Welcome back again, I am here to inform you about creating custom avatar using Vrchat SDK. This is my last article that I’d like to share with you and for this recent articles, we need 3 articles. And the first part is how to create and import avatar on vrchat and the second one is how we can setup avatar on vrchat, and the third is how to animate avatar with vrchat. For the first one, this is actually my most published article in Medium although it doesn’t have much view yet. But for our second part which is setting up avatar on Vrchat has more than 10k views already while I haven’t publish it on Medium. So without further ado, let’s start with this first part.

So today, we will focus on how to create custom avatar because creating one is very easy and doesn’t require any knowledge of modeling or texturing. We only need blender for this tutorial or any 3D software that can export to Blend4Web. But I will use Blender for this tutorial so it’s easier for you guys to follow along and of course, we don’t need any knowledge on modeling or texturing at all.

What is Vrchat SDK?

For those of you who are new to Vrchat, I will give a little bit of information about it first. Vrchat is an online social waiting room where people can chat with each other or play some mini games together. To make this happen, Vrchat has created SDK for us to integrate our own 3D avatar into the game. And for this tutorial, all we need is to download and import our own assets into Vrchat engine so that everyone can see your avatar when they join in the room you created. So let’s get started!

Tips for creating an awesome avatar in Vrchat SDK

Before we import our own assets into Vrchat, there are a few things that we have to take care of first. And the very first thing is Frame Rate(FPS) and this is actually one of the most important factor because if your avatar stuttering or moving too fast you definitely don’t want it. In order to get a proper frame rate, I suggest you to make your Avatar with 64×64 pixels texture. And if you want to add more detail on it, I encourage you to add normal map and specular map. But make sure they are small enough because we don’t need too much detail for avatars.

How to use vrchat sdk

Now that you know all of this, let’s get started on how to create our own avatar for vrchat engine. There are 2 ways to do it, either using blender or using Blender (sometimes called B4W) which is inside Vrchat SDK itself. But of course we will use the first one because creating your own avatar in blender is much easier because you only need to focus on your own artwork then just export it into B4W. So for the first part, I will show you how to create our own avatar in blender and after that, we can head towards importing it into B4W engine.

Importing Assets into Vrchat SDK

Now, we will begin the first part which is how to create and import custom avatar on Vrchat SDK. We already know that for this task, we only need blender as our 3D software and why I said so is because Blender has a plugin which allows us to export directly into B4W format without any hassle. So, let’s begin with the first step, open your Blender and delete all default cube because we will import our own avatar.

Conclusion

So now we know all about creating custom avatar on vrchat and importing it into blender. In the next tutorial, we will show you how to create 3D Avatar in Blender and import it into Vrchat SDK so stay tuned!