How to upload a VRChat Avatar - Complete Guide! [PC, Quest & VRoid]

this is a comprehensive clear and easy to understand guide on uploading a VR chat Avatar whether it's your first time in the unity game engine or you're just looking to refresh your knowledge I've got you covered everything here is time stamped with straightforward explanations of each topic but I do highly recommend you watch all the way through without skipping around even if you are familiar with some of the topics in order to grasp the full picture of how each part works together however I did include a straightforward upload speed run in case you don't care about anything other than just getting your Bot model into the game I'll be uploading a video hopefully next week which will be linked below whenever it's up showing all my Essential downloads and tricks that you absolutely need which will save you dozens of hours and make life so much easier so with all of that out of the way let's start with the essential vocabulary that I wish someone told me avatars normally come in one of two formats fbx or vrn if you have an fbx then good for you your life is easy because that's what vrchat lets you upload VR m models virtual reality models like vroids need to be converted which we will cover later on meshes are what make up your actual Avatar and all of its parts and accessories and are constructed by polygons triangles different objects may have their own meshes but optimized models will use as little meshes and polys as possible bones make up all the moving parts of your avatar from your feet to your fingers including clothes and hair the Armature is the structure of those bones in the way that they're stacked is called parenting so a hand is the parent bone of a finger while also being the child bone of the forearm but VR chat has very specific ordering and naming rules so always check the small details like capitalization are correct blend shapes also called shape keys are what move in Avatar's mesh from one shape to another normally includes things like blinking facial expressions or body sliders and are always found on the mesh they're affecting visemes are the blend shape specifically for talking typically one one for each Mouse sound textures are obviously flat images so UV maps are the instructions basically telling Unity how to wrap those textures around your avatar a good example is looking at how this Cube gets unwrapped on a flat surface shaders are what control lighting and visual effects so you'll create these material spheres for each texture you have and then the Shader effects will control what it looks like in game optimized models might only use one material While others have them broken up into different parts such as hair and clothes to act differently even if they are decorating the same mesh Unity packages are how people send their assets from their Unity project to yours whether that's the file of your avatar you bought or a friend sending one to help you out you can just drag and drop them in inside you'll usually find a prefab where someone has already set up everything for you clicking it open should reconstruct everything from the unity package together however prefabs often rely on dependencies for example if the Avatar you're using uses the popular poyomi shaders in its prefab then you need to have imported the unity package for poyomi before opening the prefab because it depends on it but don't worry because avatars usually come with instructions on what dependencies they use great now that you understand the essential vocabulary it's time to set up the VCC the vrchat Creator companion reminder if your VR chat account is too news and you won't be able to upload content you need to play a little while on an official VR chat account not steam or meta and get the new user rank before you can hit any upload buttons but with that aside the VCC is VR chat's super easy way to organize your projects and keep them updated during version changes so that your stuff doesn't go outdated vrchat itself runs off the free game engine software called Unity so it will prompt you to download Unity before anything else there's many different versions of unity and VR chat will prompt you to download the version it currently uses right now they're actually migrating from a 2019 version to 2022 but thankfully the Creator companion makes converting projects easy so don't worry about it when it happens the unity Hub will have you download its base version by default so as you're getting that make sure to hit Android as that will add Quest support and once you have the correct version of unity you can revisit the Creator companion to get going start by creating a new project using the Avatar template there you'll be prompted to automatically install different helpful Unity packages the community has made I do want to get too advanced so just download all the ones that are intended for Avatar creation great now we're in basic controls are middle clicking and dragging to move around right click and drag to look around and scroll to Mouse wheel to zoom in or out gently tapping arrow keys works too every object you have will be located here in the hierarchy including your avatar over here is the inspector which shows all the options and features of any asset you have selected these buttons will move rotate and scale the objects you have selected while the big play button at the top enters play mode unity's way of just turning the game on it automatically sends you to the camera's view in game but if you click back to your scene tab you'll be able to manage everything again alright the best way to learn is to start with a blank fbx model no Unity package or prefabs because all the knowledge we'll learn by working with this is applicable to all other scenarios as well which is