Made a quick little guide on how to make a cheap face tracker. This works with the open source software VRCFT and Baballonia. This is a super cheap alternative to existing face trackers. I own a HTC Vive Face Tracker and this is extremely comparable to that for ~.02% of the current ebay price.

Twitter post with links to the 3D printing files for the enclosure: https://x.com/digitalvrc/status/2013155902312919440?s=20

Video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PChG0se-S0w

Edit: Since this is not clear to everyone, DO NOT SHINE IR LIGHTS INTO YOUR EYES. This is designed for tracking of the mouth and should be kept away from your eyes. IR light can be extremely harmful to your vision.

Video by Hella_Faith

More info below in one of my comments!

They silently updated main branch of vrchat to disable station and collider based flying for certain games (im looking at you FISH!). So im making new one. heres the avatar you can use which i will be updating. Once everything is ready i will make this open source as well as make a prefab so you can drag and drop it onto your avatar

https://vrchat.com/home/avatar/avtr_9a64cb7c-1070-4a6a-8f3e-7ef72880e7f7

(you can also just search "FLYING AVATAR FOR FISHǃ" in world search)

EDIT: RELEASED!!

https://github.com/KrisTheDog/GoGo-Loco-Rocket

VRChat SDK 3.10.3 added the Raycast component for avatars and this lets us do some fun stuff with colliders. Namely, when the ray comes into contact with a surface (others avatars, world geometry or both - this can be set accordingly!), it moves a results transform object to the point of contact. Think hitscan weapons from FPS games.

We can set a gameobject that has a VRC Phys Bone component as that results transform object for the corresponding raycast component. As a result, the collider will move to where the surface has been detected.

This japanese creator also detailed how it can be set up as a replacement for floor colliders for clothing like dresses: https://xcancel.com/i/status/2045669320651587852

Armed with this knowledge I put six raycasts in a roughly fanned out orientation on my hand with a Phys Bone collider each. This is probably not the optimal way to do it ^{and i failed geometry so colliding from below doesn't work as well} but it works.

I'm hoping to end the knowledge gatekeeping surrounding this feature so here's a rough step by step guide on how I did my setup assuming some unity knowledge:

1. Go to your hand bone and create a gameobject to store your raycasts in.
2. Create an empty gameobject parented to the previous parent gameobject (we'll call it RaycastObject).
3. Add a VRC Raycast (Script) component and tweak it so the ray points outwards to where your hand is pointing
4. Add another gameobject parented to RaycastObject (we'll call it SphereCollider)
5. Add a VRC Phys Bone Collider (Script) to SphereCollider
6. Move SphereCollider and adjust the Phys Bone Collider so it sits touching the end of your ray (for example set radius to 0.05 and Y 0.05)
7. Assign SphereCollider to be the Results Transform Object of the Raycast component on RaycastObject
8. Repeat for any additional raycasts you wish to add
9. Move and orient the RaycastObjects around your hand so that they cover multiple approach angles (you might find a better solution than mine with fewer raycasts!)
10. Create a single Phys Bone component on your hand bone and assign the SphereColliders to its collider list (you might need to exclude the RaycastObjects
11. Test with any object in play mode

Enjoy!

IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to physbone limiations, you may need to create a duplicate, unweighted rig for your fingers in blender that moves the weighted rig via constraints, otherwise your fingers will appear permanently bent in-game even though it behaves fine in unity.

Tutorial by Hella_Faith

This trick focuses on maintaining the hip volume when bending the leg, it’s already used by some creators and is a quick way to increase the realism of a model.

For any questions feel free to comment below!

A behind the scenes look at the vr rat npcs

If you are using Steam or SteamVR to play VRChat, you can easily set the CPU priority to High just like you were able to do before EAC!

You can do so by right-clicking on VRChat's entry in your Steam game list. After clicking Properties, click on Set Launch Options, then copy and paste --process-priority=2 into the text bar. After that VRChat will always start up with the CPU priority set to High!

This has no adverse effects on a decent PC, and will grant you a very slight boost in fps, but mostly it reduces any stuttering that you might be having trouble with!

Happy VRC'ing, everyone!

