VRChat Experience 7 Intro and how to make your own

Hey, how are you all doing? Here's a breakdown of the lil parody intro I made + some assets/inspiration you can find useful.

Quick disclaimer: If you haven't seen VRChat Experience 7 yet - this post will spoil the intro. Go watch it first! 

 Pic unrelated, it's just here to push the spoilers a bit lower on your screen.

The new VRChat video features a parody of Trigun (1998) opening.

You can watch the original here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff00h746Fn0

I loved that show as a kid and I've been eager to do some sort of a tribute for over 10 years now. In fact, many years ago, I began working on CSGO trigun parody after Valve added the infamous R8 revolver. I didn't get much of it done back then and I've been tempted to properly finish for a while. As you can see, I never got to finish the CSGO version but at least I got to do it from scratch a decade later! At the end of the day I'm happy and I hope you enjoyed it too.

I guess before breaking it down bit by bit, it'd make sense to mention that the cover of the Trigun's opening theme was done by Moo Chan. If not for her, this video would've been delayed by weeks or even months, due to me having difficulties approaching the studio that made Trigun and other related stuff.

Make sure to leave a like and comment on her video!

The very first shot was a lot of fun to make! It's actually me holding a real life prop gun of Enter the Gungeon's final weapon "Gun That Can Kill the Past".

ETG gun has been a reoccurring bit on the channel for many years but it hasn't appeared much in recent years, due to me not streaming as much, so it was a nice reason to bring it out haha.

Here's what the unedited photo off my phone looks like (left image) 

My roommate Fundy isn't back in Vegas yet and my local friends got all sick, so I kind of had to get the shot done myself.

(we got a spare room now, so roommate applications are open btw hehe)

I tried to point it in a different ways but due to me not being able to see my phone screen, I completely missed that the gun wasn't actually fully in frame, so I had to draw-in the very tip of it in post. (right image)

The retro-ish look was achievement by messing with colors, halation effects, bloom settings, adding blur and then sharpening the whole image + some other generic stuff.

It can be achieved by using native effects but Red Giant's looks + Deep Glow plugins saved a lot of time, mostly with getting that natural glow effect.

Originally I wanted to go all in on retro analog/VHS look but figured it'd be too much. So I chose to just stick to coloring and adding extra little retro details instead.

Here's the next shot, both original and my version, side by side.

Let's run it step by step! First I took the original shot from credit-less version of the opening, froze the frame and removed Vash from it in Photoshop, using standard adobe tools and no third-party plugins.

Then I got on VRChat and "danced" in front of a camera. Huge thanks to Deidris for helping with the avatar on a short notice btw!!

I recorded it sideways to retain more details, as keying cyan hair on green background sucks lol. Overall I think I cut it out pretty well.

I then color matched it with background.

I will be honest, I'm not good at color grading but I can teach you a trick for colormatching greenscreen footage. You change program view mode from RGB to individual Red / Green / Blue color channels only and adjust their levels until the image begins to blend in. It's not perfect but it's the basics of it and you just gotta experiment with it.

From left to right - RED, GREEN and BLUE channels. Note how it seems to blend in without any color.

I then added another layer and made the upper part of it much darker to make it more stylistic. Then I added .png of glasses.

Yeah, the glasses are added in post. I figured it'd be easier to do it this way than mess with unity shaders and other related model making headache. It took a bit to make it look convincing enough but it got the job done pretty well!

It's also technically tracked sideways, since the footage itself was sideways lol.

For the haze scene I created a basic particle simulation using Red Giant's unoptimized-as-fuck plugin.

I then generated this turbulent noise map with some pretty basic settings.

Added mask to it and made it move from right to left within the mask.

The combination of the particle system and the turbulent noise setup turned out pretty good in my opinion!

 The next shot took a bit to setup, primarily because I wasn't sure how I'm gonna do that part in the first place.

Initially I tried to cut out Vash from the original footage frame by frame but after 10 frames and unsatisfactory results I kinda gave up on that idea.

I tried to use Adobe's object removal but it still required a lot of time and here's what it looked like but with x16 playback speed instead of real time.

The results weren't matching my expectations either, so I gave up on both ideas and after spending hours trying to cut the guy out, I noticed that the hallway pattern repeats itself a lot, which brought me an idea...

I was gonna do the transparent openings for windows and place bullet holes one by one but then I figured that adding the stupid greenscreen with guns would be funnier and take way less time, that I could spend on something else instead.

The next shot was pretty fun to make! First I froze the frame and cleaned it up.

Then I separated the books from the background and added the silly YUGO inside joke on the wall because I like making little references in my videos.

When I began working on the opening, I immediately thought of doing the bit about typing on my laptop that has 2 holes in it, so when I reached that segment, I just took a photo of it and tossed it in.

The greenscreen of me typing is sideways as well. Except it was less for resolution reasons and more because I couldn't be bothered setting up the in-game camera again.

The orange is just animated in, here's what it looks like.

Originally I was gonna record myself rolling around but if you watched my VRChat Annoying Orange video you might remember that the way the avatar works on your end is very different vs how other people see you. The issue is that it also applies to cameras, so I was just flying all over the place from my POV. Fortunately our pal Ti was around at that time, so I dragged them out of a game of volleyball to take this awesome picture.

We did try to record it rolling naturally at first but the face position would be too inconsistent, so I went with static image instead.

The books I'm carrying in were cut out from the original footage and after cleaning it up, I just animated it alongside of me running in place with that old scuffed model lol.

The next shot was pretty easy to make, just took a while.

I simply took out the frames with visible background and put them together. A bit of pain in the ass, due to the movement of Vash's clothes. I had to take out tons of little pieces and aligning them pixel by pixel, to reconstruct the background as much as possible.

The logos were pretty fun to make, the outline and kerning was annoying because it spells TOPGUN instead of TRIGUN. It took a while to achieve the look that didn't seem off to me. It's hard to explain but if you try to do it yourself - you will probably see what I mean.

The animation is pretty simple, I just made the letters appear 1 by 1 with high brightness.

Combined with added layer styles, additional effects and post processing this was the result.

The wind from the following scene was done in a similar way as the haze from the second scene. Except I just messed more with the settings + added wave warp effect to make it feel like a wind, rather than California's infamous smog.

That's it by the most part, there might be some bits I missed but if there's something I didn't mention, it's probably because I used the same method, as for something else I already explained in this post. That being said, if you have any questions - feel free to ask them in our discord! (make sure to link your patreon to your discord account).

I hope you find this stuff helpful! If you have any feedback - please let me know. I will make a dedicated patreon post in the upcoming days. I structured a portion of it but I want to make sure I don't miss anything that I wanted to share with you. I will have some previews and updates in that post as well, so stay tuned! :]

Thank you for your support, it means a lot right now!!