Dex 🔞

Hello! It's funny you ask this now, because I'm on Cohost taking a break from hyperfixating on my second 3D avatar for use in social VR (including VRC and Resonite). I'll walk you through all the steps I've observed from what I've done so far -- keep in mind that I'm very far from knowing everything, but I do share your stance on external tools doing heavy lifting. It's much more satisfying to know you've glooped your Scrumblo Scrimbly from thin air, no?

I'll be trying to keep the workflow as loose as possible, so you can create whatever you'd like. I will, however, be linking to videos that are specifically about creating one model -- I'd recommend gleaning whatever you can from each and applying them to your own work.

If this helped, feel free to share with other folks if they ask how you made your awesome avatar to save yourself the trouble of typing out something like this on your own!

Full list, including ramblings (and dropdown menus, for ease of reading) in the Read More.

We wrote a post on the uploading to VRChat bit, although it is now in need of an update with VRC switching to Unity 2022.
(Currently it seems to be struggling with updates from Macs on 2022, have not tried Linux, but Windows works)

But yes, Resonite is simultaneously a lot simpler and more fiddly. All you technically need is the FBX (assuming a well structured armature) - you drag it in, specify it's an avatar, and then use the Avatar Creator tool to assign the head and hands location.

However, if e.g. your materials aren't included in the FBX, what then follows is trying to drag and drop textures that appear as objects in a 3D space around you into specific parts of a window that's also a 2D plane in a 3D world.
For people used to the workflow, I'm sure it can be faster - but I would only recommend even trying either in VR or on a large desktop screen with a proper mouse available.
It's really hard to see things on laptops (or worse, on Steam Deck), and some trackpads just cause problems with dragging and dropping.

(It is possible I've missed something of course, but I so rarely see friends in Resonite vs VRC so have not put as much effort into learning the quirks)

One of the reasons I think social VR has a big future is: tech companies hate it, view it as a failure, want it dead dead. They keep pivoting to games and office stuff, which doesn’t stick because there is no mass adoption for either. But the social VR stuff keeps growing. Not rapidly, but steadily. EAC was a hiccup, people kept using VRchat and it bounced back bigger. I think the nature of VRChat and NEOs/Resonite specifically made this happen.

When something keeps going this long even in the face of corporate indifference and hostility that means there’s passion for it. Getting deeper into VR necessarily means getting deeper into the guts of confusing software. But every step you master, every new little bit of customization, every time you put a little digital piece of yourself into the virtual world, you not only stand out more, but learn the way tech actually works on a level more fundamental than making something in say, secondlife or furcadia.

I know what an animator in unity is now thanks to customizing vr chat avatars. I know what weight painting is because of learning things about blender from my friends. I know what ‘flipping a normal’ means and why that makes level design easier for similar reasons.

Even the hardware side of things! While slime VR as a company has had some hiccups there is now a template for open source motion tracking that works pretty damn good. You can use it with spare switch controllers. Or build your own. Tech weirdos are making huge strides with eye tracking tech that seems uninteresting to corporate types except at the very highest end of hardware.

The biggest missing piece of the puzzle right now are headsets and controllers. The one thing we don’t have a solid open alternative too…but I can’t help but feel like one little push would get us there. IR emitters, IR sensors, and accelerometers are all cheap and known tech. Same with LCDs.

I mean…nothing is guaranteed . The future is unknown. I could be wrong about all of this but…I would have never believed I could do what I do now when I started using vrc, and I think that’s true for a lot of people. Social VR is sticking around because it’s for the weirdos, and the weirdos build things.

It was July 2022 when we finally worked up the courage to join in with US VRChat meets.

In the time since, we've learned about texture editing (without paying for Substance Painter), from starting with a well labelled PSD in the GNU Image Manipulation Program, to learning how to export and label a UV map when one isn't provided, and more and more about vector illustration and ideal export workflows.

We've learned so much about Unity; going from truly struggling at adding the most basic of toggles to a ridiculous number of submenus on my main avatar (while still keeping VRChat's performance indicator at medium).
(Moving away from Unity definitely would be nice, although Resonite's in-world editor also presents a lot of its own challenges)

We've learned more about shaders and materials.
More about Git - how else are you going to even attempt to retrieve the version of an effect that only existed at 4am on one day of Furality before you tweaked it to something else?
More about OBS and Steam VR overlays - sometimes you want to record something while having a script up
More about OSC for a personal dashboard and easier randomization than trying to deal with Unity animators.
More about the principles of photography.
More about automation - because we needed some way of processing the hundreds of photos we take.
And if someone needs help, we'll share what we know.

