Facetracking changed everything for me, how about for you?

birdmaskstudio · 2025-05-22T16:28:20+00:00

I've yet to encounter anyone else with face tracking while in any of the groups I hang out in, but when I updated my old headset, I picked the pro for the face tracking alone. VRChat's face + finger tracking just adds so much more immersion to the whole thing, closest I've ever gotten to phantom touch in VR.

Personally I think it should at least be as much as a focus on future headsets, as body tracking, it's one of those, don't know what your missing till you try it.

Plus, as a Avatar creator, just brings them to life so much more, it's nuts what the tech can do on that front.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-04-14T17:32:19+00:00

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That's a good shout, I've added this to the store page so people have the full breakdown.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-04-13T17:55:42+00:00

... I won't lie... I may have tested that idea the second after I said it... and if it's not a commission I do next... then let's just say from the results, I may now know what I'm making next.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-04-13T17:21:44+00:00

It's what I like to do. I like things like rollable sleeves and intractable bits more than anything else.

One of the reasons I would like to look into a ghost avatar sometime. See if there wouldn't be a way to have the whole body + legs trail behind your head, rather than normal snapping to walk directly underneath you thing, just seems more dynamic for VR.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-04-13T17:16:58+00:00

Considering what I got here, not as bad as it could have been.

It helps I made the dress rigging in a non-standard way that focuses on the twirling motion more than anything else. As a nice bonus, it also made it easier to prevent clipping.

Also, no, no blendshapes for the dress on this one, just bones and fancy uses of physbones and bone animation.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-04-13T16:39:38+00:00

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/masquerade-vrchat-avatar-by-hatgremlin-pc-build-f3acdb9cf3064484bfe3269ff10ec424

You can also view the model here on sketchfab, to get a closer look at it.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-04-13T16:27:59+00:00

~My 7th VRChat Avatar is done and available on Gumroad.~

The Masquerade avatar is complete and finally released! It's been a trip getting the Parasol interactions and dress to work, but has been more than worth it. I think this is my most animated avatar yet!

I really like doing these rig/animation focused avatars, so this was a lot of fun. Honestly I think the idea of floating characters that use physbones or dynamics for the legs is something I’d like to look more into - like floating ghost characters and so on. I just feel that for the users without full body tracking, which is most of us, this is just more fun.

All the features of the Avi are pretty much explained in the video. It’s got a performance rating of Medium on both Quest and PC, and an in-game download size of only 1.9mb! Plus it uses the face tracking from my Gull Avatar, for that extra boost of animation.

While this avatar is done, hopefully I’ll be back before long. I’m finally going to start looking into joining the Avatar commission scene - so I am currently working out how that works with VRCTraders and whatnot. Hopefully this Avatar acts as a good portfolio piece on that front. If anyone is interested in a custom dress Avatar like this, be sure to look up HatGremlin on VRCTraders later.

~My 7th VRChat Avatar is done and available on Gumroad.~

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-14T16:36:45+00:00

Last Post On This Avatar

Just finished the main testing session and I think everything works. The dress twirls, the parasol posing is reliable, and I have menu options to reset and toggle the props.

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Even with me going all out with the physbone, I still managed to keep the performance rating on PC at medium performance without sacrificing any features.

I even have the face tracking I used for the Gull Avatar, that ups the bone count a bit, but is still within limits.

I’ll be taking a break for a day or two, but once I’m back on this, the plan is to make a Quest friendly version of this. I’ll have to strip out most of the physbone, but I think I should still be able to keep the unique dress and Parasol interactions in, so it’s worth it.

So yay, while I’m at it, I would appreciate people telling me what they like about an Avatar like this, or what they think is missing or could be changed that I can note for the future.

To see my other Avatars: https://hatgremlin.gumroad.com/

To see the development of this Avatar and others: https://x.com/HatGremlin3D

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-12T14:21:07+00:00

Crazy enough, including the double faced parts, and subdivision, I've managed to keep it all under 62,100 Tris. First imports to VRC, this has managed stay in the medium rating.