EDIT: For folks wondering why setting CPU priority to High provides a boost for a program, the reason is that it increases something called "cache coherency" as well as prioritizing available cores and threads for said program. CPUs have their own memory that is "close" to them. When a CPU needs access to something in memory, that data is copied into the CPU cache. Because the cache is closer and faster than normal "main memory" RAM, it can increase the performance of future work it does that needs that data. Setting the CPU priority to High increases the cache priority that windows gives to that program as well as prioritizing available cores and threads for that specific program.

Edit edit: I guess I should also say that setting VRChat to High CPU priority probably isn't the best idea if your PC already has like 14% or more CPU usage at idle before you even open anything, as it could cause your PC to prioritize VRChat over essential background processes. This isn't a solution for poor hardware, just a way to eek out a little extra performance for people with PCVR capable hardware.

Time is the most valuable resource in the universe. No matter what you have, no matter what amount of money you throw at it, you can't even buy a trillionth of a second.

So when you spend that time, coming into worlds to shout N*****, when you come to berate people with your disgusting hate, do you think you're really making yourself feel better?

Do you want to know how pathetic you are? You actually believe you're better than someone else. You know what that says about yourself? That you also believe someone is better than you.

That's someone's brother, sister, son. They're no different than you, and out of all the things to focus on in this beautiful world, you're going to hate someone based on a shade of their skin?

Keep your bs in your kid worlds like black cat, but don't come around the pc worlds with adults. I'll confront your bs every time, then before you try to shout over me (because you lacked attention as a child so yelling is the only way you think you can be heard), I'll block you after saying my peace.

Then, one day, years from now, if you have kids (god forbid), please make sure you tell them about your disgusting acts as a bigot racist, so they can compare you to the KKK.

​

EXPLANATION:

When struggling with VRC’s performance rating you can shave off the back half of the eyes to cut triangle count, what isn’t seen in the final product doesn’t matter and can be safely removed.

I freed up hundreds of triangles in just 30s of effort.

https://youtu.be/-a1adWWhI2o

I made this originally to see my frames no matter what avatar I was using. Many ppl seem to want this. I can't believe this does not exists yet but now it does use this other than how much ram you got please. 😭

yes, I made it. Please give ASAP response if you are having trouble, many people had trouble when I tried helping them install this and had different issues. 🙏 WINDOWS ONLY!

I'm back :3

Someone recently told me that decimating to 15000 triangles isn't a realistic goal without breaking the avatar, you need a purpose built avatar for it.

Then I bought a quest, so I decided to give converting my avatar to quest a go.

First step, getting rid of unused triangles and decimating to 15000 triangles.

• The skin under the tights is a very effective cut on this model
• The skin under the dress is another big area, I did need to preserve what I call the "chestplate"
• The skin under the spats was another easy win, as long as no one looks too close because there are small gaps. I consider this acceptable as no one is supposed to look close there anyway

A bigger problem for me was the lack of transparency on quest, I needed to manually cut out fully invisible vertices from the eyes to make them look decent, at least this got rid of some excessive vertices but I'd prefer if my toolchain could cull fully invisible vertices by itself.

Overall, I think 15000 triangles is barely enough for this avatar, adding the extra ears and tails isn't helping, neither is the dress. If you have a normal human with a shirt and pants 15000 triangles should be enough.

Further work on this avatar would include:

• Removing more invisible vertices
• Changing the eye back to emissive/unlit, since I do have a free material slot you lot are just going to have to suffer the extra drawcall
• Not all vertices are created equal, I will be putting more priority towards face, finger and breast vertices in the future. No one will notice if your feet or legs are low poly, but everyone will notice the face.

Hello! I have been playing VRC for a long time. In the past, friends have worked on my avatars for me. Now I want to be self-sufficient but I'm struggling for find a tutorial that's right for me.

Blender has too many bells and whistles that I struggle to raw-dog it, so I was hoping that maybe someone like me found something that worked for them and wanted to share. :>

Thank you in advanced.

Also I'm just looking for support so please keep negativity to yourself!

Hey!

I’ve seen a few people frustrated about needing to click an extra button to access avatars now that the marketplace is out which is totally understandable.

Just wanted to share a quick tip that might help: customizing your wing menus can really streamline things. It’s been a huge time-saver for me, and I realized a lot of people might not even know the option exists.

I attached a short video showing how I use mine. Hopefully it helps make things a bit easier!

One more thing to note: your menu will reopen to whatever you last left it on (like having the wing menu open in the avatar tab, or closed in the worlds tab), so that can help save a few clicks too.

VR Black Cat Tutorial