Here are some of my collected notes on things that I’ve found helpful when it comes to building avatars for VRChat. The intention is that this will be a living document that I add to as I learn more. Existing avatar bases Really, the best way to get started with avatar creation is to purchase someone else’s base mesh and pick it apart to see how it all works. Here’s a few base meshes that I’ve found particularly useful for these purposes: Dom’s Wolfiiyan Flufi and Sanobu by Zoidberg656 The Jinxed Kobold by dont_jinxit There’s also a few free ones out there that you can use as a reference; Ghostt’s Morph is particularly interesting in terms of a lot of its design aspects and demonstrations of how to do some pretty intense things in VRChat. And, of course, my own avatars might be helpful for someone. Modeling Most folks model using Blender. Blender is kind of hard to learn, and the UI changes enough over time that you often have to re-learn things. But it’s worth keeping up with, as it’s a quite powerful modeling package with a lot to offer! Here are some tutorials I’ve found particularly helpful: How to model a stylized female body by Astria 2D Drawing to 3D Model by Eve Sculpts Blender Modelling for Absolute Beginners by PIXXO 3D Do you really need to spend $500 on a Blender? by America’s Test Kitcheeeey waitaminute A lot of guides on VRChat modeling in particular suggest using the Cats Blender Plugin, although it seems to always be a few Blender versions behind and I’ve never managed to get it working. With my particular modeling workflow, I’ve never found it to be all that necessary. I tend to keep all of my avatar components within a single mesh object (which is way better for performance anyway) and use material slots to distinguish different parts. This means there’s no reason to bake a mesh down (since it’s already a single mesh to begin with), and for things like polygon decimation I use the built-in mesh decimator. Decimation One annoying thing about the built-in decimator is that, at least as of Blender 3.6.0, there’s no way to target a specific polygon count; it’s all based on ratio. My solution to this: Right-click on the status bar and make sure “scene statistics” are enabled Divide your target triangle count by the “tris” count in the status bar and round down to the thousands place (for example, if your scene shows 45.962 triangles and you want to get down to 20,000 triangles, your ratio would be \(\frac{20,000}{45,962} = 0.435\)) Use that value in the Mesh > Clean Up > Decimate Geometry popup for each of your meshes This won’t get an exact count (for example, when I decimate my 30,620-triangle avatar with a ratio of 0.489 I end up with an output of 14973) but it’s Close Enough. Ideally Blender would let you target a count and/or provide more digits of precision, but it’s all just numbers, man. Weight Painting Doing your mesh bone weight painting is really annoying. However, one trick I’ve found that makes it a little easier is to go into Pose mode and then moving the skeleton around until something looks off with your mesh. Then go into weight painting mode, and the mesh will reflect your current weights relative to the pose, which makes it much easier to see how your painting/blending/blurring/etc. is fixing things as you go. Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but I think it’s neat. Blend shapes/shape keys Please, please, please make sure you’re on your Basis shape key if you’re trying to make a change for the mesh as a whole. I’ve lost track of all the times I’ve been doing some major edits to the mesh only to realize too late that I was on one of my visemes! If you do end up doing this and the edits you were making were localized to specific body parts, you can usually fix this by selecting the affected polygons, and then going to Vertex > Propagate to shapes. But note that if these vertices are otherwise affected by some of your other shape keys, you’ll probably have to redo those shape keys! Symmetry Also please do yourself (and others who are editing your mesh) a favor, and make sure that your mesh’s symmetry is staying, well, symmetrical, wherever appropriate. It’s really annoying to try editing some aspect of a mesh (such as ear sizes, pawpad thickness, etc.) only to find that the mesh symmetry has been messed up. One quick way to check to see where your mesh’s symmetry has fallen apart is to select all vertices and then mirror your selection (ctrl+shift+M by default) once or twice. Any vertices that are no longer selected are also not symmetrical. Sometimes you can recover the symmetry by selecting the affected vertices and then Mesh > Snap to symmetry and fiddling with things until they work out, but often you’re going to have to redo some of your mesh topology. And of course there are often parts of the mesh that you want to be asymmetric (such as hair or snaggly teeth or the like). That complicates things, of course. A tiny rant about a tiny thing in Blender I really wish the “triangulate faces” tool had a confirmation on it. There are so many times that I accidentally press ⌘T instead of ⌘R and don’t notice that all of my quads have been turned into tris until it’s too late (usually when I go to add another edge loop somewhere and I’m like WHY ISN’T THIS WORKING). Sometimes you can recover from that with Face > Tris to quads but in my experience you have to be very careful with that as both operations are destructive and lossy. FBX export Another thing that Cats automates is the actual export of your model as an FBX. Here are the settings that I use: Limit the export to “visible objects” (and make sure anything you don’t want to export, such as scale references, scene lights, etc. are disabled) Under “Transform,” make sure “Scale” is 1.0 and “Apply Scalings” is set to “FBX Units Scale” Under “Geometry,” make sure that “Apply modifiers” is disabled There’s a little “operator presets” thing you can use to save your settings for easy recall. