomi 7.3 for me tune and now it already looks a lot better it's very flat it's like anime and it looks pretty good I still have a couple more things to do for example at the moment right after importing it's a little buggy you see rendering preset and it has a number uh usually there should be a drop down I recommend just saving the scene and closing Unity opening it up again and then it should display the drop down properly if we check now yep rendering preset opaque and then you have a drop down so this is the case for almost every different Shader that you can use you will have opaque cutout fade transparent all of these different presets to quickly explain what they do opaque just displays the color of the texture and transparency is displayed as a color as well so in this case for example you can see on the skirt I technically have some Frills here but it still is displayed as white in the texture this is actually transparent you can also see that here on the sleeves or here on the color this is usually used a lot in vroid models and textures so if you use vroid go and select your material that is being used with transparency and change it to cut out now everything that is transparent will actually be transparent however cutout does not support partial transparency so for example you may have seen something like this before where you just have weird red squares on your face maybe with a black outline also maybe this where it's just really bad and weird because this and the texture is just partially transparent so we want to select our expression material and change this to fade you can also use transclipping or transparent I don't actually know the difference between those personally I always use fade and this supports partial transparency however I recommend you to not use this if you don't need it because it can cause some other issues and it's also not as performant now one more thing that you will have on almost every Shader and it's called culling it is usually under rendering options at the very bottom there is Cal and by default set to back what does this do at the moment if I look under my skirt the back side is not visible same thing for the sleeves there's the sleeve but if you look from the other side it's not there also for the hair theoretically you can see it here but it's not displayed so if I change this to off it will render both sides of the faces and now you can see the back side of the hair you can see this back side and on the skirt you can also see underneath that the back side is being rendered alright great this is already very good setup it looks very anime like but it's also very flat personally I still like to add a little bit of shading and shadows so what I usually do is I go to lighting and Reflections light and Shadow and change from Flat to tune now right now it will look horrible because of a few settings uh I want to change the ram texture to MAF gradient and change the gradient and to one that makes it a very smooth Shadow if we do it like this it just has a lot more Shadow with this it's a smooth gradient from start to the end and the biggest issue is this Shadow strength this is currently at one I personally like to use values between 2.2 and 0.5 depending on what color it actually is so for the body for the face for the skin you can see here uh I usually like to use a very low Shadow strength 0.2 is in my opinion pretty good you still have some Shadow detail but it's not too distracting and for cloves also depending on the color you can maybe go a little bit higher for example let's see if we go to 0.4 on the dress you have a little more Shadow detail and yeah in some scenarios this looks a lot nicer if it's not completely flat but also has a little bit of shading also make sure that ignore ambient color is not ticked now one last thing I want to mention sometimes you will experience if you have multiple meshes I have the body and the face that they will behave different for example your head your face is very dark where the rest of the body is looking properly nice this can be fixed with anchor override so you want to select the mesh of your avatar and I personally always drag the spine bone into anchor override on all of my meshes this will basically tell every mesh that the spine bone position is being used for the calculations of the shading and therefore all of it will be unified and look exactly the same and there won't be any hard cuts all right that's already it uh poyomi is capable of much much more you could go into audio link and specular Reflections metallics matte caps it can do so many things so if you want to experiment feel free to do so this video was just meant to show you a very basic and solid setup that works for everything um yeah I hope it could help you if you liked it I'd appreciate a like and a comment maybe some feedback if you have some and other than that I wish you have a good day bye

Channel: Airpaca

Views: 3,877

Keywords: Airpaca

Id: igDeAFJrFbo

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023