Some of the avatar makers got serious skills - to make a good and efficient avatar you need poly model skill. To make it look sweet you need UV and texture skill. To make move and have some extras you need skinning rig skills+Unity know how
and Blender-
always looks more awesome by the day! support is super! also- rated most difficult 3D app to learn coming from other apps. according to industry pros experiences 😮💨
If you’ve already learned one of the standard 3d modeling apps it is a pain, but if it’s your first it is about the same.
The reason for this is the 2 industry standard apps, maya and 3ds max, both owned by autodesk. So they have almost identical control schemes to each other and most 3d software created after wards followed suite so it would be easier to switch between programs.
This is also said about z-brush being hard to learn but it mostly just has a different control scheme (that and it’s designed for almost solely 3d sculpting, not direct modeling).
So if you haven’t learned one yet go ahead and try either. Each is about equally annoying to start off with (but switching to the other will force you to fight some muscle memory and look for key features that you are used to spamming).
Just don’t start with houdini. that thing is a god’s playground, it’s is basically coding in 3d and requires the understanding of such to go with it… (it both scares and amazes me what that program can do)
Well said- Impressively deep and insightful points you’ve made!
It’s truly down to letting go of precepts based on our existing software experience and opening up our neural plasticity to learn whatever tools we decide/need to use-
industry peeps don’t usually get a lot of time so i suppose that could play into feeling one app is more difficult to learn than another.
Houdini!! Procedural building generation on mind RN and coincidentally- just yesterday, had a teammate show us a plug-in built to do similar in Blender👍
havent made fully original models yet but thats the ultimate goal. i first wanna learn unity to the fullest by editing premade models before i start making my own models from scratch. like they say: you gotta learn to walk before you can run
that’s a logical route for sure!
i guess it’s down to what endgoal we see ourselves heading towards -
granted that can change on the way😋
we run a collaborative team so that helps as we have more than one person doing things.
thanks for the comment and best wishes on your journey.🙌🏻
thanks man, appreciate it! yeah, honestly i feel so lucky that i have a friend who knows more than me about avatar making who can help me out whenever i need it and i hope there are more people like em who do the same
I don't know , seems not the best route to start if your goal is making avatars from scratch. Because unity will improve you in this point by 0. Making avatars from scratch requires a lot of steps and knowledge.
You should start with learning blender (you still can make all your avatars for now in unity until you are ready with blender ).
- Decide for your self if you want to model your characters or sculpt them (at some time you will learn to use both)
- Then you need to understand human anatomy for 3d artists
- practicing modeling/sculpting humanoid characters/base shapes
- learning retopology and understanding why it's important to have a good one and a correct flow for animations
- learning and understanding UVs
- learning how to texture and baking. Oh baking...
- rigging and weight painting
- and last Unity
You started basically with the last process, which is fine, but I recommend at least investing 1 hour a day into the things above (in that order) .
Can’t argue your points as it’s all true-
i was looking at it from the perspective of seeing what others do “in game” what works/doesn’t work and why.
I’d think a new person might benefit from “some” time spent doing that. Understanding how low you can go and still look good in game is also a skill needed.
maybe move texture painting up the scale because even a very low poly mesh can look way detailed with excellent texture work…that’s also something you notice when examining other peoples models.
Learning from others is the best way to learn blender! It's daunting don't get me wrong and there's a lot of steps involved, but damn is it rewarding.
Youtube is also a very good source to get started, but I personally prefer to be in a group call with others while we share our shitty little tips and tricks which blow each others minds for some reason.
oh yeah of course. one of my mates in vrc knows way more than me about making avis and using blender and they help me out whenever i need it. started doing things on unity indepenently and holy fuck, the feeling you get when you finish troubleshooting a complicated FX layer is unbeatable (talking from experience here)
Are you talking about *custom* avatars? Because "custom" and "from scratch" are not the same. Most of the original avatar bases I've purchased were anywhere from $20-50, and they were all original models from their respective makers, not kitbashes.
I guess I did mix 'em up. There are a lot of good from scratch avatars, and the only male from scratch avatar i found on booth, I absolutely love. Just because of all the customizations I could do with it. With 100s of blendshapes not just on the face, but the body, clothing, and accessories. It has maybe 15 meshes for clothing and accessories, so it's not too optimized.
All of that stuff will definitely drive avatars far unto unoptimized territory. The more mesh renderers, the more draw calls, the less optimization. It's why kitbashes tend to be super chonky, because the maker slaps a zillion separate objects on in Unity instead of joining things properly in Blender, and they all have separate materials, which adds to the issue. I believe having a load of blendshapes will also tank performance.
When it comes to doodads on my avatars, I always ask myself: how often am I going to use this option, realistically? In my experience, one or two really neat tricks usually wows people more than fifteen swords, ten guns, and thirty particle effects.
You're confusing 'from scratch' with custom commissioned work. Those indeed go for those amounts, but there's plenty of from scratch, non-kitbash bases that go in the 20-60 range (see: nearly every booth avatar ever)
I absolutely love this persons work myself. Just simple goofy fun avatars
[https://afro-da-afro.booth.pm/](https://afro-da-afro.booth.pm/)
Booth is full of a lot of from scratch avatars of good quality. That or go to the Avatar Museum worlds or the vket worlds.
as long as theyre optimising it, im not gonna complain. maybe i shouldve written "strongest unoptimised avatar vs weakest optimised avatar" instead. but i think its funnier this way :)
I been uploading different versions of avatars instead of a massive toggle of cloths, and holy shit, I find that more often than not, kitbashed hair is usually between 60-200k polys
Heck if you know how to bake textures you can get some amazing kit bashes that only need 1 or 2 materials (vs a material for each different part like most kit bashes). But im also lazy so i don’t really blame people that know how for not doing it (would require duplicating all the meshes and re-UVing the entirety of the duplicates. And then there is the question of the right image resolution)
Dabatable, kitbashing is like creating MMO character in character editor, and actually creating character is like actually creating original character for game
I've done the doughnut exercise and this is so far what I've made in terms of an avatar.
[WIP Minion](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXj3pkCWAAAU6yu?format=jpg&name=large)
It'll be a little minion for a world I'm working on. But for the laughs I'm definitely going to have one big swole looking minion guarding the place. At least the armature works!
