Build an Avatar

Parts and outfits: clothes players can change

A modular character pack ships a body in pieces: a head, hair, a shirt and an armour, trousers, boots, gloves. Parts turn such a pack into one Workshop avatar that players dress in the game. Armour or shirt, hood on or off, boots or bare feet. Everyone around them sees what they wear.

You can also save whole outfits, so a player changes everything in one pick and can still swap single pieces after.

What you can do

• Ship a whole wardrobe as one Workshop item instead of one avatar for every combination.
• Let players mix: any top with any trousers, gloves or bare hands, boots or bare feet.
• Let players take a piece off: the hood, the helmet, the belt, the shoulder pads.
• Save outfits such as All on or Casual for a change in one pick.
• Add wings, a tail, a backpack or a hat from another pack and put it in place by hand.
• Give the same avatar looks as well.

The words

• A slot is one body area, such as Hair, Torso, Legs or Feet. It wears one piece at a time.
• A piece is one skeletal mesh from the pack. Every piece in a slot is a choice for that slot.
• The avatar itself is the one piece that is always worn. In most modular packs that is the head, because the head carries every bone of the body. Pick the head as the avatar's mesh. Every other piece follows its bones.
• An outfit is a saved set: one choice for every slot.

Set it up

1. Open Tools → VR Realms Workshop, open the Avatars page and pick the head's skeletal mesh.
2. Press Build Avatar Pak once. Parts are kept in the avatar's own folder, and the first Build is what moves the avatar there.
3. Open Optional: Parts.
4. 1. Get the pieces. Press Find this avatar's pieces. The kit looks in the pack folder the head came from, copies every other skeletal mesh there into the avatar's folder and reads the slot off each name: boots go to Feet, hair goes to Hair. Pieces that are in already are skipped, so you can press it again. If your pieces live somewhere else, select their skeletal meshes in the Content Browser and press or add the meshes selected in the Content Browser. In a pack with a male and a female body, select the pieces of one body only.
5. 2. Dress the avatar. Every slot is a short list. Click a piece and the avatar in the 3D view puts it on. Drag in the view to turn it, wheel to zoom.
6. 3. Keep it. When the avatar looks the way a new player should see it, press Players start like this. Those are the starting pieces.
7. Press Build Avatar Pak, then upload as usual. Every piece travels in the same Workshop item.

The pieces in the avatar's folder are copies. Remove on a piece deletes the copy only. The pack's own meshes are never touched.

To add one more mesh to a slot later, use One more piece on that slot.

Pieces a player can take off

Tick Players can take this off on a slot and players get one more choice there: nothing. Use it for a hood, a helmet, a belt, shoulder pads or a cape. Leave it off for the slots that hold the body together, such as Torso and Legs, so nobody ends up with a gap in the middle.

With the tick on, a slot can also start empty: click Nothing in its list, then press Players start like this.

Outfits

1. Dress the avatar in the 3D view.
2. On the line 4. Extra outfits (optional), type a name, for example All on, and press Save what the avatar is wearing as this outfit.
3. The Try one on dropdown lists the starting pieces and every outfit you saved. Pick one to see it on the avatar.

To change an outfit, pick it, click other pieces and save under the same name. Delete this outfit removes the outfit and leaves its pieces in their slots.

Players always get the starting pieces as an outfit of their own, called Starting outfit. You do not need to save that one.

Wings, tails and hats from another pack

Clothes made for the body follow its bones and need nothing more. A piece that was not made for this body, such as wings, a tail, a backpack or a hat from another pack, can hang on one bone instead, where you put it.

1. Add the mesh to a slot. For a body area that has no slot yet, open Advanced: add a body area by hand, type a name such as Wings and press Add slot. Then pick the mesh under One more piece.
2. Press Move it on the piece's row and tick Hang it on one bone and put it where I want.
3. Choose the bone under It moves with the bone: the upper spine for wings or a backpack, the head for a hat, the pelvis for a tail.
4. Choose what the handles do: move, turn or size. Then drag them in the 3D view. Arrows slide the piece, rings turn it, and any size handle makes the whole piece bigger or smaller.
5. The handles move freely, in small steps (1 cm, 5°) or in big steps (5 cm, 15°). You can also type the numbers.
6. Undo and Redo take back and repeat a change. Back to where it was made starts over. Press Done when it sits right.

A mesh that shares no bone with the avatar is hung on a bone for you when you add it. A piece on one bone is rigid: it moves and turns with that bone and does not bend.

What Build checks

Build Avatar Pak writes a Parts block into its log.

• Every slot with its pieces, which one is the starting piece and whether the slot can be empty.
• Every outfit and what it puts on. You get a warning for an outfit that names a piece or a slot that is gone.
• A piece that needs something from outside the avatar's folder that cannot ship. Build stops and names it.
• A piece hung on a bone the avatar does not have. Build stops and names it.
• The weight: how many MB of textures the starting pieces load, how many MB all pieces are together, and the biggest textures by name.

Good to know

• The avatar's own mesh is always worn. Do not add a second head as a piece: it would sit on top of the first one.
• Hair, hoods and cloth that sway in the pack through a setup of their own ride stiffly as pieces. Physics on the avatar's own mesh works as before.
• Players read a piece's name without the SK_ at its start, and a _ reads as a space: SK_Leather_Boots is Leather Boots. Name your meshes the way you want them read before you add them.
• Outfit and slot names take letters, digits and spaces. None, Off, Default and Reset cannot be names: they are how players take a piece off or go back to the start.

Looks and parts on one avatar

An avatar can have both. A look changes the materials of the avatar's own mesh, which on a modular avatar is the head. The pieces keep their own materials: looks do not reach them yet.

Try it before you upload

Press Play Avatar after a Build. In the game, open the quick menu, then Avatar, then Outfits. Or open chat and type /outfit and /wear.

How players change clothes

• In the quick menu: open Avatar, then Outfits. On top are the whole outfits: Starting outfit and every outfit the creator saved. Under them is one row for every body area. Open a row, for example Torso, and pick a piece. A body area that can be left empty also offers Nothing. What you wear is lit.
• On the avatar's card in the Avatars menu. An avatar with parts shows a small shirt button once it is downloaded. Tap it and choose a whole outfit from the list.
• In chat: /outfit lists the outfits, /outfit all on wears one and /outfit default goes back to the starting pieces. /wear lists every body area with what is on it, /wear torso armor changes one piece and /wear helmet none takes one off.

Everyone in the session sees the change at once, and so do players who join later. The game remembers what you wore on each avatar, so it is on again the next time you wear it.

In the current game, before 0.3.0, a modular avatar shows its own mesh only, which for most packs is a head with no body. Publish yours when 0.3.0 is out.

Under the hood

A piece is a skeletal mesh in a folder beside the avatar's mesh, such as Parts/Torso/SK_Armor. The folder's name is the slot. One small table in the Parts folder, called VRRParts, holds what folders cannot say: the starting pieces, which slots can be empty, the order of the slots, the outfits, and where a piece on a bone hangs. That is the whole rule, and it is what the panel makes for you.

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