VRCFury vs Modular Avatar

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I’ve been using VRCFury on my avatars for quite a while now, though honestly it’s been almost solely for creating toggles; I used to use it for merging armatures when adding props/clothes/etc, but found I prefer to just do that myself in Blender. And while I’ve used a number of avatar bases that require/utilize VRCFury in their prefabs, I’ve been increasingly seeing that little ‘Modular Avatar’ logo show up (especially around the latest VKet), which has me wondering if I should put in the effort to learn/switch to using that system.

I haven’t been able to find a particularly good comparison between the two (though to be fair I suck at searching and don’t use reddit), so I’m hoping this might be a good place to find people who’ve tried both and would be willing to share their experiences and opinions. Is there a compelling reason to choose one over the other? GoLoco already has one-click installs for both and that’s the only complex prefab I throw on everything. And, again, I prefer to just pull props and clothes into Blender to manually attach meshes/merge armatures/optimize polycounts; it feels like those are the primary uses of M.A. so if I don’t intend to ever use those features, is it even worth using?

Thanks in advance~

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I use both, mainly because I haven’t figured out how to merge armatures with VRCFury yet. I’ll get there, just I haven’t had a chance to focus yet. Same thing with making toggles with MA, haven’t gotten around to it :rofl:

Drop outfit on avatar, right click that, go to Modular Avatar, Choose “Setup Outfit” option

Tools are great for people who want to use them. Don’t worry about tools you wont use. Personally I’ve done stuff in blender and also done stuff with MA/VRCFury

One thing I like about booth avatars in general is that they usually have blendshapes on the body that shrink the body down away from clothes.

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Cool, thanks for the feedback. So you’re able to use them both in the same project without things blowing up?

I guess part of me is just worried I’m overlooking something really useful, or missing out on a tool that could make things easier. Like, I didn’t even know VRCFury existed until I’d been in VRC for almost a year, and wasted sooooo much time creating toggles manually in Unity.

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Works perfectly fine for how I’m using it. But yeah in general most people will just use one or the other in a project.

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Cool, appreciate the reply.

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I was in a similar situation, having used VRCFury for a while. I had been using Combo Gesture Expressions (CGE) to create the facial expressions for my avatar, and I was using VRCFury to merge GoGoLoco and a few of my own toggles in.

Then I decided to switch from CGE to FaceEmo, which is dependent on Modular Avatar to function. I figured I should also switch from VRCFury to Modular Avatar (MA) because I was worried about having them both in use simultaneously, and GoGoLoco comes with an MA prefab.

So, I recreated my toggles as an MA prefab, added the GoGoLoco MA prefab, and uploaded it. It didn’t go well. I won’t bore you with details, but some of GoGoLoco’s functionality was misbehaving. I wasted hours searching for solutions and testing different things, all to no avail.

Eventually, I switched back to VRCFury, and everything worked fine. So in summary, my avatar uses:

  • FaceEmo merged with Modular Avatar
  • GoGoLoco merged with VRCFury
  • My own toggles prefab merged with VRCFury

…and it works better this way than when I tried to be clever and use only Modular Avatar for everything.

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Oh, interesting. I definitely appreciate the info; thanks for replying.

It is kind of a bummer to hear you had so much trouble trying to switch everything over to MA, but I’m glad to see another example of the two systems being used at the same time without blowing everything up.
Also cool to hear you have a toggles prefab you can just toss onto your avs; I keep meaning to build something like that so I can merge a bunch of anims into the FX animator.

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It isn’t a waste of time as you know understand what the tools do under the hood, going with tools from the start abstracts some of the complexity but hides the inner reason why people do things. In the end people believe in one click tools and barely optimize their avatars.

But back on topic, there used to be compatibility issues with NDMF (Modular Avatar Engine, for the most part) and VRCFury, you have some details about that at Compatibility Notes with VRCFury VRCFuryとの互換性について · anatawa12/AvatarOptimizer · Discussion #860 · GitHub from @anatawa12

I personally prefer the modularity of NDMF/MA but i don’t mind using vrcfury for specific use cases like some optimizer features or the write default fix.

As for what i use, i have a hosted list of cool mature packages based on NDMF that help improve some workflows, there is especially a few really helping with optimization like AAO or Meshia, you can see the list at GitHub - Spokeek/awesome-ndmf: An list of awesome projects based on the NDMF framework

Anyway as others said, as long as the tool helps you in your workflow, there is nothing as a “bad” tool.

Yeah, there was issues related to some of the playable layers, that have been fixed since (from what i know), but i can relate to that issue sadly.

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I’m also using both on my avi, Modular Avatar compensates for what I don’t have on VRCFury, and vise versa. Works perfectly, full face tracking, GoGoFreeze, GoGoLoco and everything.