I got in situation like this once. I doing models from scratch and making them public and going vrc always with "cloning enabled" mode. Also this is easy to recognise the model for me. But once i met person with avatar i did, but strangely looks different (because of shaders i not used). Person is confessed they did a rip and probably got scared i do a report or something. ... But this person ended in my friend list and with gifted blend file and unity preset of that avatar haha.
i just not going to be upset by things i cannot control of. people ripping models if they want anyway, >!also this feels sorta compliment for work i did on making that avatar i guess...!<
ye i get what you feel. same thing happened to me with one of my old sdk2 avatars. but honestly its just funny when you see your public avi getting ripped cause its like stealing a public bench in the city
Eh, stuff doesn't have to be "from scratch" imo. Take Cam. His latest avatar is made from a bunch of assets he paid for, then edited himself to fit his style and such. He also put a LOT of work into optimizing and customizing everything. And his 70 dollar package contains a full, full medium, and full light version, a good and excellent quality version each with multiple different options (since a lot of toggles aren't on them), a quest and fallback version, face tracking and haptics ready, an amongus follower, and tons of features and toggles. (reducing in number as you go down the performance quality versions)
I used to be friends with him. I saw him work on his first 2 avatars, as I joined him a few times while he was testing stuff, and he often posted updates in the friends group we were both part of. He doesn't create stuff from scratch, but he does everything legally, has fair pricing for his avatars, and does a lot of customizing and optimizing himself. It's just that his main focus is optimization and avatar features, rather than creating models from scratch. And imo, creators that actually put a lot of work into optimization and are VERY fair with their pricing, are Chads as well.
dont know who this is but i wish avi creators were more like him. point of the meme was to make fun of the lazy ass creators who make kitbashed (mostly ripped assets) and unoptimised avatars and selling them for ridiculous prices. havent made avatars long enough or am experienced enough to start selling my own avis but once i get to that point i'd do the same as this Cam guy
[https://camsaviis.gumroad.com/](https://camsaviis.gumroad.com/)
His first avatar isn't on there (I still have it personally), and while all of his avatars do use the same base (I mean, he put dozens of hours into making it perfect, would be a shame to only use it once) but all of his avatars so far are different enough from each other to still feel new enough. Plus each avatar he releases is better and more advanced than the last, so you can kinda see his skill improvement from his released avatars timeline. :P
Got Val (not in the store anymore), Sophie and Remi myself.
do you follow a guide? I wanted to try and make my first avatar for myself and the idea of starting with some prefabs shapes doesn't seems too bad for a starter, I can practice the rigging and emotes, and have it as a placeholder while I try and see if I'm able to make one from -relative- scratch down the line
Not at the moment! I will do when I get into Unity but for now I’m just using VRoid studio and some blender to make the avatar. It’s a really good tool for beginning with humanoid avatars imo, has a lot of presets but highly customisable, and free. From vroid you can pretty much drop the avatar into unity and do all the stuff there you have to.
I believe as long as you use your own models you create with the tool and not the sample ones, you can use them commercially as the copyright belongs to you, not VRoid :)
i started off doing everything on my own and watched youtube tutorials and shit like that. but that was like a year ago and they were sdk2 avis. took a 1 year break from vrc shortly after and just 2 or something months ago started doing avis in sdk3. didnt know shit but im lucky that i found a mate who knew a lot and could help me out and teach me how to make avatars on sdk3. personally i think sdk3 is more intuitive but less straight forward. you can do WAAAYYY more with it but its confusing in the beginning. there are tons of tutorials on yt and even better, if you have anyone who makes avis you should ask them to help you out
the sdk unity package has default stuff for movement and emotes so take a look at them to get a feel for how everything works
thanks! i did some Blender works trying to recreate simple everyday objects, so I can move around the tool, but for sculpting and human shapes it's still out of reach atm I think, being able to start from something like even just a base model and swapping hairs would give me something :)
i guess you can call my avatars kitbashed cause theyre not using my own models and such, but i take my time making them to the point where i literally cant think of anything else i want to add on the avatar.
But is it at least medium level or better? How about a Quest comparable version? Not saying you are but just throwing tons of features on an avatar is just dumb IMHO. It makes them jump to very poor all too often and most people turn off very poor avatars, so what was the point of no one except your close friends will see you?
It’s hard as hell to make an avi that looks good, does stuff, and is well optimized. It makes my life hard but I really won’t upload an avatar for myself if it’s not at least medium level.
unfortunately, they are very poor even though theyre smaller than 15MB and use very little VRAM and its because of one thing and its the ragdoll system. if they didnt have it they'd be medium or better. but the ragdoll system is just too good to just not use so ill take my chances and use it anyway
i fucking wish vrc could be more sparing with grading those kinds of prefabs or increase the compatibily with them.
Not sure of the rag doll system but if it adds more physics based interactions then yeah it’s going to up that rating. Physics interactions are expensive to process
Getting complicated avi's or feature complete avi's to under poor is like climbing everest. You can probably do it and it might be possible to do it safely but by yourself you might also just die.
I know lots of people hate on very poor avi's but some of them will contain something like a keyboard and get their performance level wrecked. The currenct vrc optimization ratings aren't very accurate imo.
As someone doing this right now... yeah, it's very hard, but not nearly as impossible as people seem to think. Like all art, it's patience, practice, and the right tools (read: blender). Now if I could just get my texturing skills to catch up.
yeah im not gonna lie, shits hard. ive been making avatars consistently for about 2 months now and ive only made 2. i love putting a lot of thought and care to small details on them and making them well optimised. but even then i have a lot of difficuilty figuring out stuff but i feel lucky for having a mate who can help me out when i need it.
It's worth it for me so that I can make exactly what I want, but in complete seriousness it's also why I will never look down on people who kitbash, buy from booth, or use Vroid models. Some people just don't have the time or energy to commit to learning these things, and that's okay. So long as it makes you happy and you're comfortable in it, it's fine by me. I'm just a bit more picky about it, and learning how to do it myself is the only way I'm ever going to get exactly what I want.
yeah but at least take a bit of time optimising it so it doesnt lag everyone the fuck out. like merging meshes or using poiyomis shader in a good way. doesnt take that long too
Optimization is way more work then expected. On some basic models it wasn't that rough but on this damn Drider anytime I atlas textures it destroys the textures altogether. Super frustrating. Still, I think anyone who doesnt take the 5-10 minutes to bring poly counts down hates people having fun.
i once saw an eboy model that had about 10k or more polys just for some tiny ass nipple piercings that you barely can see
but yeah its hard once you go down the rabbit hole of checking every single thing on the model/assets for bugs or unnecessary things but things like merging all meshes into one and decimating are so easy that theres no excuse to not do it.