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to import/export settings. Subdivision modeling When I’m working out an avatar’s proportions and general shape, I like to keep the mesh as a subdivision surface, using the subdivision modifier, and I wait until pretty much the last minute to apply the modifier permanently. This includes me setting up my basic blendshapes (or shape keys, as Blender calls them) while still in subdivision mode. However, there isn’t an easy built-in way to apply the subdivision modifier while preserving the shape keys. Fortunately, there’s a very handy script which allows you to apply your subdivision modifier while preserving all shape keys. While I’m still working on the rough body shape I’ll save, then run that before doing my FBX export, export, then undo. Sometimes the mesh gets corrupted during the undo for some reason, which is why I save beforehand. Texturing First off, Blender’s built-in UV unwrapping is pretty okay, although it works a lot better if you remembre to add texture seams to your object so it can automatically split your islands. It’s pretty abysmal at texture packing, though. I use UVPackmaster, which costs money ($44 at the time of this writing, although there’s often discounts available) but is well worth it. A lot of people use Substance Painter for their texturing. I am personally not a fan of it for multiple reasons. Fortunately, Blender has a Texture Paint mode built-in that’s sorta okay. Its UI is a lot better than Substance, anyway. Unfortunately, it’s only sorta okay. It’s missing a lot of stuff that would make it truly stellar. Most notably it doesn’t seem to support any sort of “layers” concept, and only lets you modify one channel at a time. It’s good for roughing stuff out but not great for doing fine detail work. In my texturing workflow, what I do is use Texture Paint mode to draw layer masks for different elements, and then import those masks into Krita as a “transparency mask.” Most of the texturing I do is in the form of large patches of solid colors, so that works out okay for me. Another useful thing that’s easy to miss is “Quick Edit,” which captures a high-resolution screenshot of your model, sends it to your image editor of choice, then projects the resulting image back onto the texture. This is a really good way to tweak details where Blender’s own paint brush tools fall flat. Explaining it in text is a little tricky, so here’s a pretty good quick tutorial. Shaders This is where a lot of fun comes into VRChat. In general, there are two shaders you want to seriously consider using: Poiyomi, an incredibly comprehensive collection of shader techniques in one big master shader that gives you incredible expressiveness (with both free versions and paid; I’ve only used the free version, personally) Warren’s Fast Fur, perfect for a wide variety of soft surfaces. I own the paid version, but the free version is quite good too. There’s a few other shader things to look at though: Shader Forge, a visual shader authoring environment (similar to Unreal’s material graphs) Normalized Crow’s Lava lamp, great for adding ambient energy to things and generally being Weird (although note that it’s very poorly-performing in general) VRChat Goo Shader which is great for both being a gooey mess but also for having incredibly intense transformation animations between other materials Almost all of the shader work I do is using Poiyomi. It’s incredibly versatile and pretty much everything I’ve wanted to implement a shader for myself is included in it. For example, here’s a TV static material and its associated texture, which is all done using stock, free Poiyomi! Fallback avatars There’s a slightly confusing thing about what a “fallback” avatar is in VRChat. There are two things commonly referred to as a fallback: You’re on desktop and you select an avatar that has a Quest version, and Quest users see that Quest version You’re on desktop and you select an avatar that doesn’t have a Quest version, and Quest users see your global fallback For the second one, most people just settle for one of the public fallbacks that VRChat provides, as setting a fallback requires being able to upload your own avatar and doing a bunch of extra work to make it a fallback in the first place. In the first case (Quest version of PC avatar), it’s important to keep your various expression parameters in sync, and a good idea to try to keep your physbone counts the same with the order in sync. If your expression parameters fall out of sync, weird things happen, like your clothing or material setup will be vastly different for PC vs. Quest users, and if your physbones fall out of sync, then goofy stuff happens like a Quest user will tug on your ear and PC users will see your tail move instead. In the second case, it’s much less important for things to stay synchronized; when