VR Avatar Projects

Summer 2023

I took everything I learned about Blender from YouTube to upload my first avatar to VRChat, something I had been wanting to do for years. This ended up being my largest personal project yet, with a total time to completion of about 10 hours. Last fall, I had a friend help me take photogrammetry of my body in a T-pose, but because my body was too big and complex of an object for the app I was using, I had to capture all of my limbs separately and stitch them together like Frankenstein’s monster by manually drawing the new connecting polygons, UV mapping them, and texture painting them with the clone brush to make them as seamless as possible. The stitch lines are on my ankles, chest, and left shoulder, and you can kind of identify them only because of slightly different shades of captured grey on my shirt. After this, I had to procedurally retopologize it down to about 70k polygons with QuadriFlow remesh and bake new textures, which is the recommended number for “Good” performing avatars on VRChat for PC. I also made a separate 5k polygon retopoed model that could be used as an optimized fallback avatar for VRChat on Quest, even though that one has significantly compromised detail, especially in the fingers. At the time, I was using Apple’s Object Capture API, but now that I know about the high quality of the Luma AI app, I’m curious if I could replicate the project in much less time by capturing my whole body at once and exporting it directly in an optimized size, as this took up a significant portion of the project the first time around.

Even though I kind of expected it, the final result was very cursed because I was puppeteering a rigged version of myself with a blank stare and no facial expressions, given I couldn’t rig the face and that would honestly be even more uncanny. I considered adding a blinking animation just because I thought it would be funny to mess with people. It was really fun to show it to my friend group in ICXR and have them analyze all the details as I got to explain the process behind it. 

I also took this opportunity to use this avatar as my first ever BoneLab mod. This was also something I had also been wanting to do since the game came out, as it was designed with an SDK and modding in mind. Because both VRChat and BoneLab use the Unity standard humanoid rig, it wasn’t that much effort to export it with the correct parameters for the game with the SDK. This result was even cooler because the game automatically adds gun holsters to your avatar so I got to see him kitted out, and it was easy to take 3rd-person screenshots by simply pausing the game. 

I am now experimenting with making custom non-cursed avatars that I identify with by buying stuff on booth.pm and retexturing and adding custom components to a VRoid avatar. It has been great to make some friends in ICXR who are skilled at avatar creation and get help from them. I am very excited to see how they turn out even though I won’t truly be able to see how they feel until my full body trackers finally ship.