VR Chat - Making an Avatar (My experience)

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to start making my own vr chat avatar. I have enough knowledge to use the programs needed to get a sculpt done and textured. I decided to try my hand at it and let someone else handle the rigging part of it. In a way I am surprised more people don't do this, divide the work out and team up with someone else who is good at at part you are not.

I had a basic idea of making a wolf, drew up a design and sort of went from there. Granted the design changed as I started sculpting so I sort of let my hands interpret what I had in my head.

I knew I wanted a wolf but wasn't sure if I wanted to go for a more Anthro look, cartoon or just realistic. During this stage I was flip flopping what I wanted so I changed things around a lot. Big reason this took me longer than it should. So try to get good concept art and stick to it to avoid wasting time like I did. I started doing all my basic shapes in Zbrush first since it is the program of choice when it comes to sculpting.

Took the arms off and started again. Was really happy with the legs but the character was a mix of realistic and not and wasn't sure if that was what I wanted. I wanted to keep the details simple and not overcomplicate things for my first sculpt. I did make the head, torso, arms and legs in separate layers. This way I had more control with my sculpt and could remove pieces with ease if I wanted to sculpt something completely different. I must of re done the arms about 5 times before I settled on something I was happy with.

Was getting closer to the look I wanted here. I wanted the larger feet, chunky legs and bigger neck fluff. I wasn't sure if keeping the detail in the neck was a good idea. I was worried with the character moving around in VR it would bend the texture weird so I took it out soon after. It did look cool as a static design.

Kept sculpting until I was happier with the design and started on the jaw set. Went with a cartoon look since a lot of the models I see in VR chat have really creepy sharp teeth. So I decided to imitate a look I usually draw in my art. Created a top and bottom that could interlock with each other enough so it wouldn't look too odd in vr chat. I kept the upper and lower jaw set separate along with the eyes to make it easier to rig later on.

After removing the neck fur and simplifying a lot of the rig in areas I was much happier with it. Gave it fun hair and chest poof. Decided it needed it on the elbows and back of legs as well. Was still unsure about the feet which I later thinned out in the back and added claws and paw pads.

As for the eyes I kept flip flopping on what I wanted to do. In VR you can allow the eyes to track you which is really cool. But you can also create a sort of follow me eye in the same manner you would in a suit. Both methods work extremely well. I thought I was going to go with this look until last minute when I decided to change it. I do plan to make one using this method at a later date as it works extremely well.

Feet, claws and hands were now detailed. He was getting ready for texturing. But before I could do that I went to work on the bottoms of the feet to provide some cute paw pads.

To be able to texture the avatar I wanted to do so in a program called "Substance Painter". VR chat does have a limit on how dense you can have your model so I needed to re-topo the model to create both a low and high poly model. My goal was to create a normal map for substance painter. So you might be asking yourself what is a normal map? A normal map is something that has been used by gaming companies for ages to fool you into thinking the model is higher poly that it is. By creating a low poly and high poly it creates a mesh like texture from the high poly and adds it onto the low poly. So when you texture the character it looks like it holds much higher detail than a lower non normal mapped model would, but with less polys. I don't blame you if you feel lost with this, best video to explain what I did would be this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SlWmk6c9i0 

I wanted to re topologize my high poly model to create a low poly model. I duplicated the model and used a plug in called "SoMuchZbrush" which can be seen here:

http://www.somuchmonsters.com 

This plug-in was suggested by a twitter user and I love it. You paint your model white, draw black lines where loops should go to create better topology and give the plug-in parameters on the amount of polys you want. The video on the website shows how the plug-in works. Made my life a whole lot easier and definitely worth the $25.

Once I started doing the re-topo the model started to change and then I did it a few more times until I had it down to around 22k polys. The high poly model was about half a million polys.

Once I had both low and high poly I was able to take the model into substance painter and start the texturing process.

Eyes and teeth were exported over separately so I could paint them without an issue. All the models would be put together in Blender.

Once the textures were ready I would take them into blender and would test them out. See if I wanted to change things around and then would continue working on it on substance painter.

Increased the iris and pupil size along with painting the tongue. Still needed to clean up the texture before calling it done.

Went back and finished the paw pads. Added some highlights in areas to make them less "flat".

As of last night I finished texturing my first VR chat avatar and he is now ready to be rigged. As mentioned above a friend of mine will be taking over the next part.

Overall I loved the experience and definitely suggest trying to make one if you like to sculpt.

Programs used:

ZBrush (main sculpting)

MeshMixer (use it to combine areas of the model)

Substance Painter (Texturing)

Blender (doing final set up and seeing how everything looks together)

This project took me 2 weeks to create after work. I had zero knowledge on how to use Substance painter so that ate up some time along with the basics of Blender (youtube tutorials saved my life). So if you have both of those under your belt you will be able to make one faster. I already know I can make the next character in half the time as I will know what to do well in advance.

As for future avatars, stay tuned I will be making a whole post about that, a new VR chat tier and how to purchase future models.