– New Avatar –
This year’s Halloween avatar has been officially released, just in time for tomorrow! Unlike last year’s witch outfit, this model takes after a darker, more evil style. It even has a cool animation using avatar 3.0 systems!
This is the first model I’ve made that I feel could actually be turned into a recognizable character all by itself, which is a standard I’d love to keep from here on out. The idea behind it was something akin to an evil/cursed queen, which is why she has an arm band on concealing strands of darkness. The animation lets you remove the band and unleash the darkness down the arm, turning it into a monstrous shadow hand with a cosmos style texture and effect.
The animation that plays when you toggle the shadow hand on.
The only downside of making an animation like this is that it forces me to have separate mesh objects, which isn’t ideal for optimization. In this case there are only 4 objects though, so the performance impact should be minimal. The fading effect is thanks to Poiyomi’s shaders and their awesome dithering effect, which is essentially a way to fake transparency. Real transparent shaders come with all kinds of wonky behavior inside VRChat, so it’s generally a good idea to stay away from them in my experience. This was my first time animating materials on an avatar, but thankfully it was pretty simple.
Behind-the-scenes look at the actual animation keyframes.
The clothing on this avatar was also a big step forward for me, because I used an entirely different workflow than usual. My previous method involved duplicating parts of the body mesh and sculpting them into the shape I wanted, which had the advantage of preserving weight painting info and producing mostly identical topology, both of which made skin clipping through clothing not a problem. However, with my discovery of the transfer weights function in Blender, it’s become trivially easy to attach clothing with any topology onto an already weight painted base model and have little to no clipping. So rather than duplicating the skin to make clothing, I started from scratch with a single polygon and added mirror, subdivision, shrinkwrap, and solidify modifiers to create an easy to edit layer of skin-tight clothing. After the modifiers have been applied, I can go back in and separate certain places from the skin, like the hood. Then I use transfer weights, and like magic, the whole thing moves perfectly with the model!
The base topology of the clothing, early in the process.
All in all I’m very proud of this avatar, from the new clothing workflow which produced fantastic results, and from actually diving into more complex animations! It really adds some life to the model, and I may turn this into a fully-fledged character for my own use later on.
Now of course there are more holidays coming up, which means more opportunities for specially themed avatars. However, my plans at the moment only include making a Christmas themed model, as I don’t see Thanksgiving or New Years producing very interesting avatars. Since this frees up time in November, I’m going to spend some of it completely redoing my avatar world in VRChat! The snowy theme will remain consistent, but it’s due for an update and I’m confident I can make it more interesting and visually appealing than it is now. I’ll still be releasing a new model in time for Christmas as well!
Have a spooky (but safe!) Halloween everyone!
You can check out the portfolio page here and purchase the avatar from Gumroad!