I recently created my first custom avatar from scratch for VRChat. While I was learning how to do this, I worked on writing up a google doc to document all the steps and pitfalls for the whole process of modelling an avatar in Blender all the way through uploading it through the VRChat SDK in Unity.
This guide assumes that you’ve had zero prior experience with Blender and Unity and it has lots of screenshots! I hope that this helps others going through the process of creating an avatar for the first time!
I’ve also made newbie-friendly guide for adding super-basic finger movements to avatars. I didn’t cover that topic in the my original guide, so I created a separate short document for it. Note: This only covers basic built-in finger movements. Nothing fancy like custom gestures or gesture overrides.
Here’s the google doc for that:
Addendum: Please don’t request edit access to the docs. I am not granting edit access to anyone.
Addendum to the addendum: If you’re having trouble accessing the document, please make sure that you’re signed into Google Drive with a Google Account.
In addition, you might want to add a note at the end that you should, once done with the Quest/Android version, swap to PC and upload to the same ID so PC users can see the avatar as well.
Wow, I was just thinking of making a Youtube series for this. When you say newbie friendly, you really meant it. Teaches you the basics of Blender and everything.
After a little more learning and playing around, I’ve got a couple new sections up in the tutorial for how to set up blinking and eye tracking using CATS and the 3.0 SDK’s Eye Look component in the Avatar Descriptor. I hope this helps someone trying to do eye stuff for the first time!
i could really use more detail about rigging in the guide, i can’t figure out how to attach the legs to the hips correctly and basically everything else i could find online uses mixamo which i’d rather not.
just generally how the armature is supposed to fit together, I ended up finding a pre-made humanoid rig on an hour-long youtube tutorial and using that instead
Unless they’re really cartoony, heads can be very hard to make starting out. They’re probably one of the most difficult parts of modelling a character, especially if they’re anime-style heads. The main focus of this guide is to help new users get familiar with the basic tools of Blender and Unity.
It will be hard to get use to 3D modelling at first, but skill will come with practice. It took me a while to make my first humanoid head for my tiny, flying Cirno avatar, but even then it looks pretty bad unless I use the toon shader for it.
Depends if it’s already pretty much the thing you want, you can just decimate it to reduce the poly count and rig it. But if it’s a reference for a new avatar you’re best off making a drawing of what it should look like first before sculpting it.
Hey, in the texture aliasing part you mention that if a model contains a lot of solid colors i should use textures of the colors instead so they can be in the atlas. I have a protogen model and the only texture appearing in the texture list is one called “screens”. Trying to save the atlas it gives me an error that there are no unique materials selected. When I first tried to do this there were more then this one texture, but now I can’t see them.