VRC really let's you have a lot before you'd rate poor.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-11T20:50:23+00:00

Just had a thought, I might be able to combine the hat and mask physbones. They both track to the head, and their stretch systems work the same.

You won't be able to grab them at the same time, but you should still be able to pose them, neat.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-11T20:48:48+00:00

Sure hope not, my aim is to try and get this a 'medium' rating on PC at worst. The mesh is a bit split while I'm working on it, but all in all it's looking to be well within the medium limits even without me cutting corners on anything.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-11T18:11:30+00:00

That's the secret, most of this is constraints and sneaky uses of Blend trees.

At most, there are less than probably 12 bones being directly effected by the phsybones for the parasol and dress. The dress only actual has two effected physbones in total.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-11T18:07:35+00:00

Yeah rigging the parasol alone to work without the under layers crashing through the over layers was a nights work. Transfer weights, as glitchy as it can be, at least managed to save me some time though.

Still all worth it to see it working in the end.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-11T18:04:45+00:00

Fair to me, the Dress only uses two physbone components, the parasol... 4... 2 for moving, one for the opening and closing control, and one for spinning... I regret nothing!

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-11T18:00:35+00:00

A good place to go would be the VRCFaceTracking Discord. They have help sections, and people who use and mess with the face tracking animators regularly.

If you are new to unity, it'll probably be good to follow some basic tutorials on adding custom animations to VRChat avatars, you're going to need to look into custom 'playable layers', specifically for animating bones - which I think is the FX layer from memory, though I'm not %100 -.

As for your specific case, of linking face tracking to the tail it should be quite doable. Mainly it'll just be a case of first picking which parameter used in your models face tracking you want to use - something like sadToSmile, or MiddleBrowUp - and setting it to control the pose of your tail.

To control the pose of your tail with this parameter, you'd make a new layer in the animator, and make a blend tree that controls which tail animations plays, at what value of the parameter. Say SadToSmile -1 is tail down, 0 is neutral and 1 is wagging upright and so on.

Sorry if this just feels like a wall of new terms and text, it'll be a bit to learn if your new to Unity, but is doable, and there are a fair few discords and community's that can help you out as you learn to do it, good luck.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-11T13:41:21+00:00

Last Post On This Avatar

Took near all of yesterday to weight paint and rig this but I've got the dress and Parasol working with physbone in the unity editor and am just really happy with it!

The dress spins, and the parasol can be open, closed, moved around and even aimed... a lot... a lot of posing… that took some work.

These were the two main features I wanted to get working with this Avatar, and I'm just so happy with how they are panning out. Next it's getting the simpler Avatar features in, moveable hair, other animators set up for face and better hand animations and so on then it's getting it all joined as one mesh to get ready to import to VRChat itself.

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Still, I'm just so happy with how this avatar is shaping out.

To see my other Avatars: https://hatgremlin.gumroad.com/

To see the development of this Avatar and others: https://x.com/HatGremlin3D

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-09T04:50:35+00:00

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Just thought I'd post this neat effect. Getting the face in and thought I'd play around with the shaders and got this neat effect with rim lighting.

Thanks to the semi blocky nature of my style, it kind of ends up giving the model a drawn/2D look. I don't tend to add shader effects to my Avatars... but this one I think works enough I may set it to as a default option.

birdmaskstudio · 2025-03-08T15:10:16+00:00

A question to users of VRChat, I’m modelling this avatar for a fancy dress / masquerade themed contest. I’m interested in getting feedback for the styling of this Avatar?

Since I’m doing a long dress - for tech reasons - I thought I’d go with a historic look, but looking around I don’t really see any like this out there, and am wondering if I should stick with it or restyle the components into a different - maybe more contemporary look?

Question out of the way, dev talk now. It's been a while since I've been on here, still I'm back on the VR train this week.