people see your global fallback, they aren’t seeing any of your expression stuff from the avatar that you’re wearing. The global fallback will be scaled to more or less be the same size as your current avatar, and it’ll track your visemes and position and so on, but parameterized things will not synchronize between the two. And that’s a good thing! Anyway. When creating a global fallback avatar, PolyTool makes the process a lot easier. It has builtins for converting your avatar over to a Quest fallback, including mesh decimation and material atlassing and so on. It’s not a one-and-done thing and there’s a few fussy things to worry about. At some point I might make a full tutorial on how to use it for those purposes, although there’s a brief explanation about how I have it set up in my critter avatar’s documentation files. However, in general, I find that Polytool’s mesh decimator isn’t all that great, and I’ve had much better luck using Blender’s mesh decimation for producing the 15K and 10K polygon versions (for the Quest version and the global fallback, respectively). And this is also something the Cats Blender Plugin will theoretically help with. On that note, a nice thing about how Unity’s FBX importer works is that you can do your avatar setup on your full-resolution mesh and then have the Quest versions inherit from the main mesh: It’s a fairly small thing but it makes at least that thing slightly less obnoxious. Useful libraries and Unity plugins As I mentioned in my cross-platform material switching explanation, one of the most useful tools for managing VRChat avatars is VRCFury, which makes a lot of things a lot easier: Managing animation layers, especially on cross-platform avatars Adding attachment accessories with toggles Simplifying menu management and so much more One of the things that VRCFury makes really easy is adding GoGo Loco, which gives you a whole bunch of useful stuff on your avatar: Various sit and lie poses (especially helpful if you don’t have full-body tracking) Avatar size adjustments (although VRChat are changing the way this works and this might be disappearing at some point) Adding various flight options, including being able to carry other people while you fly Thry’s avatar performance tools are really handy for keeping track of a bunch of stuff. VRC Gesture Manager makes testing your avatar infinitely easier. PumkinsAvatarTools are handy for a lot of initial setup and also correcting a bunch of common issues with your rig. EasyQuestSwitch makes it easy to switch between Quest and PC builds, notably turning on and off different avatar instances depending on your current build target. Random Q&A-type stuff See also my material switching tutorial, which covers a lot of issues you might run into when uploading or with your uploaded avatar’s performance. The VRC SDK control panel shows no errors with my avatar, but the “Build & Publish” button is grayed out! That button unfortunately requires all avatars in the active scene to be in an error-free state, for some reason, not just the currently-selected one. If you have a broken avatar, or one that would be broken if it were uploaded to your current platform (e.g. a desktop avatar while you’re trying to build for mobile), you need to disable it before that button will turn active. EasyQuestSwitch helps with this. comments #VRChat #avatars #resources #tutorials (via busybee)

Ah yes, lots of frustrating stuff happening all at once, so much so that I’ve wrapped around to not caring about any of it. Unemployment stuff When I left my job last June I was technically fired, under the justification that I was unable to do the work the way they wanted me to. This was supposed to make it so that I could collect unemployment and so they didn’t have to provide me any meaningful severance package, and technically it was a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act but not in a form where I could actionably do anything about it under those terms (or maybe I could have, but it’s too late now anyway). Because of the reason of my termination, the Washington State unemployment office made my determination “pending adjudication,” and it took them nearly a year before they’d start to accept my weekly claims. Of course, when they finally did, they were only allowing me to submit claims for the final two or three weeks of my benefit period. It took a lot of convincing them that I was trying to submit my claims during the benefit period but they were simply not allowing me to due to the pending status, and finally they decided that they’d “let” me backfill my claims for the previous year… and buried me in paperwork, with an impossibly short deadline. I did everything I could to satisfy that deadline, and they started to pay out my benefits! Yay! Then they decided that I wasn’t actually eligible after all, and decided to start threatening me with legal action if I didn’t pay them back immediately! Another fun thing is that the benefits they paid out had federal tax withholdings, but their repayment demands included what had been withheld for taxes. So now I get to pay them back more than they’d sent me, and just hope that I can get a refund on it with my taxes next April. They’re also occasionally asking me about my disability issues, sending me the same questionnaire, which I still fill out in response, which they never reply to. So anyway the impression I get is that