How to Convert a VRChat avatar to vrm for VSeeFace, LIV, Beat Saber, and many other VTuber apps

hello welcome to my VR chat Avatar to vrm Avatar conversion tutorial now this video is meant to be a relatively quick and painless walkthrough of how to get your VR chat Avatar Into The vrm Format so that you can use it with vcface love it Liv or other vrm capable programs apps and games this video is kind of intended for people who have basic knowledge of how to upload a VR chat Avatar and that have Unity installed on their computer already uh the current version of unity that we're using for this is the same as vrchat 2019.4.31 F1 however the vrm format is compatible with a wide variety of versions of unity the Avatar I will be using for this is the suquet it is a free Avatar so anybody can download the exact project I've got going on here pretty much and follow along my project has the vrchat SDK in it and the dynamic bone SDK and the latest version of the free version of poyomi okay you will also need uni vrm which will be linked in the description both of these will be linked in the description of the video all right let's get started first of all I've already got the sukat scene open here uh if it's not open for you go ahead and navigate to the Sue cat scene and just open it up it's possible depending on how you have playomie installed that some of the shaders might be missing or configured incorrectly it's okay because in the final products we won't be using poyomi so if materials are pink in here just shift click them and choose a Shader that you like the final product it won't really matter later on alright now we're going to import the vrm SDK so I've got that on my desktop here because I already downloaded it and in case you're confused the link for this is in the description just double click on it you should have three categories here uni gltf vrm and vrm shaders if you have never previously installed this so just make sure you're getting all that stuff and then hit import foreign through this part a little bit okay cool when you've installed the vrm SDK you should have a little window up here or a tab rather in between unity ltf and window it'll say vrm if it's missing that means it didn't install correctly and we've got a little problem so just go through that again or start with a fresh project you should also have a vrm folder down here of your M Shader and a unig ltf folder all right once you've done all that let's make a new scene file save as we're going to call this the vrm cat scene and it'll be a copy of this scene since we did save as and just double click it to make sure you're in the scene now that we're in this scene let's remove the characters we're not going to use because there's a couple extra characters in here so I'm just going to delete all these guys you can delete them any way you wish click on the root in the hierarchy or just drag over them whatever after we've deleted all those characters the next thing we're going to do is make sure this character is in the center of the scene and that their position and rotation data are all zero this is really important so that your character doesn't end up scuffed later on now that their position and rotation data are zero you want to go to vrm export to vrm make t pose and because this character was set up in kind of a particular way you're actually going to have to select this more than once so close out left click on the top of the character in the hierarchy and go to vrm export to vrm you should have all these metadata options we're making the base of the Avatar that we're actually going to re-import in the unity later so that it gives us a bunch of assets and components automatically so just make it a su cat base you can title this whatever you want this is the internal name of the character not the name of the file that gets saved on your computer version whatever you want author I suggest putting whoever made the avatar and go ahead and Export that do not export it into your project instead export it somewhere else I'm going to be exporting it to my desktop and we'll call it the Sue cat base save and depending on how complicated your character is that might take a few minutes so just give it a moment to think when it's done that window will go away now let's navigate to our desktop I've got the base vrm here now what we want to do is we want to make a new folder so create folder and I'm going to call my folder vrm bases let's go in there and we're going to drag the vrm that we just made back in here and when we do that Unity is actually going to create a bunch of folders and components and assets for us of the character that is going to save a ton of time cool look at that minimize this now we can actually uh hide this character and bring in the new version this is the version that we'll be working on to actually export later as our final product notice how it's got a if you click on it right here at the top it's already got the vrm meta vrm humanoid vrm look at head all these things have automatically been assigned to the character because of the way we exported it and brought it back in now uh the most important thing we got to do is go to the blend shapes and if we double click on that it'll bring us here we viron bases sucat based dot blend shapes and if you click on the blend shape dot asset here it'll bring you to the blend shape Clips these are your basic emotes and visemes so your character will have the speaking blend shapes just like VR chat but they're a little bit more limited with the vrm format so you're mainly going to have the vowels and we just click on the vowel and we turn it on and you'll get a preview of what that looks like down here and you just do that for all the vowels if your character doesn't have complete visemes or if some of them are weird just fill them out the best that you can you can technically configure these blend shape Clips however you like blink is meant for both eyes so look for a blend shape that has both if you don't have a blend shape that's both blinks you can set you can do like blink left and blink right together either way is fine Joy is typically an emote that at least in VC face you trigger manually so um it's kind of the name Convention of this blend shape clip is a little strange but I suggest making it a fun emo it's like a blush or a blep or something else that you might want to trigger manually so like this for example it's kind of a silly emote angry is in a silver fashion uh you can actually set up VC face to trigger this based on if you've kind of angle your eyebrows in real life with your webcam sorrow can go to sad just whatever blend shape is the equivalent of the of what you think would go in the blend shape clip here because obviously