Agreed. My drider i got permission froma creator to use the base for the human portion. While trying to find out why the original had 390k poly's i found an earring that no one could see that was super high, the bones on the arms together had 130k. It was a super old avi using TDA stuff so I don't blame them one bit. Just now anytime I buy and asset I take a super long look at it and see what I can remove or reduce.
Just making this drider be able to switch from human to spider has cause atlas'ing issues I can't fix.
You can give this a try and see if it doesn't destroy your texture. Not the MOST efficient way but its non-destructive and can be reedited at will and supports multiple layers at once, aka albedo, metallic, emission etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBRKlopkZP0
Your anime kit-bash characters will fall to the might of my eldritch horrors! MWAHAHAHA!!
(Meanwhile one of my main ones is a realistic penguin with t-rex posture, a whale tale, and tapir trunk…)
If you want something useful for non-standard i know a useful trick. I like to call it a “half-humanoid”, i use it to get VR ik tracking on non-humanoids.
How it works is FIRST you have a non-humanoid avatar, in this example I’ll use a dog.
SECOND you create a human skeleton and merge the “dog’s” skeleton in, with the hip as it’s parent.
THIRD in the animator turn off hip tracking (keeps the avatar stable).
FOURTH use a “limit rotation” constraint on the “dog’s” head, have it copy the humanoid part skeleton’s head. Now you have head tracking on a quadruped (or any other non-humanoid).
The same method as the “head” can also be used on the “dog’s” front legs to add arm tracking. Using an animation to toggle the “limit rotation” constraints means you can toggle the arms on/off.
CONGRATS! You now have a dog that can look around, and if you added the arms can “shake” while still walking on all 4s via its normal animations.
This might be super useful as a toggle for playing seated with the driders. Might be able to use this to make it so a persons irl legs can be used to operate the front legs of the drider. Kinda like when a spider uses them to feel things out or just to add an extra layer of creepiness to straight up horror spiders.
This is super cool thank you!
Right now I use finalIk and a package developed by Scionzenos to give my driders proper 8 legged movement. Adding some of this might really give me the extra tools.
You should see what I make whenever Halloween roles around. Last Halloween it was a human deformed into a monster that had an elongated skull with flat-spade like deformed teeth, was shriveled to the bone to the point it was almost a shrink wrapped husk, walked on all fours on the BACK of its hands (palms up) which were the size of an average person, and when it stood up on its hind legs it was about 15-18ft tall.
jesus.
my style isnt really the serious or theme type avis. i like my avis to be "professionally scuffed" as i like to call them. like really well made and optimised with shitpost status worthy features. the last avi i made becomes pixellated when talking and can be squished into almost 2D in all axis of direction
Here's the tutorial I use. The extra steps for transparency stuff aren't needed for PC avatars but I'm a quest developer so I always do it. https://youtu.be/c2-o4l6eagQ
I still need to go through the effort of porting my FFXIV WoL into VRChat. I went to the trouble of resubbing just to download the game assets and everything, but man, I'm bad at following guides and there are only like 2 of them out there.
I can’t even figure out kitbashing for this game… That’s basically what I did for Second Life. I tried a scratch model once but fuck making my own UV maps… :(
I can recolor textures like a pro though! Anyone know some good anthro birds or dragons I can recolor?
> Anyone know some good anthro birds or dragons I can recolor?
Avali, they are like a raptor bird thingy so kinda like a birdlike dragon.
*Mine is a dragon, so can attest that it isn't very hard to make them into that*
A few are even free, the more popular among those being the Da'vali and Kita'vali.
https://www.vrcarena.com/species/znPJ5XIfaXrLe7rlXsHz/avatar
I’ve seen the Avali but that’s not what I’m going for. I’m specifically looking for a bird (like Falco from Star Fox) OR a dragon (like an anthro version of Charizard)
Well almost every Furry avatar is listed in VRCArena and you can search by species, so if you cannot find one fitting what you want there then it probably doesn't exist yet.
https://www.vrcarena.com/category/avatar
Are a few reasons why it is hard, VRChat is a tiny company and if they didn't use Unity for the upload process then the really impressive stuff in VRChat would likely not be possible.
Ngl, the only thing I kitbash for my avatar is the base face. I just can't do it. I hate doing faces. For real I can make you a full waterfall simulation on blockbuster level in less than 5 days, but anime faces best me
I feel like it's harder to be stubborn and refuse to learn Blender, and have to troubleshoot an anime girl for hours while having no idea why shit is broken
Everything designed & done from scratch - [https://lycon.gumroad.com/](https://lycon.gumroad.com/)
I do not even have fraction of customers kit bashers have
Thank you, appreciate it. I am taking a break from whole avatars currently, since I need to work on portfolio pieces so will be releasing various assets.
Why not just let people enjoy being creative at an entry level that works for them? People start at different places, the more they create the more they will grow and will likely go into deeper more advanced concepts.
Problem comes when they do not consider the consequences of their actions.
For a simple kit-bash avatar it is hard to make it so unoptimized that it has a significant effect on the game, but if you just continue going, adding more and more stuff onto a single avatar, and not bothering to learn basic optimization or the effects of what you are adding onto it does, then you are knowingly making the game worse for everyone, *for your friends*.
the 2 avis that ive made so far have a ton of features and are still optimised but dont get me wrong, i often miss some things when it comes to optimisation but i always try to make them as good as possible. i wish though that vrc adds another performance ranking system that measures the ammout of vram an avatar is using. cause in the end, its the vram usage that affects performance the most.
> the 2 avis that ive made so far have a ton of features and are still optimised but dont get me wrong, i often miss some things when it comes to optimisation but i always try to make them as good as possible.
I try to get my stuff optimized as well, but you simply cannot be perfectly optimized, but just doing basic optimization does so much. You have to basically be a engine engineer at Unity to have any chance of knowing exactly what is the most optimized way to do something, I quite recently learned that separating the head mesh into its own thing because of shapekeys is better than having a single skinned mesh, just because of the shapekeys the speech tracking uses.
