After some request for Avatar customization @Kalila informed me about ready.player.me website which is Vircadia ready and quite easy to produce avatars in no time.
Anyway in my community of Italian teachers some are quite proficient in making their own avatars with blender and mixamo and other utilities, which are working correctly in Unity and other virtual world experiences. Question they have put to me yesterday: Is the usual workflow described here Create Your Own Avatar — High Fidelity Documentation
including the avatar packager (currently the avatar packager in Vircadia goes to 404),
and the plugin for unity which can be found on tivoli page tools/unity-avatar-exporter · d63609bedda1248c6c29a38f2b94ba0dfcbaf294 · Maki / Interface · GitLab still valid for preparing valid avatars in Vircadia? Or is there any specialized .unitypackage or workflow specific for Vircadia?
Also, I’m not sure if you’ve seen this yet but our user documentation is actually here: https://docs.vircadia.com/ some parts are out of date but it’ll far more up to date than any other documentation like the ones linked, heh.
We are not currently maintaining our Unity Avatar Exporter. However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to bring avatars over. You will need to use Blender to do the conversion process. That can be aided by the Blender plugin that I have linked above.
Thanks Kalila for the links and the encouragement that some of these tools are still working with vircadia.
Regarding the current documentation https://docs.vircadia.com/ actually is not so updated at least for the avatar sections, it still refers to 404 pages or having a big warn sign
Mixamo select an avatar and download as fbx for unity (is that the right option?) in tpose (for some characters the tpose appears broken so need to check with the Menithal “force tpose” button when loading in blender on the left if the armature is correct. For instance with Erika archer the tpose is corrupted.
Import fbx into blender
select the armature and its children and click on “add HIFI armature” on the right which creates armature.001. For some characters the newly created armature is wrongly scaled so had to scale it properly to match the character.
select old armature and delete it
select armature.001 and all its hierarchy
export hifi fbx specifying selected and copy + embed materials
use this fbx in avatar loading.
The final result is described in this video I made in Italian: video in italian
On the whole it seems we are able to make the avatars working. Will let you know when my students (who are teachers) are using it.
Mmh just seen now that the menithal plugin had had many commits in the vircadia branch since 2020, but on that project is still missing a release .zip. will try to install that version, but without a release version is is prone to errors while installing
PS. version installed, but it seems it has the similar behavior as the original one from menithas.
Awesome, glad you’ve got a flow going. You should zip up the “metaverse_tools” folder and import that as the add-on into Blender. The commits done there so far are mostly fixes and cleanup.
Hi @Kalila, I am preparing the class for using metaverse_tools, and followed your suggestion to zip the metaverse_tools folder only and trying to install, but after losing some hours, I eventually understood that simply downloading zip file from the github IS NOT WORKING. After struggling for many hours I found out that there are missing modules which are not automatically downloaded from that project in particular the submodule apply_modifier_for_object_with_shapekeys. This makes practically impossible for people having no git development tools installed to have a working and installable copy of this plugin onto Blender. May I ask if any kind person can produce a release version as menithal did so to have plausible and straightforward for non technical people to download the plugin? Otherwise the simplest fallback is simply to use the two year-old-version from menithal, but you did discourage that.
that is working thanks, can I provide this as a link to my students? I also did provide a link made by myself but I am a bit unconfortable to give opensource projects via private links.