different characters are going to have different blend shapes fun gets triggered when you smile by default in VC face so I like to put a really simple smile here if it if it exists so like Happy Happy Works look up look down look left and look right are occasionally found on some characters but not all characters if you have blend shapes for these you can turn them on but they're not really necessary you don't need them blink L and blink R are self-explanatory blink left and blink right you set up your vrm app of choice to track your eyes basically or your eyelids at least they will individually blink to make new blend shape Clips if you want to get a little bit more advanced so for example there is a there is a blend shape for cheeks but we haven't assigned it to any expression so we could create a blend shape clip called cheeks and you would just name it right here later in another video I might show off some more advanced stuff about blend shape Clips where these are case sensitive but if you're just making your own for manually triggered Expressions they're not really case sensitive and then for cheeks you just go to body and you turn on the cheek splint shape let's make that a little bigger so we can see the difference it's kind of a subtle blend shape but it could be silly you could even make it sillier by adding another shape to it a little bit there we go there's the basic blend shaped clips now if we exported the Avatar right now it would uh demonstrate basic Visine capability in VC face but we're not done yet there's more to do so let's go back to the hierarchy of the character the next thing we have to do is we have to put on Spring bones so a VR shot character will have Dynamic bones or in the future near the physic bones that vrchat is working on however vrm characters are not compatible with Dynamic bones so you have to use spring bones this character has Dynamics on their their jacket their ears and their tails so we need to add secondary uh we have we have to add a spring bone for all of those things if you do spring bones make sure you put them on the secondary object that is underneath your character in the hierarchy this object gets created automatically when we bring the character into unity and then into the scene if you don't have it that means that we missed a step okay so secondary right here and in fact there will be an example spring bone already set up here with no root this means that the spring bone isn't actually hooked up to anything let's start by making this spring bone hook up to the jacket so I know that the jacket already has four parts and I'll show you how I know that by bringing the VR chat character back and putting him alongside our character and expanding them in the hierarchy here the coat has a few parts and these four parts right here all have Dynamics spring bones and dynamic bones it's difficult to make them look exactly the same but for most characters spring bones are good enough so we're just going to make one spring bone component for the jacket and give it four roots which I've already done right here I'm going to expand the Armature and click drag this stuff into there easy peasy you can check your work by pressing the play button and go to scene at the top here next to game then click on the top of your character in the hierarchy and move them around a little bit and the jacket should move around now obviously if you are a YouTuber and your character is focused on the head this may never get seen but I'm trying to be thorough because you never know where you're going to use this character turn off the play button if you do not turn off the play button and you keep trying to follow along with this video you're going to run into problems so make sure you turn it off all right and let's do the the rest of the character so go back to secondary let's add a different spring bone component for the ears and the tail because we might want to give them different physic values and then let's uh expand the character a little bit here so I know that the original character their Dynamic starts on root tail zero zero one so we're going to do the same thing on here just gonna go to secondary and drag root actually sorry about that go to secondary change the root size to 1 that way you actually have something to drag it to then drag root tail to here boom and you should see some yellow spheres appear they're kind of small but we can change the size of those spheres later and then we have to do the ears so the ears are usually located on the head and I'm clicking on the VR chat character right now as a reference it looks like ear left base and ear right base are where the Dynamics are so we're just going to emulate that by expanding our character a little bit our vrm character as soon as I find the head neck head ear left and right base okay go to secondary set root to two and then just click drag those over bam Isn't that cool and we can test that out with the play button again click play go to scene and talk click the top of your character just drag them around a little bit that's with the default the spring bone values you can change the values to uh if you want to make the ears like more bouncy or less bouncy or more stiff or whatever you can change the values very similar to working with Dynamic bones but that is all the Dynamics on the character now we can also add colliders to the hands and the way we would do that is by going down the shoulder the left arm left elbow left wrist added component and it's called a vrm springbone collider group let's move our VR chai character away a little bit so I have a little bit more space to think there we go second uh we go to go back to the left wrist I'm going to try a couple values here so the offset the size determines how many spheres there are and the offset determines the position of the sphere is relative to what you attached the component to so let's make a really small offset and then let's reduce the size of these spheres a little bit you can also manually move the Spheres so like I kind of just want them on the hands and maybe we'll make them a little smaller a little bigger now in theory if you were using your character in an application that lets you move the uh the hands around your head and stuff you could touch your ears but we're not done yet let's copy this component to the other hand so expand the right shoulder right arm right elbow right wrist paste component as new you're going to have to make one of these you're going to have to reverse the uh the value here a little bit on one of these I think this one just take the minus sign off bam and that should be a reflection of the other hand perfect then go back to secondary and you're going to have to add a collider group