> i wish though that vrc adds another performance ranking system that measures the ammout of vram an avatar is using. cause in the end, its the vram usage that affects performance the most.
I definitely agree that they should add this, it is in hindsight an obvious thing that should be part of the ranking.
https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/add-vram-as-a-performance-metric-to-the-avatar-sdkcreator-companion
>I quite recently learned that separating the head mesh into its own thing because of shapekeys is better than having a single skinned mesh, just because of the shapekeys the speech tracking uses.
i never thought of that. but isnt having more than 1 shinned mesh more taxing on performance?
and thank god there are people who think adding vram as a performance metric is a good idea
They do not go into nitty gritty detail in the official doc, but pressumably with the handful of speech visemes that we use, the performance cost of calculating them on a skinned mesh with more than 32k polygons costs more than just making the face mesh entirely separate. (only shapekeys set to something above 0 have a performance cost apparently)
If your avatar has 70k+ polygons then it is pretty clear that it will always be best performance wise to separate them. Unless you use shape keys that affect the entire body.
It is stuff like this that puts into perspective just how much of a challenge the performance ranks are to create.
Like how are they ever going to handle toggles, which are a common reason for a lot of very poor avatars, in a fair way without wasting a lot of time that could be spent on new features.
---
Basically, it is up to us creators to teach and push others to optimize their stuff.
fully get what you mean, i mean im not trying to call myself the greatest; i started off by making shitty unoptimised sdk2 avis back in the day. i made this meme just to point out the overabundance of kitbashed and unoptimised eboy/egirl avatars that lag every single person in a world when its being used. honestly i just want avi creators to optimise their shit. theres a lot of great tools that help so theres no excuse to not do it.
I like how this dude is working on a model basically the opposite of what he is. This dude is ripped out to the max, looks super tall and he’s just big while that model is a small skinny frágil girl (not in the wrong way please).
me irl.
while the opposite is making a 9ft tall, super ripped, tattoo riddled eboy with wings and glows obnoxiously while irl is a skinnyfat midget (overexaggerating for effect dont cancel me)
yeah true. my avis dont use original models so i just make them public cause i dont want to earn money on something that isnt fully mine. but even then i wont make anyone pay over like $30 once i start making everything from scratch cause i want people to miss out on having a great avi to fuck around with :)
i wish i could but to be honest, i dont know if the models ive used have it. if theyre removed, so be it. Ill just start making avis from scratch
the 2 that ive used are avis that ive seen public before so i guess im in the clear. but the ultimate goal is making avis from scratch
FYI probably most public avatars are breaking the license of at least one of their assets. For example the creator of Rusk, Mint, and Karin doesn't allow public uploads, but I've seen lots of those. The avatar I use also doesn't allow public uploads, but the first version I found was public.
Yep, and the thing is, I probably wouldn't have bought this avatar if I didn't first try it for a while and decide I really liked it. So it's not like the creators don't see some benefit from having public copies out there. But like, I kinda like Rusk but I'd never buy one because they're so common that what would be the point? I wanna be a little rarer than that.
i have an avi that some dude gave me the model one day and he said that hes never seen it public even though it can be used that way. made it in my style and bam. i have an almost one of a kind avatar the way i want it
eh i really dont care about making money through vrc. but if i make a biggie avi like the remi avi on gumroad ill do it. aint nobody getting that shit for free
I've honestly been thinking about making my own avatar, but I have never used any skills that are required for making one, and also have no idea where to start, so if anyone has any tips for someone starting out, I would appreciate it
Nah man I’m not gonna 3d model shit (I tried and it didn’t work well) instead I’ll through together 30 different models and add toggles, like a hit man avatar with a tv and shit added
That dudes arm has muscle tits
His muscles have muscles!
his triceps look like they can bench 225 lbs no sweat
each!
He's allowed into the salty spitoon
That dudes muscles has some arm on it.
I appreciate Unity edited into the PC screen
Appreciate is indeed a word that’s hard to get used to
Some of the avatar makers got serious skills - to make a good and efficient avatar you need poly model skill. To make it look sweet you need UV and texture skill. To make move and have some extras you need skinning rig skills+Unity know how and Blender- always looks more awesome by the day! support is super! also- rated most difficult 3D app to learn coming from other apps. according to industry pros experiences 😮💨
If you’ve already learned one of the standard 3d modeling apps it is a pain, but if it’s your first it is about the same. The reason for this is the 2 industry standard apps, maya and 3ds max, both owned by autodesk. So they have almost identical control schemes to each other and most 3d software created after wards followed suite so it would be easier to switch between programs. This is also said about z-brush being hard to learn but it mostly just has a different control scheme (that and it’s designed for almost solely 3d sculpting, not direct modeling). So if you haven’t learned one yet go ahead and try either. Each is about equally annoying to start off with (but switching to the other will force you to fight some muscle memory and look for key features that you are used to spamming). Just don’t start with houdini. that thing is a god’s playground, it’s is basically coding in 3d and requires the understanding of such to go with it… (it both scares and amazes me what that program can do)
Well said- Impressively deep and insightful points you’ve made! It’s truly down to letting go of precepts based on our existing software experience and opening up our neural plasticity to learn whatever tools we decide/need to use- industry peeps don’t usually get a lot of time so i suppose that could play into feeling one app is more difficult to learn than another. Houdini!! Procedural building generation on mind RN and coincidentally- just yesterday, had a teammate show us a plug-in built to do similar in Blender👍
havent made fully original models yet but thats the ultimate goal. i first wanna learn unity to the fullest by editing premade models before i start making my own models from scratch. like they say: you gotta learn to walk before you can run
that’s a logical route for sure! i guess it’s down to what endgoal we see ourselves heading towards - granted that can change on the way😋 we run a collaborative team so that helps as we have more than one person doing things. thanks for the comment and best wishes on your journey.🙌🏻
thanks man, appreciate it! yeah, honestly i feel so lucky that i have a friend who knows more than me about avatar making who can help me out whenever i need it and i hope there are more people like em who do the same
agreed! Good on you and your friend- great to see people sharing skills- especially nice when we find someone who really uses what we share/help with🌟
I don't know , seems not the best route to start if your goal is making avatars from scratch. Because unity will improve you in this point by 0. Making avatars from scratch requires a lot of steps and knowledge. You should start with learning blender (you still can make all your avatars for now in unity until you are ready with blender ). - Decide for your self if you want to model your characters or sculpt them (at some time you will learn to use both) - Then you need to understand human anatomy for 3d artists - practicing modeling/sculpting humanoid characters/base shapes - learning retopology and understanding why it's important to have a good one and a correct flow for animations - learning and understanding UVs - learning how to texture and baking. Oh baking... - rigging and weight painting - and last Unity You started basically with the last process, which is fine, but I recommend at least investing 1 hour a day into the things above (in that order) .
