UGC Tools

Preparing your avatar

Pick your mesh, press Prepare Avatar. It works out what your avatar needs and does it.

Avatars arrive here rigged all sorts of ways. Some are built on the Unreal mannequin and are ready as they are. Some were rigged in another tool entirely, with bones named nothing like ours. Some have tails and ears that should move. You should not have to know which of those you have, so one button figures it out.

How to use it

Open Tools → VR Realms Workshop and open the Avatar section.
Set Skeletal mesh to your avatar.
Press Prepare Avatar.

It tells you what it did as it goes. Then fill in the title, description and tags and publish as normal.

Pressing it twice is safe. If your avatar already has physics set up, it is left exactly as it is. The button will never undo tuning you have done by hand.

What it actually does

If your avatar is already on an Unreal mannequin skeleton, it says so and leaves the skeleton alone. Those avatars are driven directly, which is simpler and better than translating them.

If it was rigged some other way, it works out where your spine, arms, legs and fingers are by looking at the shape of the skeleton — what connects to what, and where it sits — rather than at bone names.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Every rigging tool names bones differently, and plenty of avatars use two or three conventions in the same skeleton. There is no list to convert against. But the shape of a humanoid is always the same, so we read that instead. It works whether your hips are called Hips, pelvis, Bip01_Pelvis or something in a language we have never seen.

It needs a rig that is put together sensibly: hips at the base with everything hanging off them, arms and legs running in a line from shoulder to hand and hip to foot, and at least a few fingers. Almost every avatar built for social VR already is.

Tails, ears and hair

Anything that is not part of the skeleton — tails, ears, hair, whiskers, cloth — gets physics, so it moves as you do. That is set up for you and attached to your mesh; there is nothing to pick or remember.

It does not treat everything the same, because it should not. A tail wants to swing freely and trail behind you. A chest bone wants to barely move. Ears sit somewhere between. One setting for all three looks wrong in at least one direction.

Some things are deliberately left still: eyes, jaw, tongue, fingers and toes. Those are driven by other systems, and physics on them looks broken.

When it finishes it lists every loose chain it found and whether it included it, with a reason. So if something of yours is not moving, you do not have to guess — the list says whether it was skipped, and why.

Something did not move? Read the list. If a chain was skipped because we did not recognise its name, open the Animation Blueprint and add it — it is an ordinary Blueprint, and it is yours.

Making the physics your own

What you get is a starting point, not a cage. Open the Animation Blueprint it made and change whatever you like — how far things swing, how quickly they settle, how far they can travel.

To keep a version you have tuned, rename it. The tools only ever touch the file they made, so a renamed one is yours permanently and nothing will overwrite it.

Prefer to build your own from scratch? Do that, then set it in the Physics anim BP box. Anything in that box is left alone. Clearing the box turns that avatar's physics off.

That box is optional. An avatar with nothing in it simply has no secondary motion, and everything else works exactly the same.

Players can turn physics off

Players can switch avatar physics off for everyone in the room, for performance or simply because they prefer it. That applies to every avatar, hand-made or generated, and needs nothing from you — but it is worth knowing your work will not always be moving on someone else's screen.

Advanced

Under Advanced are the same two jobs on their own buttons: skeleton only, and physics only. You do not need them — Prepare Avatar runs whichever are needed. They are there for re-doing one step deliberately, such as after editing a skeleton.

One difference worth knowing: Generate Avatar Physics rebuilds from scratch and overwrites what is there, where Prepare Avatar skips it. That is the only way to rebuild physics on purpose — and the reason to rename a version you want to keep.

Mannequin avatar looks broken? If your avatar uses the UE4 or UE5 Mannequin bone names, the panel skips the skeleton step and the game drives it directly. Some rigs borrow those names but have their bones turned a different way, and then the neck, arms or legs come out twisted in game. Press Map Community Rig under Advanced, then Build again, and check it with Play Avatar. The panel prints the same tip under its validation result.

Heads up. These tools are new. If a rig comes out strangely, or a chain is judged wrongly, the lines the panel prints are exactly what we need to see. #workshop-support

← UGC Tools