Pixel Yinglets for VRChat

MAIN DOWNLOAD (all that's needed for a PC upload is here):

OLD VERSIONS (for posterity + placeholder Quest package):

CHANGELOG:

06/02/2025

PIXEL YINGLETS .981

Feature additions:

- Added finger colliders! Grab & index finger positions are still locked to controller. VRCFury plugin is now a prerequisite for installation.

Bugfixes:

- Fallback shaders are now set correctly in default file.
- Glasses should now be transparent and display appropriate cubemap reflections in worlds where it's set properly.

06/29/2024

PIXEL YINGLETS .98 (RC1)

Feature additions:

- Added toggleable clothing! The toggle list is currently a set of outfits; toggleable individual items will appear in a future patch.
- Added toggleable short hair style!
- Added first-person snout (toggleable in Other Features)!
- Added puppetable tail!
- Added ingame saturation/brightness sliders to the body texture modifier!
- Added ingame hue/saturation/brightness sliders to the clothing texture modifier!

Mesh additions:

- Added shirt!
- Added skirt!
- Added shorts!
- Added dress!
- Added underwear (low and high-cut)!
- Added glasses!
- Added short hair style!

All added meshes deform to body mesh blendshapes. Shirt UVs are atlased for easy pattern application.

Mesh changes:

- Remodeled hands and feet. Fingers now have fully articulated knuckles, and fingerpads now wrap around to base of claw (as seen in later Out-of-Placers pages).
- Remodeled forearms and legs to no longer be rectangular in profile.
- Remodeled calf/thigh sections of legs to be more shapely.
- Remodeled tip of snout to have polygonal nostrils, visible from the sides and front.
- Remodeled ears to have signature concave yinglet shape (adjustable as described in Blendshape Tweaks).
- Remodeled whiskers to taper to points at their ends.

Texture changes:

- Body texture is now its own 512x512 diffuse texture with new UVs.
- Body texture has been almost completely redrawn.
- Hair and credits are now separated into a 512x512 diffuse texture with new UVs.
- Clothing uses its own 1024x1024 texture set.
- Clothing and body materials use alpha texture maps that cycle between UV positions in outfit swaps.
- Tailpoof now uses alpha texture toggle method.
- Added Gumroad URL to credits page.
- .kra texture files are now included. Due to transparency mask features, Krita (a free program) is now the recommended method of doing bucket-fill texture color changes. However:
- A .spp file is also now included! It's basic for now, but a more robust version will be included in .99.

Animation changes:

- Ears and whiskers now rotate based on facial expressions. Whisker movements are tied to eye/brow expressions, ear movements are tied to mouth expressions.
- Right-hand fingergun now triggers Sad eyebrows/mouth state.
- Changed sitting height on Desktop mode to line up with the seats in the (...I just realized, now changed) VRChat Home world

Blendshape changes:

- Mouth movevents now create subtle changes in the topology on the top of the snout.
- Ear Shape now blends between the two common Val Salian ear shape types.
- Clothing includes blendshapes that compress inside the body when not used.

Armature changes:

- Ears and whiskers are now parented to singular physbone roots.
- Tail0 bone has now been added, for puppeteering.
- Tweaked weightpaints, uh, basically everywhere.

Known issues:

HIGH-PRIORITY: (for a hotfix or 0.981)
- Shorts don't blend well with Belly Size at the moment.
- Still some clipping issues with the front of the skirt/dress.
- Body alpha mask is too aggressive on lower belly in certain situations.
- Default state needs to be with clothes on, since calibrating FBT with them on is mildly horrifying.
- Materials need to be condensed into fewer slots.
- Substance Painter file needs proper layers with effective labeling.
- Documentation still needs updating.
- Marketing package still needs to be made.

LOW-PRIORITY: (for 0.99 or later)
- Thought I'd be clever by repositioning it, but fly of shorts is actually, uh, completely unreachable using yinglet arms. Will move to center of crotch in next update.
- Skirt/dress could probably use a toggleable ruffly lower tier and/or a modesty flap, just to avoid flashing folks.
- Eyewhiskers don't move during the blinking animation. This will be fixed when I change the eyelid mesh in .99.
- Biceps could use another pass for proportions and anatomical accuracy.
- Tail has a hardcoded curve and needs to be more directly driven by physbones. Floor collider for tail is necessary for proper apto.
- Parameters are running fairly close to memory limit. Considering supplying alternate Parameters file to free up enough memory for people to enable add-ons (GoGoLoco, VRCFury), since I don't expect color shifting to be a priority if you've bought the model.
- Quest version still needs updating.
- Lower-poly versions of the mesh need to be preserved as an alternative Unity package.
- Model needs toggleable long luxurious eyelashes.