since I’m too disabled to work, that also makes me too disabled to receive unemployment. However, I’m not so disabled that I immediately qualify for disability benefits, so, that’s fun too. Disability So on that note, I applied for disability back in May. Today I checked on the status of my application and they’re still waiting for me to send in my medical records. That’s totally my fault, as I’d forgotten they were waiting for that. So I quickly printed off everything I’d collected and mailed it in to them. Then I discovered that my printer hadn’t printed all my records because it silently failed due to insufficient toner, and in particular it was the most important ones that weren’t in the packet I mailed off! Sigh. Anyway I’ve ordered more toner which should arrive next week and hopefully I can send an amendment to my medical records. The Social Security Administration was expecting that they wouldn’t be reviewing my application until October anyway. Also I want to update who they should be my point of contact to vouch for my disability issues. I don’t see any way of formally doing that, but that information is part of the cover sheet for the medical records submission, so hopefully the updated information I provided there will be acknowledged. Or not. Finances So, having a bunch of money show up in my checking account and then immediately get clawed back has messed up my budgeting mechanism, so that’s fun. For now I’m at least making enough to sustain myself with my passive investment income, and if things get any worse I can tell the investors who manage my portfolio to start to switch to “income” rather than “growth” and that’ll take some pressure off too. Meanwhile, I’ve lowered the prices on my music commissions and have also been advertising said commissions in more places. I’m not getting a lot of interest on those. Hospital grievance A month ago when I went to the hospital with severe respiratory issues I was treated very badly. I submitted a grievance. They investigated themselves and came to the conclusion that they’d done nothing wrong. Go figure. Medical miscellani There is an apparent link between fibromyalgia and high triglycerides. My doctor was insisting that I needed to get my triglycerides down to see if that’d help with the fibromyalgia, even though the studies show that high triglycerides are a symptom, not a cause. After a bunch of shenanigans and frustrations I don’t want to get into, I finally got on Repatha, which reduced the numbers immediately. It has done nothing for my fibromyalgia. My insurance has only approved Repatha for a few months, and when that approval runs out it costs… much more than I can afford. And as soon as I’m off it, my numbers will skyrocket again, and doctors will start blaming me and my diet for it again, without fucking asking me what it is that I eat or how much I exercise. Meanwhile, the copay on my blood thinners (Xarelto) and my HRT (transdermal estradiol) are also stupidly high, and my insurance keeps on trying to get me to switch to warfarin (which requires weekly monitoring) and a different formulation of estradiol (which doesn’t work right for me, which is why I’m on the formulation I’m on). Or maybe they want me to go back to pills, which were fairly ineffective and also contributed to my clotting disorder. Socialization I’m having trouble finding and keeping friends on VRChat, and the friends I usually spend time with aren’t on as much anymore. Also embodying my fursona hasn’t actually been, like, sustainably Cozy after all. I did end up reconnecting with my friend from ages ago (referenced in a recent musicpost) and it was a lot of fun. We did a little karaoke on VRChat. I hope I can see him some more. We’ve had some fairly similar struggles although they’ve resolved very differently. Music Choir starts up again in a couple weeks, which will be nice, but my voice is still fucked up from the severe bronchitis last month. I’m doing my vocal exercises again now with the hope that things clear up by the time choir starts again. Fortunately my tenor range is mostly fine, and it’s just alto that’s screwy right now. Unfortunately alto is the range I sing in for my own stuff, and right now I can’t seem to record the vocals I want to record for my own things. On that note I really want to start working on that album I keep saying I’m gonna work on. But with my voice being messed up maybe I should work on the other album I keep saying I’m gonna work on. I also really want to reorganize my basement/studio area though. It’s such a mess and I hate spending time down there. I kinda wish I’d gone ahead and built that backyard studio building after all, but that’d cost way more than I can justify spending right now. I definitely don’t have the attention span or physical fitness necessary to do that though. Lots of stuff needs to get moved around and I only have limited “swap space” with which to do it. I should probably at least try to actually plan the space out or something. Pain And of course, as implied above, I’m definitely not in any great shape regarding my chronic pain issues. My usual fitness activities have been kind of off-limits, too: Stepmania hurts my knees too much anymore Beat Saber fatigues my arms and wrists too much It’s been way too hot to take walks outside Gardening is making my allergies go absolutely apeshit Gaming I was getting overwhelmed with my “daily challenge” games