important for any customizations you do this is the thing I really wish I had when I started so that's why I'm showing it to you I'll be using my own model as an example demonstration no I'm going to be covering a lot of information in a short period of time so I encourage watching at half speed in pausing as needed drag the model fbx into your assets folder and plop it into the hierarchy by dropping down the boxes you'll see there's my Armature with all the bones and then the body mesh with all my blue shapes but we need to prep this model first by selecting the fbx in your assets folder down here the inspector menu shows us some options Unity doesn't know what this fbx is unless we clearly tell it so let's mark the model from generic to humanoid and then apply after that we need to check the configuration of the Armature in Bones ah okay common problem the chest bone didn't show up we can fix that easily by just searching the word chest or just dragging the bone in from the hierarchy and over here my bangs showed up where my jaw is supposed to be beardrat doesn't use a Jawbone so this is Unity trying to just fill it in with something either click and delete it or just search none hit apply and done now let's add the textures and get the materials started for Shader work right click to create separate folders for both organization's sake and drag in your textures from your computer then right click to create materials then we import the Shader packages the two main shaders that people use in VR chat are poyomi and Little tune they have very similar features but I'm going to show you poyomi since that's what I use just download the latest version off GitHub and drag the unity package in now at the top of the material you should be able to select the Shader that you want to use tune Shader usually being the best place to start the Albedo is where your texture goes so use the Explorer on the left to click to your texture folder and drag it in careful not to click out of the inspector if there's a part of your texture that's supposed to be transparent or cut out then make sure your texture has Alpha is transparency turned on and make sure the Shader using it isn't an opaque one use transparent or cut out otherwise it'll just show up black now you can drag the material you mean to where it goes on your model if you have a Shader that's in a hard to click spot you can also assign it straight from the body mesh you can do a lot of crazy stuff with shaders if you take a few minutes to go through it a couple examples are masking you could turn on an effect like an emission and anything white on the mask will receive it and anything black does not I'll edit textures or make my Maps just by right-clicking it showing an Explorer and then I use Photoshop there's also these purple versions of textures you'll see a lot in cheaters which are the normal Maps those will give visual depth to your textures details without actually having to change the mesh it's not hard to do as you can literally just find generators for this online that's everything you need to know to go wild just note that if you're uploading a quest Avatar the Shader support is way limited which we'll come back to later in the quest section Alright It's fizbone Time Fizz bones are what you add to bones to make them move or interactable it takes a lot of experimenting to get it right but the actual setup is surprisingly easy open your Armature and find the bone you want to add physics to hit add component and pick fizbone just drag the bone in as the root in bam you did it when you go into play mode and drag your model around you should see things moving but if you don't like how they look you can go back to your bones while in play mode and adjust the settings to your liking but if you exit out of play mode the settings don't stay so I'd recommend you actually copy the values and then paste them back in when you're done in and you could paste them in as a new component onto other bones if you want them to have the same values just remember you have to drag in the new root for that new bone if you don't want the Fizz bones clipping through areas of your model you can add colliders to those parts for me my bangs fly through my head so I create a head collider and drag in the root like before once it's adjusted to a good spot I can go back up to the Fizz bone that I want to collide with added a collider space pick the head and bump that radius up and lastly if you want to make your bone interactable you can turn on the option to grab it pose it squish it or stretch it just remember to pick a good radius size all right for those of you whose avatars didn't come with facial animations or gestures already set up you can do that easily yourself or just go in and change what gesture is affecting each go to the window Tab and make sure the animation is open drag it to a convenient spot and select your model's body mesh where all the blend shapes are hit create animation and name it what you want such as smile then you can click record and Slide the blend shape up to create your animation you can technically make anything an animation but since this is just a base expression I'll turn off the record button and slide back by blend shape you can keep doing this for more expressions and just hit off the preview button to go back into original pose whenever you're done alright the smart people stuff that goes behind the scenes and actually making the VR chat Avatar animates in different ways are the playable layers I think it really in depth but for this simple task of just doing face expressions we can stick with the FX layer here assuming you don't have one already you can make a new one by clicking where it should go and searching for the hands layer click onto it duplicate it in case have any mess-ups rename