Development notes:

- In creating this update I have learned a lot about proper workflow for texture creation. So .98 had me redrawing the main texture, but .99 is going to have me redrawing it a second time to be conformant to that workflow, and to make the Substance Painter file more robust.
- I worked way too much during this! I didn't suffer any major health effects, but the stress from what I now recognize as crunch did give me some Eternal Darkness sanity-meter effects at one point, and the stress made it difficult to enjoy life outside of work on top of that. Future updates will be approached at a more leisurely pace. This is unlikely to affect release dates, since extended work hours seem to often result in work that needs to be redone.
- If you enjoy this avatar, please give this a 5-star rating on Gumroad, it means a lot! <3

05/18/2024

VERSION 0.98 (Beta 2):

Most issues have been fixed. I'll be taking a week-long break and relaxing work on this slightly, but 0.98 proper will not be "done" until the package is definitively polished.

Known issues:

• Avatar needs to start with blendshapes minimized.

• Dress needs a more physics-friendly mesh, and possibly double-sided materials.

• Nostrils need more visible color definition.

• Shader settings are still at Poiyomi defaults! This will be fixed ASAP.

• Clothing weights are still FAR from final.

• Sitting height still needs to be tweaked in Desktop mode.

• Clothing textures need to be given proper pixel-art textures. Clothes need to look nice!

• .kra files need to be properly partitioned out and atlased.

05/11/2024 (happy birthday to me! Some yinglets are born instead of hatched, you know!)

VERSION 0.98 (Beta):

Coming in hot! A more refined version of this will be released within the next few days, but here it is, with all promised features implemented.

Known issues (to be fixed in .98 proper):

• Hair models clip through to the other side of the ear meshes.

• Weighting on the clothes needs to be refined a bit more.

• Lighting needs to be made more stark and distinctive (currently a flat blue Overlay layer, which is not how I usually shade stuff.)

• Some sort of leg rigging issue has resulted in view height needing adjustment. One bone is constrained to itself, that'll be fixed in the next patch.

• Nostrils still aren't visible from the front.

• Mouth needs to be more clearly defined.

• Wrist bone locations need to be adjusted.

03/02/2024

VERSION 0.975: THE "LET'S DIGRESS" HOTFIX

(PC and Quest versions now available!)

Feature additions:

• Customization slider for chin height.

• "Read this first!" page and toggle, which summons a plane containing helpful tips for first-time users.

Geometry tweaks:

• Raised feet slightly to prevent them from clipping into the ground.

• Adjusted shelltooth angle to prevent it from clipping into the lower lip.

UV/texture tweaks:

• Changed credits page to use pixelated fonts. (Fonts are "Retro Pixel Cute Prop" and "Retro Pixel Thick" by TakWolf:

  https://github.com/TakWolf/retro-pixel-font)

• Condensed color legend on texture.

• Added "Read this first!" UI elements to texture. (Will be cleaned up when I expand the texture canvas for clothing.)

• Added a single line of base fur pixels at the top of the eye texture UVs, to prevent bleed in eyes-closed animations.

Armature tweaks:

• Re-weighted feet. Still not ideal, but hands an

  d feet will be retopologized for the next update.

• Constrained feet to plantigrade ankles.

Other tweaks:

• Assigned default values to most properties between 0 and 1.

• Fixed default lid minimizer not firing in eyelid animations.

• Reimplemented ear scaling on Quest.

02/28/2024

VERSION 0.97: THE "LET'S DIGRESS" UPDATE

(While this is currently up for download, a night of testing has made it apparent that some additional fixes are needed! Expect a hotfix in the next day or two -v-;)

Feature additions:

• Radial menus for body characteristic customization:

  • Hue sliders! Body and eyes can be customized independently.

  • Shelltooth length.

  • Snout length.

  • Snout width.

  • Snout roundness.

  • Ear shape.

  • Ear length.

  • Belly size.

  • Hip width.

  • Underfluff density.

• Digitigrade leg armature on PC version, using constraints. Your hip bones should no longer completely dislocate when you crouch! :D

• Front and back fur patterns! In the "Base Fur" layer category in the .psd is a "Patterns" subcategory, with "Front Pattern" and "Back Pattern" subcategories that can be toggled, recolored, and customized as you please.

• Credits page, accessible from the main circle menu! Tell all your friends!

