busybee VRChat Stuff

One of the most poorly-defined yet critical things in configuring a VR avatar is where exactly to place the viewpoint. It can have a lot of impact on your viewing experience, especially with how the viewpoint ends up relating to the rest of the body. This becomes especially critical in systems like VRChat and Resonite where the physics of the body are directly impacted by this placement, and especially now that VRChat has built-in functionality for allowing a first-person view of your facial features (which the critter avatar calls “first-person snooter”).

When building a humanoid avatar that has proportions that more or less match one’s physical body, you generally want the viewpoint to be situated such that it’s placed at the same relative depth from your real-life view origin compared to your shoulders, as this means that your virtual head will be tracked with the same relative offset from your virtual shoulders as they are from your real ones. Otherwise, your virtual arms will seem to be the wrong length when fully extended.

But this raises the obvious question: where’s your physical view origin?

Critter v1.7 brings a bunch of new features, some of which will require some changes to your existing avatar setup.

So you’ve enjoyed becoming critter, but you want even better customization with your horns: when you’re a different material, you’d like to be able to change the sound that is made by your horns being popped off.

Worry not, as of version 1.7.0 you can make this happen!

Sometimes you need to be able to build and test an avatar from a different machine than what’s running VRChat. This can be a bit tricky. I finally figured out how to make the process less-awful.

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. This document is also currently a complete mess and will probably be split up into separate things at some point.

A commonly-desired feature for a VRChat avatar is the ability to switch materials, so as to change color schemes and the like. This requires a nontrivial amount of setup, and with the standard approach it is difficult to maintain cross-platform compatibility. As a result, creators will usually only set it up on PC, leaving Quest users unable to see these customizations.

Here is my approach to setting up material switching in a way that’s easier to support on multiple platforms simultaneously. This particular method is what I developed for my critter avatar.

Please consult this document if you would like to set up a Unity project for uploading your own instance of the critter avatar.