Setting Up & Adjusting Particles for VRChat Avatars

hello so today i'm going to talk about how to set up any of the particle systems that you find in my shop or from anywhere else for uvr chat avatar so my booth store has a lot of free particle systems and if you download one you'll find a zip file with a unity package as well as some usage guidelines and if you open the unity package in unity it'll have everything you need in order to follow this tutorial sorry i've already opened the uh cherry blossom particles right here you'll see there are a couple different variants and i'm going to start by dragging it into my scene and positioning it where i want on my avatar so in the hierarchy this represents all of the bones of your avatar and in order to understand how your particle system is going to attach you have to understand what a parent-child relationship is so in our case if i drag these particles into the hierarchy and i put them under the hips these particles are now a child of the hips meaning they will follow any of the movement that the hips make they'll follow the rotation they'll follow the scale so if i move the hips the particles move with them in this case i want the particles to follow my left arm so i'm going to put them under the left arm and then i'm going to position them to my left arm making sure that the position is correct from all angles so next we're going to record animations of the two states that we want our particles to be in on and off so when you're animating it's always good practice to make a clone of your model because first of all it provides you with a backup but second of all if you animate on the main model it will often cause irreversible changes and you don't want that to happen so i'm going to just duplicate this and drag it off to the side and the cool thing is is since these two models are identical any animations that we make on this model will easily transfer over to this one later so now's a great time to show you the windows that we're going to need in order to finish the rest of this project if you go into windows at the top of your screen we're going to need to find the animator and the animation window so here's our animation window i'm just going to track this down here and here is our animator window and it should appear up there so with your clone model selected and while inside the animation tab we're going to create a new animation clip and i'm going to call it particles off okay so to create our animation clip we're going to hit this little red record button and what the record button does is it saves any changes that you make while it is active as part of the animation so we're going to click it we're going to click on our particle system the parent of our particle system i should say and in the inspector uncheck this box in order to disable it and you'll notice when we disable this parent all of the children get disabled as well and you'll notice that a new keyframe appears down here in the animation so now we can turn off record and repeat similar steps for an on animation in order to create a new animation clip you can click on this drop down and create new clip and name it something descriptive now you can delete the clone because we're done using it now we're going to create the menus that will actually control the toggling of our particles we have three things we need to make an fx controller an expressions menu and a set of expressions parameters our fx controller is definitely the easiest all we have to do is right click click create and find animator controller and for good measure i'm going to name this fx controller now we need our expressions menu and our expressions parameters for the expressions menu and parameters we're going to duplicate the existing ones from the vr chat sdk after we add all three of these items open your avatar inside of the avatar descriptor we're going to place each menu where it belongs the expressions parameter in the expressions menu go under the expressions tab the fx controller will go in the fx slot inside of playable layers if your avatar already has expressions parameters and menus you can keep using the same ones and just add to them but if you don't already have them you'll need to create them inside of the expressions parameters we're going to create a new parameter we want it to be a boolean which has two states true and false which is perfect for toggling particles on and off we want to make sure that our default value is unchecked meaning that it's false now we're going to give it a descriptive name although we have a good parameter we have no way to interact with it now we're going to create a control inside of the expressions menu click on add control change the type to toggle and give it a name if you want you can also upload an icon now use the drop down to select your new parameter if you decide to add more toggles you don't have to create a new expressions menu every time you can just add a new control below the existing controls finally we have to tell your avatar what to do when the parameter is actually changed go to the animator tab with your fx controller selected inside of the parameters tab create a new parameter of the same type as your parameter name it exactly the same case sensitive back in the layers tab create a new layer below the base layer and name it something descriptive ensure that your layer's weight is set to 1 and then drag in both of your animations make sure that particles off is connected to entry because we want it to be the default state then check on both of your animations and make sure that right defaults is off right defaults can cause issues with some other add-ons such as spring joints next we're going to make transitions to connect our animations right-click on particles off click on make transition and then drag it over to particles on click on then transition to edit its settings we only want particles off to change the particles on when we tell it to so we're going to add a condition set the condition so it says the transition will only occur when your parameter is true then unchecked has exit time open the settings and set your transition duration to the desired amount i like to keep in mind at zero now we're going to repeat the steps with another transition back to particle off once again we're going to edit the settings add a condition except make it so it will only go back to particles off when our parameter is false then uncheck has exit time and fix your transition duration as you did before the last step is to go into your hierarchy select your particle system and disable it whatever is in the hierarchy will be the default state when you upload it to vr chat so if you want your particles off by default this needs to be off by default keep in mind if you try and preview your animations inside of unity nothing will happen but with this setup i can guarantee that it does work inside of vrchat [Music] [Applause] all of the particles in my shop are highly optimized and can be used for both worlds and avatars i'm going to quickly go over the basics of unity's particle system so you can adjust it to your liking many of my particles are actually multiple particle systems if you expand the parent object in hierarchy you can see the different particle systems that make up the whole particle effect currently this particle is great for avatars because it spawns lots of particles when you move but is not so great for worlds because it has very few particles standing still we can change that by clicking on one of the particle systems going down to the emission tab and messing with the rate settings rate over time refers to how many particles are spawned per time whereas rate over distance talks about how many particles respond when you move the object if we want this to be better for a world we should adjust the rate over time to be higher additionally we can scale up the size of the particle system if you try and conventionally scale it up it will increase the size of all particles instead we need to adjust the size of the emitter shape in the inspector open the shape category and you can adjust the scale let's say i want this to be 10 by 10 by 10. additionally you can adjust the maximum amount of allowed particles at any given time if you're using this on an avatar try and keep the maximum amount small because more particles contributes to a worse performance rating however if you're using this on a world it's pretty safe to increase the maximum amount of particles the maximum amount of particles can be changed right here let's say i want it to be a thousand another helpful setting is simulation space currently the particles are being simulated in the world which means they can interact with the world and if you move the particle system around the particles will stay in their current position however if we change the simulation space to local the entire particle system including each individual particle will move this might be helpful for spell effects if you're trying to transform them the last few settings that i'm going to talk about today are looping gravity and simulation speed looping refers to whether the particle will restart by itself once it ends if looping is checked the particles will play forever but if it is unchecked once the particle system stops it won't continue until something else forces it to if you don't want to mess with the particle's velocity but you want it to go faster it may be helpful to mess with the simulation speed here's what a fast simulation speed looks like here's what the default is and here's what happens if you make it slower finally depending on the thematic of your avatar it may be useful to modify gravity in this case the default gravity modifier is zero however if we want the particles to float up we can give it a negative value if we want them to go down quickly we can give them a positive value for smaller objects such as feathers and petals it may be useful to use a fractional value in this case .05 thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to watch my tutorial i really do hope that it was informative for you uh while you have a moment it would be great if you would check out my booth store which has tons of free assets like particles and jewelry other than that if you have any questions please leave a comment and i'll try to answer it as fast as i can until the next one signing off [Music] you

Channel: Chiimera

Views: 24,147

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Id: yW8ZqD5Omog

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022