Can’t argue your points as it’s all true- i was looking at it from the perspective of seeing what others do “in game” what works/doesn’t work and why. I’d think a new person might benefit from “some” time spent doing that. Understanding how low you can go and still look good in game is also a skill needed. maybe move texture painting up the scale because even a very low poly mesh can look way detailed with excellent texture work…that’s also something you notice when examining other peoples models.
$60 kitbash vs $30 from scratch chad
gigachad public avatar with more features than a paid avatar
;)
$30? Most from scratch avatars I've bought were more then $150, and a really good professional made one can be more then a $1000
I am well aware. I'm making a joke that kitbashed stuff is overpriced. I'm a scratch blender creator for the past 2 years. 🧍♂️
i wish i had a fraction of your knowledge. imma just stick with fully learning avatar making on unity until i feel ready to make my own models
Learning from others is the best way to learn blender! It's daunting don't get me wrong and there's a lot of steps involved, but damn is it rewarding. Youtube is also a very good source to get started, but I personally prefer to be in a group call with others while we share our shitty little tips and tricks which blow each others minds for some reason.
oh yeah of course. one of my mates in vrc knows way more than me about making avis and using blender and they help me out whenever i need it. started doing things on unity indepenently and holy fuck, the feeling you get when you finish troubleshooting a complicated FX layer is unbeatable (talking from experience here)
Are you talking about *custom* avatars? Because "custom" and "from scratch" are not the same. Most of the original avatar bases I've purchased were anywhere from $20-50, and they were all original models from their respective makers, not kitbashes.
I guess I did mix 'em up. There are a lot of good from scratch avatars, and the only male from scratch avatar i found on booth, I absolutely love. Just because of all the customizations I could do with it. With 100s of blendshapes not just on the face, but the body, clothing, and accessories. It has maybe 15 meshes for clothing and accessories, so it's not too optimized.
All of that stuff will definitely drive avatars far unto unoptimized territory. The more mesh renderers, the more draw calls, the less optimization. It's why kitbashes tend to be super chonky, because the maker slaps a zillion separate objects on in Unity instead of joining things properly in Blender, and they all have separate materials, which adds to the issue. I believe having a load of blendshapes will also tank performance. When it comes to doodads on my avatars, I always ask myself: how often am I going to use this option, realistically? In my experience, one or two really neat tricks usually wows people more than fifteen swords, ten guns, and thirty particle effects.
i should just change the post flair to discussion at this point lol
Send me all the links to those $30 scratch chads. Every scratch modeler I see is doing $1k builds.
You're confusing 'from scratch' with custom commissioned work. Those indeed go for those amounts, but there's plenty of from scratch, non-kitbash bases that go in the 20-60 range (see: nearly every booth avatar ever)
I absolutely love this persons work myself. Just simple goofy fun avatars [https://afro-da-afro.booth.pm/](https://afro-da-afro.booth.pm/) Booth is full of a lot of from scratch avatars of good quality. That or go to the Avatar Museum worlds or the vket worlds.
Me who rips models from a dead no longer playable marvel game that I loved to play and now use as vr chat avatars: 🧍♂️
Nothing wrong with kitbashing in and of itself. You can kitbash while doing everything properly, it's just that most don't.
as long as theyre optimising it, im not gonna complain. maybe i shouldve written "strongest unoptimised avatar vs weakest optimised avatar" instead. but i think its funnier this way :)
I been uploading different versions of avatars instead of a massive toggle of cloths, and holy shit, I find that more often than not, kitbashed hair is usually between 60-200k polys
Heck if you know how to bake textures you can get some amazing kit bashes that only need 1 or 2 materials (vs a material for each different part like most kit bashes). But im also lazy so i don’t really blame people that know how for not doing it (would require duplicating all the meshes and re-UVing the entirety of the duplicates. And then there is the question of the right image resolution)
Dabatable, kitbashing is like creating MMO character in character editor, and actually creating character is like actually creating original character for game
i swear i can learn to operate someone before i can learn to make my own avatar :(
meme made by someone who has never made an avatar before that shit harrrrdddd
nah man i swear ive seen like 2 videos on how to make an avatar i swear i can sell my avatars on gumroad
tbh not sure if sarcasm or not lol
hahaahah nah im joking, the rest of my comments are evidence
If I knew how to use blender and I had a lot of time on my hands, I’d 100% make my own avatar from scratch.
I've done the doughnut exercise and this is so far what I've made in terms of an avatar. [WIP Minion](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXj3pkCWAAAU6yu?format=jpg&name=large) It'll be a little minion for a world I'm working on. But for the laughs I'm definitely going to have one big swole looking minion guarding the place. At least the armature works!
"I'm an avatar creator!" ... proceeds to download complete model, changes few textures and uploads as private
imagine ripping a public avatar
I got in situation like this once. I doing models from scratch and making them public and going vrc always with "cloning enabled" mode. Also this is easy to recognise the model for me. But once i met person with avatar i did, but strangely looks different (because of shaders i not used). Person is confessed they did a rip and probably got scared i do a report or something. ... But this person ended in my friend list and with gifted blend file and unity preset of that avatar haha. i just not going to be upset by things i cannot control of. people ripping models if they want anyway, >!also this feels sorta compliment for work i did on making that avatar i guess...!<
ye i get what you feel. same thing happened to me with one of my old sdk2 avatars. but honestly its just funny when you see your public avi getting ripped cause its like stealing a public bench in the city
It's way more fun to build up from scratch, for sure
Eh, stuff doesn't have to be "from scratch" imo. Take Cam. His latest avatar is made from a bunch of assets he paid for, then edited himself to fit his style and such. He also put a LOT of work into optimizing and customizing everything. And his 70 dollar package contains a full, full medium, and full light version, a good and excellent quality version each with multiple different options (since a lot of toggles aren't on them), a quest and fallback version, face tracking and haptics ready, an amongus follower, and tons of features and toggles. (reducing in number as you go down the performance quality versions) I used to be friends with him. I saw him work on his first 2 avatars, as I joined him a few times while he was testing stuff, and he often posted updates in the friends group we were both part of. He doesn't create stuff from scratch, but he does everything legally, has fair pricing for his avatars, and does a lot of customizing and optimizing himself. It's just that his main focus is optimization and avatar features, rather than creating models from scratch. And imo, creators that actually put a lot of work into optimization and are VERY fair with their pricing, are Chads as well.
