Dex 🔞

just for documenting the process on this, since it took a bit more time than it should have done

all of the "player 2" skins as i call them were already set up, besides one that needs checking for why it's broken - that missing one is why the smash logo is a bit offcentre since i ended up cropping out the extra space before adding the text

desktop mode made a lot more sense for lining stuff up (given i could play a canned animation for the hands in this case), but it does create some limitations that got a bit annoying

initially, wanted to see what would happen trying VRCLens with VRC's multi-layer feature
to save you some time if you want to try this, it doesn't work; if you want to use vrclens then use one of vrclens's bluescreen/greenscreen options instead.
the background layer had the view from VRC's camera, and the player layer had the full VRCLens layer including the background, so i guess vrclens just renders to a texture in front of the main camera

and also because you still take photos through vrc's camera, this meant a lot of menu hopping since on desktop you can't have a radial menu and the camera open at the same time, so i'd have to set the player 2 skin, start the clap animation¹, open quick menu, open multi-layer camera, take shot, move, back out of all menus, set the player 2 skin, start the clap animation again, etc.

so take 2, with vrchat's default camera, and i figured out a ridiculously simpler way of doing it
i've created dashboards for controlling my avatar in TouchOSC before - and conveniently, TouchOSC on my laptop was still connected to the steam deck, which is how i pretty much always run desktop mode VRC. made a very simple dashboard of unlabelled buttons that just send an OSC message to /avatar/parameters/Player2 with different values.

start clap animation, open multi-layer camera, take shot
hit next button on dashboard on laptop, move with camera open and still clapping, take shot

done very quickly, reminding myself about some of touchosc's quirks was probably the longest part

1. i forget how it is with the default clap, but with gogoloco's clap it only works while its option is selected in the radial menu (persisting if the radial is dismissed by opening the quick menu)

built myself a little TouchOSC dashboard to do a few things in VRChat that would otherwise require a lot of menuing and/or fucking around with animation controllers

in this case, a weighted randomization of which tail animation I want to play, as well as helpful status messages

I don't think it's in a state of being publicly releasable, but it's nice going from having 0 knowledge of a programming language yesterday (in this case lua) to knowing just enough to do the things i want to do

a nice bank holiday project

(video here of some of the other options + tail changes in action)