The main purpose of this post is to provide readers with information on how they can upload personal photographs to be used as avatars in virtual reality chatrooms. The authors talk about their previous implementation for avatar creation, which involved different approaches to capture facial features from a face in an image, including eye detection and cropping. The method they settled on involves using OpenCV’s Haar Cascade classifiers for facial landmark localization, followed by the creation of a polygonal mesh from the resulting points.
So,how to add avatars to vrchat?
Download avatars from vrchat.net
To start, you need to download some avatars from vrchat.net. These avatars are in the .obj format, which is a common 3D format supported by many 3D software applications.
Import the obj files into Blender Once you have downloaded some avatars, import them into Blender. You can import them by going to the Import menu, selecting “Wavefront(.obj)” from the filetype list on the left and clicking once more on “Import OBJ” (fig 1).
Export the avatar meshes Once you have your avatars in Blender, select all of them using shift+left click, right click on one of the selected objects, and head over to Mesh -> Combine (fig 2).
Adjusting avatar scale in Unity Finally, go to Edit -> Transform Tools -> Transform Properties (fig 3) and change the Scale parameter there. I found that 0.0005 works well for most avatars. A scale of 1 will result in very large avatars, while a scale of 0 will only display the primitive object containing the mesh. You can now go ahead and move your avatars into Unity, where you can use them as usual. The first thing you’ll want to do is create an empty game object called “Avatar Manager” (fig 4) which you will then need to attach the avatar meshes to.
Now that you have your avatar meshes in Unity, you’ll need to create an Avatar script. This script will take care of loading the avatars and assigning them to the appropriate players in the game.
Upload the avatar to your computer
To upload an avatar to your computer, you can use any web browser. You’ll need to access the URL https://vrchat.com/avatar/upload , append your Oculus ID (also known as oculus handle) to the end of the URL and hit enter. VR chat allows each user to upload a single avatar image that is then displayed to other users in the same chatroom. The avatars are stored on vrchat.com and can be accessed via https://vrchat.com/avatar/<oculus_id> .In order to make many users see your avatar, you’ll need multiple copies of it. I’d recommend putting a different instance of it in each corner of the virtual world. You can also make these avatars semi-transparent to reduce the impact they have on performance.
Move the file into a folder for VRChat
In order to make your avatar available in VRChat, you’ll need to place the file into a specific folder. This folder can be found by going to vrchat.com, finding a chatroom with the same number as the one displayed in Unity (usually #0000 or #0001 ), and then right clicking on your name there and selecting ‘Copy Avatar URL’ (fig 5) .
Open up VRChat and go to “Edit Avatar”
Once you have your avatar image stored on your computer, open up VRChat and go to the “Edit Avatar” menu. Click on the “Upload” button and select the file that you just saved. You can now close VRChat and reopen it in order to see your new avatar.
Congratulations, you’ve now created a custom avatar for VRChat!
So, how to add avatars to vrchat? I hope this article will help you answer that question. You can download avatars from vrchat.net, import them into Blender, export the avatar meshes, adjust the scale in Unity and finally upload the file to your computer. Then you can move it into a folder for VRChat.
