How to Change the Facial Expressions on an Avatar | VRChat Unity Tutorial

hello and welcome back to another video today we are going to be talking about changing expressions on a vr chat avatar if you've ever been in game on vr chat using your avatars and you've done hand gestures whether or not you're in desktop or in vr you will notice that your facial expressions will change let's say you've bought an avatar and you're doing your gestures and the facial expression isn't necessarily one that you want it's not something that you exactly like either you want to change it add another one or just make tiny adjustments to an existing one that is what i'm going to show you here today i'm using unity 2019 but please be wary that this also works with 2018 nothing in 2018 will be different all the steps are the same the avatar we have on display for us today is bun by mumu baby and another little addition i'm going to add considering we are specifically talking about the head is the head was made by zinn pia this is mumu baby's private edit so please if this is a head you're interested in through the duration of me using it in this video feel free to check out the link in the description now in order to change a facial expression there is something that is being manipulated called a blend shape a blend shape is a morph target animation basically fancy words for saying that the mesh of a head is being manipulated into a specific animation meaning that the mouth the eyes and the cheeks are three common places where the mesh will be manipulated when making a facial expression blend shapes are all subjective to the specific type of head you are using some heads will have more blend shapes and some heads will have less blend shapes so a few examples of other heads would be the tita head that was very common we have zenpia we have sleepy we have panda bear there are very many people who have made heads that all have a varying amount of blend shapes but at the end of the day most of them have same features such as eye shedding smile tongue everything that you're going to need to make your basic facial expressions now in order to find the first step we're going to have to do is we're going to need our little animation layer if your animation layer is not here already i will show you how come to the top to window go down to animation from here another pop out tab will come saying animation animator and animator parameter what we are going to need is animation you can either use the shortcut which is control 6 in order to open up the animation tab or you can drag and drop it to wherever you want i have mine in the lower right hand corner that's what's comfortable for me and this is a layout that i find working for myself when i'm in unity if you need to find a specific layout that works for you please pause now and figure out what is more comfortable now that we have that we need to get our fx layer into our avatar an fx layer is a layer that is applied to an avatar all the way down here in playable layers you see fx that can include things such as facial animations gestures and toggles hue shift it's basically anything that comes up in the menu the small circle radial menu and vr chat that is interactable for you something you can interact with so in order to apply the fx layer to the avatar in order to start editing that it is an animation layer of course and we want to manipulate the animations we are going to come to our avatar at the left hand side click on the name of your avatar and that is all you need please do not click on armature body or anything in the hierarchy just click the avatar's name now on our right hand side there is a few tabs all over here you have transform and animator we are going to need the animator tab right here directly underneath underneath that it says controller scrolling slightly over here we can see none runtime animator controller click that the little circle click the very little circle at the very side sometimes i forget to do that myself of course and at the left hand side we have another sub menu popping up this consists of all the layers that is available to this avatar now we need the fx layer please remember that please try to find the fx layer you might have a bit of trial and error depending on how your avatar is set up but find the fx layer you'll know if it's the correct layer if it has all your toggles and all your facial animations it's normally one of the ones closer to the top now now that we have our fx layer applied we can start manipulating the avatar's facial expressions looking at the bottom right hand side for me this could be wherever it is for you but since you're following along on my screen you can see in my animation tab i have all this crazy stuff right here we aren't going to focus on anything right here instead we are going to focus on finding a facial animation now on preview is right here underneath animation and underneath that is a little tab this could say from anything from jacket off shirt off hue slide ears on it could say absolutely anything depending on your avatar's layout again but you need to click that which is going to pull open a menu from there you can see all of your toggles and animations that are attached to that avatar we are specifically looking for facial gestures now you're looking here like i don't see smile or i don't see this for some it might say smile or frown or whatever you may but for a majority of avatars it is going to give you the hand motion because facial expressions are directly linked to a hand gesture basically saying if i point it's going to activate or tell the face to do this it's almost like a nerve ending within your avatar that doesn't exist we need to find the facial and hand gesture for this it's probably just going to be in one of the hand gestures let's do hand open at underneath animation it says preview and we are going to click preview and bam you can see our avatar