We've seen creativity be pushed to its limits over and over again - from a friend's party trick of transforming into another friend at the boop of a snoot, to filling a room with Goop at a moments notice, to the public avatar we saw this morning which included the entire tram sequence from Half-Life 1.
The lead programmer of Resonite is right at this moment at BLFC, 3D scanning things and quickly importing them into Resonite.

I remember the whiplash I felt the day of Furality Sylva's closing ceremonies - which was also the day of the Apple Vision Pro WWDC keynote.
That Apple's solution for socializing with people who are not physically present (at least, the only one presented so far) is a fucking video wall, when I had spent ~3AM to ~5AM that morning snuggled up with (primarily) so many Good Girls thousands of miles away.

And so yeah, I think it's safe to say that Big Corporations do not fucking get it - and that as long as there are still furries (especially therians) that need species euphoria, there will always be a place for social VR, and always a place to learn and grow because of it.

i still feel like this is what happens when boundless, limitless creativity meets zero documentation

i tried again last night to import the yinglet model
same error where it doesn't recognise the legs
and the error message only gives the troubleshooting tip "drag and drop this error to a file browser, then post it on the discord"
did as i was told (after figuring out had to hit the plus button to save the text file), joined the discord just for that, no idea if i posted it in the right place

i ran into the same issue with some models in unity for VRC, but at least there i knew searching would find the answer (inspect the FBX > rig > check it's set to humanoid, hit configure > assign bones to their correct location > hit done)

here the best i could do is take a chance looking for old neos documentation and hope that it’s still broadly applicable

and what gets me is that this error message in itself feels teachable, “if you want to try fixing this yourself, look at the ExampleComponent in AvatarHierarchyLocation". At least it'd be a very specific thing to search for or query if additional help is needed.

let's be clear, this one is a me problem, it should not happen if the base used more standard bone names - i just think there are better fixes than this

but i also got into a situation last night where i found out ctrl+clicking on a floating element in desktop mode would focus the camera on it (while trying to figure out how to right click drag on a crap laptop touchpad)
and hey, that's very neat for working on stuff on desktop. a nice canvas
except i could not figure how to get out of this mode
the settings menu does not seem to have keyboard shortcuts or the ability to remap them
ended up respawning

and i know the fix for some is to build collaboratively in a way other platforms don't allow for
but eh. for every WIP unity or VRChat screenshot i've posted here, you do not want to know how many times i've listened to scarlet fire or the furality sylva test video trying to tweak audio based shader settings
i'm not exposing other people to that.

again, i conceptually like resonite. i've been looking up some old neos tutorials now that i have reason to, and the stuff you can do in-engine is incredible - like for example being able to generate ice and quicksand physics on a surface with just a texture of your choice and some components to assign material and physics properties based on colour of the texture.
but it also feels like there's a lot of hurdles to jump over just to get started
(and also for better or worse, if i'm doing something in unity, i like doing that on my mac and testing on deck, while the best i can do here is remote play)

not at any single point does any character resleeve into a public aeromorph avatar and think "ah, gender"

this got a like so I brought it back, but i also saw a friend have some Feelings when they tried on the same avatar earlier today so it's also timely and relevant :>

you can always tell a dude that's never actually been in social VR made a thing because they assume everyone would just stick to realistic human avatars. if your thing assumes the VR landscape isn't full of furries and weirder shapes, everyone can see you don't even go there

Snow Crash gets a pass because VR barely existed back then, and as I recall even that still was like "yeah some people are just dragons in here, but we're not talking to them right now"

"people want to look like [their IRL bodies] in VR"

even among people that favour human avatars, it's always anime girls, memes, people from popular culture, or some combination of these (the intentionally glitchy miles o'brien someone we know sometimes uses)

--

i listen to a tech (plus other things) podcast hosted by two cis guys. to our knowledge, neither is a furry, and neither has ever questioned their gender identity. they've got themselves quest pros so they can compare working in it via horizon workrooms(?) to how working in vision pro will be when that comes out.
the most boring platform that does not allow for anything outside of humanity to exist - and people that have shown themselves willing to accept the defaults. if that opening statement were in any way true, it feels like it would apply here

and still, one of them decides that it's too uncanny seeing glimpses of something that looks like he does in virtual mirrors, and so turns most options (other than skin tone) to the opposite of anything he would normally pick

--

people want to look like themselves, sure
what bad VR stories fail to recognize is that people want to look like the version of themselves in their heart and soul - especially for all the critters we know
and that's not remotely the same thing as the flesh prison