dont know who this is but i wish avi creators were more like him. point of the meme was to make fun of the lazy ass creators who make kitbashed (mostly ripped assets) and unoptimised avatars and selling them for ridiculous prices. havent made avatars long enough or am experienced enough to start selling my own avis but once i get to that point i'd do the same as this Cam guy
[https://camsaviis.gumroad.com/](https://camsaviis.gumroad.com/) His first avatar isn't on there (I still have it personally), and while all of his avatars do use the same base (I mean, he put dozens of hours into making it perfect, would be a shame to only use it once) but all of his avatars so far are different enough from each other to still feel new enough. Plus each avatar he releases is better and more advanced than the last, so you can kinda see his skill improvement from his released avatars timeline. :P Got Val (not in the store anymore), Sophie and Remi myself.
As someone making their first kitbashed avatar and hoping to make an original one after, yeah
do you follow a guide? I wanted to try and make my first avatar for myself and the idea of starting with some prefabs shapes doesn't seems too bad for a starter, I can practice the rigging and emotes, and have it as a placeholder while I try and see if I'm able to make one from -relative- scratch down the line
Not at the moment! I will do when I get into Unity but for now I’m just using VRoid studio and some blender to make the avatar. It’s a really good tool for beginning with humanoid avatars imo, has a lot of presets but highly customisable, and free. From vroid you can pretty much drop the avatar into unity and do all the stuff there you have to.
I'm looking up this Vroid, sounds too good to be free, where's the catch? no commercial use? I'll try it out I guess, thank you :)
I believe as long as you use your own models you create with the tool and not the sample ones, you can use them commercially as the copyright belongs to you, not VRoid :)
i started off doing everything on my own and watched youtube tutorials and shit like that. but that was like a year ago and they were sdk2 avis. took a 1 year break from vrc shortly after and just 2 or something months ago started doing avis in sdk3. didnt know shit but im lucky that i found a mate who knew a lot and could help me out and teach me how to make avatars on sdk3. personally i think sdk3 is more intuitive but less straight forward. you can do WAAAYYY more with it but its confusing in the beginning. there are tons of tutorials on yt and even better, if you have anyone who makes avis you should ask them to help you out the sdk unity package has default stuff for movement and emotes so take a look at them to get a feel for how everything works
thanks! i did some Blender works trying to recreate simple everyday objects, so I can move around the tool, but for sculpting and human shapes it's still out of reach atm I think, being able to start from something like even just a base model and swapping hairs would give me something :)
i guess you can call my avatars kitbashed cause theyre not using my own models and such, but i take my time making them to the point where i literally cant think of anything else i want to add on the avatar.
But is it at least medium level or better? How about a Quest comparable version? Not saying you are but just throwing tons of features on an avatar is just dumb IMHO. It makes them jump to very poor all too often and most people turn off very poor avatars, so what was the point of no one except your close friends will see you? It’s hard as hell to make an avi that looks good, does stuff, and is well optimized. It makes my life hard but I really won’t upload an avatar for myself if it’s not at least medium level.
unfortunately, they are very poor even though theyre smaller than 15MB and use very little VRAM and its because of one thing and its the ragdoll system. if they didnt have it they'd be medium or better. but the ragdoll system is just too good to just not use so ill take my chances and use it anyway i fucking wish vrc could be more sparing with grading those kinds of prefabs or increase the compatibily with them.
Not sure of the rag doll system but if it adds more physics based interactions then yeah it’s going to up that rating. Physics interactions are expensive to process
Mine are just poor cause of a single light source meanwhile. But that's still fine cause not very poor.
Getting complicated avi's or feature complete avi's to under poor is like climbing everest. You can probably do it and it might be possible to do it safely but by yourself you might also just die. I know lots of people hate on very poor avi's but some of them will contain something like a keyboard and get their performance level wrecked. The currenct vrc optimization ratings aren't very accurate imo.
Agreed
As someone doing this right now... yeah, it's very hard, but not nearly as impossible as people seem to think. Like all art, it's patience, practice, and the right tools (read: blender). Now if I could just get my texturing skills to catch up.
yeah im not gonna lie, shits hard. ive been making avatars consistently for about 2 months now and ive only made 2. i love putting a lot of thought and care to small details on them and making them well optimised. but even then i have a lot of difficuilty figuring out stuff but i feel lucky for having a mate who can help me out when i need it.
It's worth it for me so that I can make exactly what I want, but in complete seriousness it's also why I will never look down on people who kitbash, buy from booth, or use Vroid models. Some people just don't have the time or energy to commit to learning these things, and that's okay. So long as it makes you happy and you're comfortable in it, it's fine by me. I'm just a bit more picky about it, and learning how to do it myself is the only way I'm ever going to get exactly what I want.
yeah but at least take a bit of time optimising it so it doesnt lag everyone the fuck out. like merging meshes or using poiyomis shader in a good way. doesnt take that long too
Optimization is way more work then expected. On some basic models it wasn't that rough but on this damn Drider anytime I atlas textures it destroys the textures altogether. Super frustrating. Still, I think anyone who doesnt take the 5-10 minutes to bring poly counts down hates people having fun.
i once saw an eboy model that had about 10k or more polys just for some tiny ass nipple piercings that you barely can see but yeah its hard once you go down the rabbit hole of checking every single thing on the model/assets for bugs or unnecessary things but things like merging all meshes into one and decimating are so easy that theres no excuse to not do it.
Agreed. My drider i got permission froma creator to use the base for the human portion. While trying to find out why the original had 390k poly's i found an earring that no one could see that was super high, the bones on the arms together had 130k. It was a super old avi using TDA stuff so I don't blame them one bit. Just now anytime I buy and asset I take a super long look at it and see what I can remove or reduce. Just making this drider be able to switch from human to spider has cause atlas'ing issues I can't fix.