go into this weird little riding bike pose and her facial expression has changed if i unclick preview she's back to normal and if i re-click preview there we go took a second to load she is right there now that we have our avatar ready and to be edited to have the facial expression manipulated we are going to look for the blend shapes now remember what i said at the beginning of a video we need to find the blend shapes so we can manipulate them now the best way to find this is to go over to this side over here your left hand side underneath armature most of the time it could be anywhere in your hierarchy system it's going to say body now this orange outline is outlining both the avatar's body and its head that is exactly what we need is for the head now to this side it's probably going to be pulled up 99 of the time if it's pulled down then please do not look at this step or if you want to remember here is transform on your right hand side underneath that is skin mesh render now remember a blend shape is a manipulation of the mesh which is why it would be under skin mesh render pulling down blend shapes now we get all of these sliders these sliders is what different blend shapes and is what is manipulating the face of the avatar so you have squint blush you can even give her elf ears you can do whatever you want to your avatar's facial expressions here remember how i told you to have your avatar in preview well this is how we can see what we're doing we're going to eyebrow lower her eyebrows go lower um we can do sad lips her lips turn down we have oh we have like ah o and she which are a basic animation for almost all avatars but it's just some basic sliders for you to manipulate now you've chosen the facial expression that you want to change or one that you want to apply now what do we do do i just change it and it saves the answer is no it's a little bit more than that so coming down into this bottom right hand corner we are seeing all of the skin mesh renders that are being manipulated on here we can see the sliders that are currently activated right so we are going to hit this little record button beside preview now what this is allowing us to do is record the facial animation it is allowing us to save it from here you will manipulate whatever you want so for the demonstration of this video i'll do something fun like the smug i think that's a little funny now down here you can see that another body skin mesh render was added 7.77.3 77.3 meaning the smug animation was saved please keep in mind that it isn't on this specific avatar but it may be on yours please double check so that your animation saves these little diamonds right here are called key frames key frames is the frames of your animation it's the key it's like the important frame of your animation some if not most avatars have two key frames for its animation so if you applied a specific gesture on one side or undid something on a specific keyframe you have to go to the second third fourth fifth whatever how many other keyframes you are wanting to change and change it so let's say there was a second keyframe here i'd have to click this little bar and slide it down to 0.01 there would be another set of diamonds here and which i would either have to undo a blend shape or reapply a blend shape in order for them to be the same flipping back and forth shows you normally the differences if you've missed anything but those two keyframes if they are there should be the exact same now we're going to unclick record and we are going to click preview we're going to take it out of preview of course she's normal click preview again and bam there is her smug animation now of course because i don't want this i'm going to undo it but the same thing is applied normal and now there is no more smug animation you've had successfully changed your facial expression now that you've changed all the facial expressions you want and you've double checked there's also one more thing you can do here you don't always have to change facial animations let's say you don't like an avatar's resting face meaning the face that you see right here and you're like i don't like it i want to change something about it now this is a lot easier than going into blender but it certainly does have its limitations so please be wary when doing this you can change the resting face with blend shape so let's say i'm not a fan of how high her eyebrows are i can lower her eyebrows now this is her resting face whenever i go into vr chat and i'm using the resting phase this is what it'll look like for other people you can already see her resting face is defaulted to a small smile i could always be angry in my resting face if i wanted to i could always be squinting if i wanted to it's whatever you want but just know you can also change the resting phase it's a slight easier way of molding a face to what you want it to with not really doing that but of course it has limitations now before i leave you off on this video there is one more key step that you need to remember when uploading an avatar make sure your fx layer isn't where we put it before now we are going to go back to bun where we put our fx layer the animator controller and where it says fx we do not want that there we do not want our animators still apply to the avatar when uploading this can cause many complications such as toggles not working an avatar's feet being in the floor it's just not good for us to have it if you forget it and you don't notice the difference at the end of the day it doesn't matter but for the sake of your upload going smoothly and not having to do it a second time please remove your fx layer by clicking on it and then clicking backspace and that is it your avatar is ready to upload with its new facial features

Channel: DwuckiesVR

Views: 21,017

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Id: dyvi4S-cO-0

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021