like Squaredle, Oh My Word!, and Good Sudoku, and I decided to take a break from those. That’s been good for me. I’ve also found that playing video games has been too hard on my wrists. I’m up to the end of the main quest in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and I’m finding myself not being motivated to actually finish it, because it’s just too button-mashy for me, and the non-main-quest stuff just hasn’t grabbed me enough to want to keep doing it. I think I’d rather be focusing on playing the smaller games made by my friends, and maybe streaming it on Twitch just so that hopefully I can help them to get some visibility. I’d also like to be making games again, too, but, y'know. Pain shit. Driving anxiety And of course I’ve been having trouble driving anywhere, because I get in the car and then start to have a bit of anxiety which leads to dizziness which leads to anxiety and so on. I’m basically able to go to the grocery store and pharmacy, and if I push myself I can get myself out to see nearby friends. Hopefully I’ll be able to drive to choir, because my carpool buddy moved to a different neighborhood so they’re no longer an option, and hopefully driving to choir helps me to remember that I can, in fact, drive. Like I’ve been doing that for literally 30 years and have never been the cause of an accident. I also really want to be able to go a bit further; that friend of mine lives down in Puyallup (20 miles South of me) and I’d like to be able to visit him. tl;dr Basically, I’m still a mess and I don’t see that changing any time soon. comments #mental health #disability #life #fibromyalgia #tl;dr (via busybee)

Stuff that grabbed me today yesterday: The ancient Song Fight! title “Indie Rock Bottom” still has some great songs on it. Mouth Reliant, prayformojo, and Narboutique stood out in particular. Back in the day I was really into The Verve Pipe, not to be confused with The Verve. I always found it disappointing that the only song of theirs which got any real radio play was The Freshmen, which I didn’t care for (and is one of the few songs I’d always remove from my MP3 collection after reripping the CD over the years). Anyway, a while back I found and downloaded a bunch of their live recordings, such as The Back Room @ Colectivo Coffee on 2017-11-25, which is an absolutely amazing performance of a bunch of their songs reimagined from angsty grunge/alt-rock to bittersweet country/folk, which was not a transformation I was expecting but holy cow does it work. And they actually managed to make me like The Freshmen. Dang. Anyway me posting about The Verve Pipe on Mastodon led to someone pointing out an ironic ska cover of The Freshmen which you can hear over on YouTube and it’s uh. A thing. I don’t think I’ll be listening to it again, but hey, it exists. * comments #music (via busybee)

I feel like I’m trapped in a gravity well and am having difficulty motivating myself to do anything at all. I’ve been sleeping way too much, and it isn’t actually helping with anything. I have a severe case of anhedonia when it comes to actually doing things I care about. I’m pretty much just hanging out at home with my cats and occasionally getting on VRChat and plinking away at the same trivial things I usually do, and I’m having trouble keeping up with my chores or my gardening. I’m barely getting out of the house except to go grocery shopping. It sucks and I hate it. On the plus side I’ve been enjoying cooking a lot, and I keep thinking maybe I should document the things I’m cooking and write up recipes or the like. I just get so frustrated so easily at technology right now, and when I try to go out and drive anywhere I have a dizzy spell and worry I’m going to get in an accident, and all of the technology I’m surrounded by is so ineffective and unreliable and I get angry at it a lot for not even being able to do its One Job, and I’m still recovering from the fucking bronchitis I got a month ago, and the Washington unemployment department eventually denied my entire last year of unemployment claims for stupid reasons that I guess are technically my fault but due to an extremely unfair, Kafka-esque situation that they put me in to begin with. I’ve been somewhat enjoying the latest Zelda game but even that ends up hurting too much, so I only play it for a couple of hours every few days. I’m close to the end of the main story though. It’s a game that’s been both amazing and engaging but somehow tedious at the same time. I’ve spent basically no time in my recording studio. My whole basement is a cluttered disastrous mess and I hate being down there. I want to reorganize it but I don’t know where to begin, and don’t have the physical capability to do so anyway. Whenever I do go down there I just see piles of abandoned projects and hobbies I gave up on. I feel like maybe if I gave myself a routine and a schedule to follow I’d feel better, but I’m not sure what the purpose to that would be either. Now that the weather’s cooled off a little I can start taking daily walks again. And tomorrow is a thing I want to go to although I don’t think I’m up to actually performing cello like I had intended to, god I’m so out of practice, ugh ugh ugh I have so many things I want to do but none of them feel worth climbing out of my little hole for. But if I don’t push myself, how will I ever? comments #mental health #depression #chronic pain (via busybee)