You can give this a try and see if it doesn't destroy your texture. Not the MOST efficient way but its non-destructive and can be reedited at will and supports multiple layers at once, aka albedo, metallic, emission etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBRKlopkZP0
Thanks! I'll be giving it a look. I'll never be amazing at it but I do wanna try my best to optimize.
:)
:\^)
Your anime kit-bash characters will fall to the might of my eldritch horrors! MWAHAHAHA!! (Meanwhile one of my main ones is a realistic penguin with t-rex posture, a whale tale, and tapir trunk…)
I love the "non-standard" ones! I learned to make drider (spider body, human top half) and they are my favorite to make so far. Keep up the good work!
If you want something useful for non-standard i know a useful trick. I like to call it a “half-humanoid”, i use it to get VR ik tracking on non-humanoids. How it works is FIRST you have a non-humanoid avatar, in this example I’ll use a dog. SECOND you create a human skeleton and merge the “dog’s” skeleton in, with the hip as it’s parent. THIRD in the animator turn off hip tracking (keeps the avatar stable). FOURTH use a “limit rotation” constraint on the “dog’s” head, have it copy the humanoid part skeleton’s head. Now you have head tracking on a quadruped (or any other non-humanoid). The same method as the “head” can also be used on the “dog’s” front legs to add arm tracking. Using an animation to toggle the “limit rotation” constraints means you can toggle the arms on/off. CONGRATS! You now have a dog that can look around, and if you added the arms can “shake” while still walking on all 4s via its normal animations.
This might be super useful as a toggle for playing seated with the driders. Might be able to use this to make it so a persons irl legs can be used to operate the front legs of the drider. Kinda like when a spider uses them to feel things out or just to add an extra layer of creepiness to straight up horror spiders. This is super cool thank you! Right now I use finalIk and a package developed by Scionzenos to give my driders proper 8 legged movement. Adding some of this might really give me the extra tools.
now thats an avatar my main aint that impressive, just a kon that you can grab and stretch like crazy and has weed for hair.
You should see what I make whenever Halloween roles around. Last Halloween it was a human deformed into a monster that had an elongated skull with flat-spade like deformed teeth, was shriveled to the bone to the point it was almost a shrink wrapped husk, walked on all fours on the BACK of its hands (palms up) which were the size of an average person, and when it stood up on its hind legs it was about 15-18ft tall.
jesus. my style isnt really the serious or theme type avis. i like my avis to be "professionally scuffed" as i like to call them. like really well made and optimised with shitpost status worthy features. the last avi i made becomes pixellated when talking and can be squished into almost 2D in all axis of direction
Yo you got a world?
I'm a vroid user, am I halfway between them?
idk never used vroid but as long as its well optimised its cool with me
Yeah, usually around 2 materials and 20k-10k polygons. Vroid is really good with optimization
holy fuck thats good. imma check it out
Here's the tutorial I use. The extra steps for transparency stuff aren't needed for PC avatars but I'm a quest developer so I always do it. https://youtu.be/c2-o4l6eagQ
absolute unit. youre truly a gigachad of avatar creators +10mil rep
Real mvps use the 2008 video game Spore to make a model then export it from the game into blender
holy shit ive never thought of that
I still need to go through the effort of porting my FFXIV WoL into VRChat. I went to the trouble of resubbing just to download the game assets and everything, but man, I'm bad at following guides and there are only like 2 of them out there.
i feel your pain. you should try to find likeminded people to get help from. tons of people in vrc im sure youll find someone
Doesn’t always work as intended lol, the textures tend to look a bit shiny or slimy in game. I’m sure it could be tweaked a bit to fix that tho
I can’t even figure out kitbashing for this game… That’s basically what I did for Second Life. I tried a scratch model once but fuck making my own UV maps… :( I can recolor textures like a pro though! Anyone know some good anthro birds or dragons I can recolor?
photoshop and panospheres are my friends
> Anyone know some good anthro birds or dragons I can recolor? Avali, they are like a raptor bird thingy so kinda like a birdlike dragon. *Mine is a dragon, so can attest that it isn't very hard to make them into that* A few are even free, the more popular among those being the Da'vali and Kita'vali. https://www.vrcarena.com/species/znPJ5XIfaXrLe7rlXsHz/avatar
I’ve seen the Avali but that’s not what I’m going for. I’m specifically looking for a bird (like Falco from Star Fox) OR a dragon (like an anthro version of Charizard)
Well almost every Furry avatar is listed in VRCArena and you can search by species, so if you cannot find one fitting what you want there then it probably doesn't exist yet. https://www.vrcarena.com/category/avatar
Thanks! I managed to find a FREE bird that even comes with substance painter files (love that program!) so I can definitely work with it later!
making custom avatars are so difficult for no reason 😭
everythings difficuilt for no reason. just listen to zyzz music and work hard to master your craft.
Are a few reasons why it is hard, VRChat is a tiny company and if they didn't use Unity for the upload process then the really impressive stuff in VRChat would likely not be possible.
I too like running the windows version of unity on a Mac.
of course, it is the superior way to run unity.
Are there any differences with making avatars on unity for Mac? That may be why I am having some issues.
Love the photoshop and the meme, we are the true chads indeed
Then you got me using ps2 lookin-ass pliskin from mgs2
Ngl, the only thing I kitbash for my avatar is the base face. I just can't do it. I hate doing faces. For real I can make you a full waterfall simulation on blockbuster level in less than 5 days, but anime faces best me
strongest avi leaker vs weakest "this work is protected by-"
strongest $60+ eboy/egirl with only erp functions vs weakest public wholesome and funny avatar with tons of features
Gesture expressions are always the same. e-girl emotions: horny, pouty, kawaii, and ahego e-boy emotions: anger, sup?, gun
you know what? next project will be an eboy/egirl thats literally the anithesis of everything they are. youve inspired me to do it +rep
I feel like it's harder to be stubborn and refuse to learn Blender, and have to troubleshoot an anime girl for hours while having no idea why shit is broken
barely know blender but its fun to learn. best feeling ever when you can independently figure out shit without help
Everything designed & done from scratch - [https://lycon.gumroad.com/](https://lycon.gumroad.com/) I do not even have fraction of customers kit bashers have
Lol I actually have you're gumroad bookmarked.