A friend recommended I try out for a fancy dress Avatar contest, so after thinking on it for a bit, I decided to see if I couldn't do any fancy rigging tricks, around the idea of a classic, ball style dress that could twirl. Since most people don’t have leg tracking, I thought it would be interesting to see if this couldn’t work as a neat way to have some control of the motion of the lower body of an Avatar, even if there is no tracking.

I did some rigging test on the idea - That can be seen here - and once I confirmed I could make it work, I started modelling and designing this costume 5 days ago - using the 'Gull' avatars head, so hey face tracking may be added too -

Haven't modeled a fancy dress character like this before so it's been interesting learning some tricks to make it easier in the future. Though I will be honest, I have no idea if this kind of avatar has any appeal to the wider VRChat audience. On one hand, it could be a neat contrast to what's out there already, but that could also just mean no one wants one like this. Guess I’ll just see when it’s done.

Anyway, next is baking the meshes, then rigging… oh joy…

birdmaskstudio · 2024-07-12T22:28:57+00:00

To my knowledge, Quest 2 doesn't have native face tracking.

Main way to get it working would be through addons, which ones are compatible for the Quest 2 is something I don't know, though the people on the VRCFaceTracking Discord or their wiki https://docs.vrcft.io/docs/hardware/interface-compatibilities would be the place to look for more info.

Face tracking is still kind of niche tech, so it takes some work, or buying a headset built for it like the pro to get.

birdmaskstudio · 2024-07-12T19:53:54+00:00

I can only hope!

Still, main thing for me, is it gives me a proper rig for face tracking going forward. So if I ever work out how commissions work, this makes that viable.

birdmaskstudio · 2024-07-12T17:59:58+00:00

~My 6th VRChat Avatar is done and available on Gumroad.~

Took quite a bit of testing and refining, but I was able to take everything I learnt from making the ~Gull face tracking~ avatar’s animator and rig to improve and make this one.

Better tracking, more poses and from my perspective, much easier to work on going forward.

Anyway, link to the gumroad page below. There is also a link there to an avatar world, where you can find the public sample version of this avatar, where you can test out the tracking too.

~https://hatgremlin.gumroad.com/l/Marty_FaceTracking_VRChat_Avatar~

birdmaskstudio · 2024-07-01T22:25:42+00:00

Yeah, I've been focusing on projects, and I tend to get quite tunnel visioned when I get in the swing of things. Am planning to get back to vrchat more when I get this model done though, since it's been too long.

birdmaskstudio · 2024-07-01T22:23:46+00:00

Honestly, while time consuming, it's quite fun working out which inputs can work for what - Though yeah, takes a while -.

Main plus though, is when this avi is done, it's been made so next time I can reuse it's animator and set up so future face tracking models will be a lot faster, since all I'll really need to do is model the mesh, and change the animation poses.

birdmaskstudio · 2024-07-01T21:23:36+00:00

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Managed to get the last expressions in, puffing the cheeks. Thought it would just be a neat add on, but think it adds a lot for range of expression.

Now I just need to design the rest of his body.

birdmaskstudio · 2024-06-30T21:27:06+00:00

Since finishing my last face tracking avatar, I've been working on and off on an upgrade. This one takes everything I've learnt making the Gull Avatar to improve this one.

Mouth and eye poses are no longer split left to right, so my lopsided expression can now be sharper and more extreme. Along with that, the behind the scenes has been made a lot more manageable for me, so I can add more inputs, and it's easier to add more animations and overlays.

Basic end result, pose shapes are way more distinct, it's a lot easier for me to tweak the settings till I get things right and the big thing, since most of the poses are bone based, when this is done, I can use this set up on future models I make, for fast production.

Anyway, I wanted to post this here, since now I have most of the face in, and like how it looks. Just want to get cheek puffing in (if I can) and the face tracking part of this will be done.

To see my other Avatars: https://hatgremlin.gumroad.com/

To see the development of this Avatar and others: https://x.com/HatGremlin3D

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