you can guess how this is going to go luckily if you only have one vrm character in the scene this is really easy just set the collider group size to two and fill in the blanks left wrist right wrist easy peasy lemon squeezy foreign case it's not obvious in order to bring up that window I'm clicking on the little circle on the far right here that makes it really easy cool now if you're able to move your hands to where your ears are or your tail or the jacket it'll it'll brush away a little bit and that's how you do the spring bones next we're going to mess with the shading a little bit the character currently if you export and re-import the character it's probably going to have Unity standard on it so let's take a look at that go to the suitcad base then go to body on your right side you should have the material for your body it's going to say standard let's change that to vrm vrm format avatars are only compatible with vrm shaders and unity standard Shader so if you try to use poyomi or anything else like that you're going to run into problems later when you try to use the character and other stuff or even when you try to export the vrm Shader is doesn't give you as many options as poyomi does but it's still pretty good I suggest changing the shade color to a slightly different color depending on your character so like this for example and then like maybe brighten it by default I think this character or I think this Shader is meant for human characters so it kind of depends on what kind of character you have in here you might have to experiment a little bit it's also compatible with an emission map so you can see the emissions on this character are in the eyes but it already came out the way that we expected it to so we don't really need to change anything there if your character has rim or outlined you can turn those on too and we can also set the clothing to be vrm as well oops I clicked the wrong one vrm not vrm 10. okay let's see if we can mess with this a little bit because the shade color is probably do this there we go very cool all right we are pretty much there uh there's one more thing I want to show you before we export this character and it's kind of optional if you're just making characters for yourself you don't really need to do this but if you're making them to distribute or for a friend or something you might want to do this get the camera in your scene and rotate it so it's facing the character and you can actually use the vrm SDK at the base of your character click on the base at the top here take a screenshot and you can save this in we could just save this in the project we'll call it the Sue cat thumbnail bam now whenever you load this character inside of an app or VC face or you know whatever other thing they'll have this little picture to show off the character and you could theoretically like select any other image and put it there so if you have art or a render of the character you could you could put it in that slot by using the little select button you can also drag a picture in it there yeah so that's a little extra thing you can do um entirely optional but it might make it easier to manage and and pan through your characters if you have a lot of vrm characters okay so now we're on to the final step make sure you're clicked at the top here Sue CAD base then go to vrm export to vrm this one we'll call it like uh Sue cat brm you can name it whatever and then the version number is basically how many times you ran through this I'm just gonna call it one remember this is the metadata that is inside of the character it is not the name of the character on your computer's hard drive that can get a little confusing because when you're looking for the character inside of an app it'll show this name not the name that you save the literal file as now let's export it I'm just going to put this on my desktop we'll call it Sue cat vrm Avatar one save it'll take a few minutes depending on how complicated your character is this character is pretty simple so it's already done now let's bring up VC face I've already got like VC face if it's your first time launching it'll give you like a little tutorial and stuff but I've already kind of got it prepared ahead of time I'm going to add an avatar and I have a lot of avatars who boy but let's go to my desktop and let's choose sucat vrmavatar1.vrm and depending on how it loaded instantly I was about to say sometimes this could take a while and then just hit start and there we go you can use reset position I kind of wasn't looking straight ahead when it uh when it came through but when I smile and when I blink my eyes it blinks now I'm wearing glasses so even with glasses I think that the eye blinks and all that are pretty good when I smile the character smiles and if you don't like the auto smile or the auto angry like this you can actually turn that kind of stuff off with this simple expression detection you could just turn it off and then it won't happen anymore if you want to manually trigger Expressions you can set them up with hotkeys in here now any blend shape clip if you remember the blend shape clips from earlier will appear in this list so remember cheeks I'm just going to set cheeks to the minus key hit OK and then when I hit minus it's kind of subtle so I'm going to zoom in makes my cheeks blow up so yeah that's pretty much it um thank you so much for sticking out through through this whole video if you have other requests or ideas for tutorials please reach out in the comments or in my Discord server or on Twitter or whatever I want to do a tutorial video once a week or once every other week I want to go crazy with tutorials I want to do like Arc kit and blender and unity like vsf animations the vsf Avatar format I want to go all out so if there's anything that wasn't clear um you can ask in the comments and you can also ask in the content creation channel of my Discord server there is a lot of helpful people in there including myself and we'll do our best to to kind of help and give advice or hopefully clear up anything that it wasn't super clear already and yeah just thank you guys for supporting me if you really really like this then you know like comment share subscribe and if you love it I have patreon and I also stream weekdays Monday through Thursday and sometimes on my streams I do uh blender stuff Unity stuff substance stuff or we just play games and we have meetups and VR chat we're kind of all over the place um but yeah that that is everything I think I covered it all love you guys have a good one bye bye

Channel: RitualNeo

Views: 53,470

Keywords: vtuber, vrm, vseeface, liv, tutorial, how to

Id: uI5X7dIxF1Q

Length: 27min 9sec (1629 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2022