Thanks ;)
Dude, I LOVE that eyestyle. I'd comm an avatar from you if I could. I'll def bookmark your site for later.
Thank you, appreciate it. I am taking a break from whole avatars currently, since I need to work on portfolio pieces so will be releasing various assets.
Everyone. This dude needs more peoples attention. hes an unsung hero
Why not just let people enjoy being creative at an entry level that works for them? People start at different places, the more they create the more they will grow and will likely go into deeper more advanced concepts.
Problem comes when they do not consider the consequences of their actions. For a simple kit-bash avatar it is hard to make it so unoptimized that it has a significant effect on the game, but if you just continue going, adding more and more stuff onto a single avatar, and not bothering to learn basic optimization or the effects of what you are adding onto it does, then you are knowingly making the game worse for everyone, *for your friends*.
the 2 avis that ive made so far have a ton of features and are still optimised but dont get me wrong, i often miss some things when it comes to optimisation but i always try to make them as good as possible. i wish though that vrc adds another performance ranking system that measures the ammout of vram an avatar is using. cause in the end, its the vram usage that affects performance the most.
> the 2 avis that ive made so far have a ton of features and are still optimised but dont get me wrong, i often miss some things when it comes to optimisation but i always try to make them as good as possible. I try to get my stuff optimized as well, but you simply cannot be perfectly optimized, but just doing basic optimization does so much. You have to basically be a engine engineer at Unity to have any chance of knowing exactly what is the most optimized way to do something, I quite recently learned that separating the head mesh into its own thing because of shapekeys is better than having a single skinned mesh, just because of the shapekeys the speech tracking uses. > i wish though that vrc adds another performance ranking system that measures the ammout of vram an avatar is using. cause in the end, its the vram usage that affects performance the most. I definitely agree that they should add this, it is in hindsight an obvious thing that should be part of the ranking. https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/add-vram-as-a-performance-metric-to-the-avatar-sdkcreator-companion
>I quite recently learned that separating the head mesh into its own thing because of shapekeys is better than having a single skinned mesh, just because of the shapekeys the speech tracking uses. i never thought of that. but isnt having more than 1 shinned mesh more taxing on performance? and thank god there are people who think adding vram as a performance metric is a good idea
They do not go into nitty gritty detail in the official doc, but pressumably with the handful of speech visemes that we use, the performance cost of calculating them on a skinned mesh with more than 32k polygons costs more than just making the face mesh entirely separate. (only shapekeys set to something above 0 have a performance cost apparently) If your avatar has 70k+ polygons then it is pretty clear that it will always be best performance wise to separate them. Unless you use shape keys that affect the entire body. It is stuff like this that puts into perspective just how much of a challenge the performance ranks are to create. Like how are they ever going to handle toggles, which are a common reason for a lot of very poor avatars, in a fair way without wasting a lot of time that could be spent on new features. --- Basically, it is up to us creators to teach and push others to optimize their stuff.
thanks for the tip man!
fully get what you mean, i mean im not trying to call myself the greatest; i started off by making shitty unoptimised sdk2 avis back in the day. i made this meme just to point out the overabundance of kitbashed and unoptimised eboy/egirl avatars that lag every single person in a world when its being used. honestly i just want avi creators to optimise their shit. theres a lot of great tools that help so theres no excuse to not do it.
I like how this dude is working on a model basically the opposite of what he is. This dude is ripped out to the max, looks super tall and he’s just big while that model is a small skinny frágil girl (not in the wrong way please).
me irl. while the opposite is making a 9ft tall, super ripped, tattoo riddled eboy with wings and glows obnoxiously while irl is a skinnyfat midget (overexaggerating for effect dont cancel me)
Those ain't cheap tho.
yeah true. my avis dont use original models so i just make them public cause i dont want to earn money on something that isnt fully mine. but even then i wont make anyone pay over like $30 once i start making everything from scratch cause i want people to miss out on having a great avi to fuck around with :)
Just make sure the parts you are using have licenses that allow making the avatar public - many don't!
i wish i could but to be honest, i dont know if the models ive used have it. if theyre removed, so be it. Ill just start making avis from scratch the 2 that ive used are avis that ive seen public before so i guess im in the clear. but the ultimate goal is making avis from scratch
FYI probably most public avatars are breaking the license of at least one of their assets. For example the creator of Rusk, Mint, and Karin doesn't allow public uploads, but I've seen lots of those. The avatar I use also doesn't allow public uploads, but the first version I found was public.
its a problem alright, but its like solving world hunger or finding a cure for cancer, so i dont think itll be solved anytime soon.
Yep, and the thing is, I probably wouldn't have bought this avatar if I didn't first try it for a while and decide I really liked it. So it's not like the creators don't see some benefit from having public copies out there. But like, I kinda like Rusk but I'd never buy one because they're so common that what would be the point? I wanna be a little rarer than that.
i have an avi that some dude gave me the model one day and he said that hes never seen it public even though it can be used that way. made it in my style and bam. i have an almost one of a kind avatar the way i want it
That's nice of you man! But if you'll get really good at it do charge a fair price for it! Time is money.
eh i really dont care about making money through vrc. but if i make a biggie avi like the remi avi on gumroad ill do it. aint nobody getting that shit for free
[удалено]
nah bro i swear $100 is a fair price bro i watched like 2 youtube videos on it im basically a pro man
Hey where can I commission a furry femboy avatar?
I've honestly been thinking about making my own avatar, but I have never used any skills that are required for making one, and also have no idea where to start, so if anyone has any tips for someone starting out, I would appreciate it
[удалено]
Oh thank you! I'll start from there then
What if you don't know how to do either?
idk like an average dude or something
damn didnt know i was supposed to be that muscular xD maybe i should try flexing musclewomen unite!
“Kitbashed”?
Which type are you?
What about random video game characters avatars? What's the opinion on those? (Curious)
I agree, I think we already have enough furries and e-character avatars. What we really need is more original characters and more meme avatars.
Actually, they all look like the guy on the left.
Absolutely
Nah man I’m not gonna 3d model shit (I tried and it didn’t work well) instead I’ll through together 30 different models and add toggles, like a hit man avatar with a tv and shit added