it to something like this and for convenience sake I'm going to drag it somewhere I will remember clicking it open brings you into the animator which already has placeholders set up click and drag to select all the existing layers and turn the right defaults on this goes for both hands including the idle States now just match the animations to whatever gesture you want personally I recommend just putting them on one hand for a better control all right now that we have literally everything else set up for the model we can look at the final piece the Avatar descriptor which needs to be added as a component on your overall object in the hierarchy now let's quickly run down it the Viewpoint is where your IRL headset will be in game so adjust it somewhere between your eyes using the edit button and return your model should already have visemes for talking so just hit Auto detect and for the eyes you want to make sure that you've enabled eye look and you drag the correct bones into the right spots here you can dictate how far they roll in any direction when looking around I usually stick between 10 to 15. column slash excited is how much or how little your eyes look around while the shy confident slider is how much your eyes look directly at other players I recommend leaving it in the middle for blinking you'll likely have a blink blend shape on your body mesh already so just drag it in here and pick blink if you have blend shapes for I look up and I look down you can add them here but personally I leave them out because I like the natural eye roll already anyways of course for your face expression you want to drag in that FX layer you put together and it's time to upload click open the SDK tab up here at the top and you'll likely get a bunch of Errors at first but good news is hitting autofix usually takes care of anything you can ignore and don't sweat over keyword errors if you want to test your avatar before fully uploading it you can find it in the other tab inside vrchat otherwise it'll just go straight to your account if it doesn't show up right away then restart VR chat now let's talk about quiz compatibility if you want your avatar to be Quest compatible you'll have to make a second version that fits the optimization requirements listed by the vrchat website you can either control D with your existing model or drag in a separate optimized prefab you might have been provided since the rules are pretty strict as for shaders you're not allowed to use any shaders except the built-in ones that vrchat provides listed under mobile shaders it's extremely limited including no options for transparency so please keep that in mind typically the only one you should be using for avatars is the tomb Shader if it looks really bright for some reason like mine did just turn out this light at the top assuming you're all good to go from here it's time to match the IDS every Avatar uploaded to vrchat has its own blueprint ID to distinguish it from one another since you want both the regular and Quest model to show up under the same ID you can just copy the ID from one and attach it to the other as long as you do this the corresponding model will show up for the corresponding user in-game you aren't going to be building for Windows this time whenever you're ready to upload so just switch the build Target to Android and there you go if you're working with a vtuber model in vrm format including vroids you need to convert it to fbx First since Unity doesn't natively recognize vrm models so you can download the vrm for VR chat converter off the website booth and drag in the unity package click the new tab that appeared at the top of unity and import the vrm model off your computer although the model shows up not all the pieces are put together very well for VR chat so if you click the model and go up to click convert for VR chat it'll set up a new Avatar descriptor for you with all the missing pieces now keep in mind all the things I covered in this video are still relevant shaders Fizz bones Avatar descriptor animations Quest compatibility and whatnot if you're having issues errors or want to add in things like hair movement then check back through everything I've already covered in the video alright and finally the 15 second boost or gumroad Avatar speedrun drag in the correct Shader packages or any other dependencies bring in your model and click open the one that says prefab check the Avatar descriptor to make sure there's no screw-ups open the uploader click through any errors and upload easy as pie nice and there we go if this video was helpful to you then please like And subscribe to catch the part two of this video with all the unity life hacks and Time Savers on the next upload my Discord server is a great place to ask questions or show off your work and if you want to hang out in your new virtual self online I actually run events at the tvris studio inside of VR chat if you want to support the channel and making more videos just like these then please consider joining my patreon and of course thank you to my patrons including virtual VIPs Alyssa gretlen black amethyst Dutchman 101 GM in in Penny rice 600333 snake8 head Sally and yamazakura

Channel: The Virtual Reality Show

Views: 87,067

Keywords: vrchat, avatar, vrchat avatar, vr chat, vr chat avatar, vrchat avatars, vrchat avatar tutorial, custom vrchat avatar, vrchat vroid, vroid, vtuber, how to make a vrchat avatar, custom, custom avatar, quest, quest avatar, meta quest 2, quest 2, vrchat avatars quest, quest compatible, vr chat quest, vrc, vrc avatars, upload vrchat avatar, easy, beginner, fast, vrchat avatar beginner, guide, vr, unity, blender, unity tutorial, vrchat worlds, fbt, how to make avatars for vrchat, avatar worlds

Id: vWr4diTDqJM

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023