Where to start with making avatars

[Acetango]

I decided I want to make my own avatars (for personal use, currently), but obviously there's more to it than just wanting to do so. So, I wanted to ask: what are good resources to have? What mistakes are common that I can avoid? I appreciate any and all help given.

[Doranos]

Best tip I can give you is... Make backup.
There is nothing worst than doing something on an avatar that you can't fix back so be sure to have a working avatar version saved elsewhere so you can go back to it if you end up breaking it.

[TwIsT [S9N]]

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmbcja09Mvg

This tutorial rolls pretty fast - I recommend downloading ClipGrab (https://clipgrab.org/) to download the video to a local copy; I spent the last several hours this evening taking my downloaded copy of this tutorial and re-writing it to accommodate the changes in Blender 2.80, but it more or less follows the same. There are other techniques you'll want to pick up, but this will get you from a downloaded model with no skeleton data all the way to a rigged VRChat model ready to be uploaded.

I started building my own models a few months ago so I've been in the same boat as you, wanting a custom model and not knowing where to start --and on top of that, having very little time between work life and home life to take on a drawn out learning session... when I could even find the motivation. But, about 6 months after I got my VR rig together, I started making goals to get busy with teaching myself 3D modeling and animation. VRChat's SDK, Unity, Blender, Cat's Blender Plugin and Material Combiner have been the perfect avenue to get some experience going.

Now, I'll say this --as you're getting started, you're going to want lots of pre-made models to get a feel for how the process works, and for a really easy path to getting up and running, it's hard not to recommend https://vrcmods.com/ (VRCmods) because they have tons of resources and enough good tutorials as well to get you going. But I recommend learning both methods and spending several weekends and any other time you can squeeze into it to get as much experience with the work flow aspects of it all so that it begins to make sense in a way where you spend little time looking at documentation and a lot of time tweaking aspects of your models. VRCmods is a good way to get there. But once you understand the basics of taking a ready-to-go unity-packaged model from VRCmods and getting it working perfectly everytime in VRChat, you're likely going to want to learn how to go from any model to VRChat --the method described in the Youtube URL above (published by Fruitpex on Youtube) is excellent in getting right to the point. In my own usage, aside from re-writing it to fit Blender 2.80, I expand upon that tutorial with my own personal preferences, such as different shaders, lighting techniques, settings I prefer for the Main Camera and overall ambient lighting in the scene itself, and things such as knowing when its better to mix different shaders to create just the right effect of soft light-absorbing skin versus shiny jewelry, versus matte cloth, etc. Those are all a matter of artistic vision. I haven't published my re-write and I'm not sure if I will before it would be obsolete any way, but it serves its purpose as an in-house guide that I'm currently working with. Still, I was able to use Fruitpex's tutorial and take a freshly downloaded MMD model of Hellboy and fully rig it and get it ready for publishing tonight. If it weren't for the time I had to take to write it all down as I went, to create my draft documentation, I'd say the whole process per-model would have taken around 5 to 10 minutes each, and that's only because I'm not trying to rush through it. It's not difficult once you learn the work-flow of it all. :)

Good luck!

[TwIsT [S9N]]

Can you set this as a 'sticky post'? I'm not sure... it may require requesting it from the Forum Owner, but your question and my answer would actually be really good as a sticky-post for the community's reference.

One thing I forgot to add, if you haven't done so already, make a native account with VRChat via their site and merge your Steam account, then start logging in with your VRChat native account. Get at least 24 hrs login time. At that point, you can start uploading content --otherwise your account will be restricted from doing that.

If you already have a native VRChat account though, and over the 24hr minimum, then you should be good to go once you get your dev environment all setup.

I can't say what the minimum specs are for it all, but here, I'm running my dev environment on the same rig I play VRChat with, which is:

Intel i7-8700K, 16GBs ram, 3TB storage, ASRock Z370 motherboard, Asus RTX 2080 8GB, Samsung Odyssey+ headset

I have a fairly complex network at home --I've worked in IT professionally for the last 2 decades and do a lot of R&D, virtualization, self-hosting, etc. in-house. That said, I've setup a separate file server with high-speed drives on Gbit ethernet to be my back-end storage that houses all of my VRChat data (models, shaders, animations, etc), Unity project data, and other 3D animation dev related materials. I setup my Unity projects to use the network drive path for storage, and while it does put a slight bit of a transfer overhead on the work-flow, it also ensures that if my workstation were to take a catastrophic crash requiring a rebuild of the OS environment, all of my projects are safe and ready to be plugged back into it all as soon as the workstations made ready again. More so than anything, planning is what really matters, and that matters all the way down to how you go about managing assets that you use in your scenes to produce your VRChat avatars. The default layout for the VRChat SDK is fine, but the shaders can be moved to the plugins folder under assets once they are installed, and your models can be sorted however you like --I've preferred to use /Assets/Avatars, /Assets/Animations, /Assets/Plugins, /Assets/Custom-Textures, and so on. This way, it keeps the root /Assets folder clean from clutter and allows me to build out a vast environment of asset data from all the models I work on, without having to create a huge project grouping for each model that takes up so much space for each one. I did it much like I manage my file servers, so that the layout has a good logic to it that I can work with regularly, and leave and come back to without ever loosing track of where I last was. Anyway, with these sorts of practices, it'll get you well on your way to creating custom avatars in no time, like a professional. :)