Geometry tweaks:

• Retopologized legs! Now significantly less boxy, and they stick out less far in front of the body (I used Valsalia's "Anatomy of a Yinglet" as reference).

• Retopologized ears. The inner part's concave now!

• Added blendshapes for all the customization sliders.

• Added a bit more volume to the breast size blendshape.

• Tweaked waistline to be more yinglet-y.

UV/texture tweaks:

• Repainted legs and ears.

• Repainted the weird transparent pixels bordering the tops of the hard black sections of the legs.

• Made eyebrow anti-aliasing pixels actual transparency instead of the default fur color.

Armature tweaks:

• Added glasses bone. This and the skirt bones will factor into the next major update.

• Added bones for individual whiskers.

Other tweaks:

• Restored eye sparkles on Quest.

Known issues:

• Ear scaling doesn't work on Quest at the moment. This will be fixed in the next update.

• Feet are not constrained to the right limb. Will be addressed in hotfix.

• Shelltooth intersects with lower lip in some talking animations. Will also be addressed in hotfix.

• Default eyelids don't blend properly with other eyelid shapes. Hotfix coming up!

02/14/2024

0.96: THE "LET'S EXPRESS" UPDATE

Feature additions:

• Radial menu ability to toggle facial expression hand gestures!

• Two new submenus filled with facial expression presets! (The above option must be toggled off to make use of preset faces.)

UV/texture tweaks:

• Eyebrows now no longer show what's behind the model.

• PC version of model now has 2 extra material slots, for eyes and eye sparkles.

• Eyes are now 20% emissive. (Emission color determined by color in pixelyingletbase-improved.png.)

• Eye sparkles are now fullbright (no longer react to shading).

• Quest version no longer has eye sparkles. (Fix coming in later patch.)

Other tweaks:

• Added Quest version with as many compatible updates as possible, alongside instructions to upload Quest version. (I anticipate updating 'em further, considering VRChat now says creating a second project is no longer necessary -- but following the instructions as provided should provide the same result.)

02/07/2024

0.951: THE "SLIGHTLY MORE RELEASABLE" UPDATE

Geometry tweaks:

- Fixed pupil intersecting with Closed Eyes blendshape lower eyelid.

- Added duplicate eyebrows in service of more expressive hand gestures.

- Fixed smiling_lowerlids looking like a pain response.

- Raised lidded eyes by 1 "pixel".

- Deleted stray vertices. (Hope those weren't loadbearing.)

Blendshape tweaks:

- Hooboy, too many to list. Long story short, the range of facial expressions is now on par with my former main model, complete with working skeptical and surprised expressions. The eyelid shapes should transition in a slightly less obvious way, too.

UV/texture tweaks:

- Created PSD with bucket-fillable color layers.

- Adjusted and repainted hand UVs to reduce cross-painted artifacts.

- Set eyebrows to be over transparency in PC version. (This currently has a material assigment issue, and will be fixed in the next upload.)

- Repainted blush and eye sparkles.

Physbone/weight painting tweaks:

- Removed duplicate tail bones.

- Weighted tailpoof to existing tail bones.

- Added physbone colliders to fingertips.

- Adjusted breast weighting and physics. (Still may not be perfect.)

- Set ear physics to be independent to each other. (Will be reflected in expressions in a later patch, exciting!)

- Hair now has gravity.

- Added (unweighted at the moment) mohawk bones and bones for skirt.

- Reduced range of eye movements to prevent pupil from disappearing.

Other tweaks:

- Found out eyebrows were transitioning in periods longer than 0ms; traced the problem to a transition I forgot to reduce timing for. It should work as designed now.

- The manual assumed knowledge of how to install Unity; the first few steps have been tweaked to reflect this.

To do:

- Apply changes to Quest version.

- Create Quest version upload instructions.

- I really need to implement a hue slider and a facial expression submenu. It's after that I can see actually uploading a public version of this!

01/13/2024

0.95: Rig hands properly (Initial Upload)

0.94: Facial expressions (aw yeah, NOW we're cookin)

0.93: Re-animate eyes

0.92: Toggles for optional meshes (hair and tailpuff) + titty blendshape

0.91: Fix eyes + ears

0.9: Physbones on ears, whiskers, hair, tits, and tail

0.81: CREDITS PAGE

0.8: Pixel art texture

0.7: Model mouth and speech visemes

0.6: Animated eyes

0.5: Optional breast blendshapes

0.4: Optional hair and tailpuff

0.3: Fix hands and leg rigging

0.2: Whiskers (I forgot to model them! The yinglet artist's curse)

0.1: Ingame and ambulating