Guides

Build a Workshop Avatar

Any humanoid avatar, however it was rigged. Your bones do not have to be named the way Unreal names them, and you do not author any animations. VR Realms drives the body from your headset and controllers.

Quick path

1. Import your FBX anywhere in the kit
2. Tools → VR Realms Workshop → Avatar, and pick your mesh
3. Press Prepare Avatar
4. Fill in the title and tick your tags
5. Build → Upload

Bringing a rig from another platform

Avatars built elsewhere are nearly always humanoid: hips, a spine, two arms, two legs. The problem was never the shape, it was the names. There is no shared standard for what the bones are called, so one avatar says upperarm_l, the next says Left-arm, and a third says something else. Most also carry parts a plain human skeleton does not have: a tail, ears, whiskers, hair.

The kit works your skeleton out from its shape instead. It finds the arms by where they sit and what they connect to, not by what you called them, and then drives your avatar by retargeting from ours. Nothing is renamed, re-rigged or rebuilt, so the avatar you upload is still the file you started with.

Prepare Avatar tells you what it worked out in plain words: which bone it decided is the hips, how many chains it matched, and what it is treating as a tail or ears. If something looks wrong there, that is the place to catch it.

Coming from VRoid Studio? There is a dedicated walkthrough for that route, from the VRM export through Blender to the publish panel: VRoid and VRM avatars.

What the skeleton needs

• A normal humanoid arrangement: hips at the top, a spine leading to a chest, both shoulders and the neck hanging off that chest, arms and legs where you would expect
• Extra bones are welcome, not merely tolerated: tails, ears, wings, whiskers, hair, jaw, eyes, extra fingers
• Hands with no finger bones, or only one or two finger chains (a mitten hand from an auto-rigger), still build from Creator Kit 0.4.26: the kit finds the two hands by their bone names. The avatar works and can grab, but its fingers stay stiff, and Build says so
• Roughly human proportions and scale. Digitigrade legs are fine
• Nothing has to sit on a Mannequin skeleton any more. If it already does, that still works exactly as before

Mannequin avatar with a twisted neck or limbs?

If your avatar uses the UE4 or UE5 Mannequin bone names, the game drives it directly, the same way it drives ours. 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. The fix is one button: open Advanced in the Avatar panel, press Map Community Rig, then Build again. The kit then maps your skeleton by its shape and retargets it, like any other rig. Try it with Play Avatar before you upload.

Tails, ears and hair that move

Anything that is not part of the core humanoid skeleton gets soft physics set up for it automatically. A tail swings when you turn, ears bounce when you walk, hair settles when you stop. You do not have to set any of it up.

It is generated as an ordinary Blueprint named ABP_<YourAvatar>_Physics, saved right next to your avatar, and it is already attached to the mesh. Nothing is locked away.

Changing how it moves

Double-click that Blueprint and you will see one Kawaii Physics node per chain. Click a node and its Root Bone tells you which part it drives. The one whose root is Tail1 is your tail, the one rooted at Ear1_L is the left ear, and so on. Select it and the Details panel on the right has the settings worth touching:

• Damping: how quickly it settles. Low keeps swinging, high stops fast
• Stiffness: how strongly it is pulled back to the pose you modelled. Low is floppy, high barely moves
• World Damping Location / Rotation: how much it ignores your body moving. 0 is full swing, 1 means it just follows you
• Limit Angle: a ceiling on how far a bone may bend, so nothing folds through itself
• Gravity: pulls the chain down, useful for a heavy tail or long hair

A tail that feels lifeless? Lower Stiffness and lower Damping. It will trail further behind you and take longer to settle. If it starts whipping around, put Damping back up a little or set a Limit Angle so it cannot bend too far in one joint.

Chest or belly bones moving too much? That is the usual complaint, and it is the opposite fix. Raise Damping and Stiffness so the movement reads as weight rather than wobble, and add a Limit Angle of roughly 20–30 degrees. Setting Damping high and Stiffness high gets you a barely-there shift; you rarely want either at zero here.

Change a number, press Compile, and look at the preview on the left. Work one chain at a time, because it is much easier to judge a tail on its own than to guess which of six edits caused something.

Full physics guide → Every setting explained, the presets the kit applies and their exact numbers, how chains are chosen, how to turn the whole thing down with Alpha, and how to test it without uploading.

Cloaks, capes and dresses (Chaos cloth)

A cloak, cape, skirt or scarf that hangs and swings uses Unreal's Chaos cloth. Cloth is the one thing an avatar can do that costs every other player in the room frames, because every PC that can see you runs your cloth. So the kit has a hard limit on each clothing asset:

• 1,500 simulation particles at most (a particle is a vertex of the simulation mesh)
• Iteration Count 2 and Subdivision Count 2 at most, and no more than 4 when you multiply them
• Self collision off

Over any of these, Re-check says TOO EXPENSIVE and Build stops without changing anything. A cloak straight out of a modelling tool is often 6,000 to 8,000 particles, so most cloth hits this the first time.

How to fix it

• Simulate a lighter copy. In Blender, duplicate the garment and decimate the copy to around 600 to 900 triangles, give it its own material, and export both. In Unreal, open the mesh, Clothing tab: create clothing data from the light section, apply it to the full garment, then hide the light section. The garment you see stays exactly as detailed.
• Turn the solver down. Iteration Count 1 or 2, Subdivision Count 1, self collision off.
• Use bones instead. Add a few bone chains down the cape or hair in Blender and skin the mesh to them. The kit sets up bone physics for extra bones automatically when you Build, and it is far cheaper than cloth.
• Or remove the clothing data. The garment stays on the body as ordinary skinned geometry and costs nothing.

Tags

Tick these before you upload and they are applied for you. Untagged items appear in neither the in-game filters nor Workshop browsing, so this part matters.

• Content type: Avatar
• Avatar style: Humanoid, Stylized, Realistic, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Anime, Creature, Blend Shapes. Tick as many as fit; Blend Shapes is for avatars with working face shapes
• Audience: Everyone, or Mature Themes. Ticking both resolves to mature
• Access: Personal

Mature Themes and who can see your work

Tagging an item Mature Themes changes who it reaches. It is not a label that sits on top of a normal upload, it is a gate, and a player has to take two steps before they can see anything tagged that way.

Mature content opens for somebody only when all three of these are true:

• They own the free VR Realms Mature Content DLC on Steam. It costs nothing and installs nothing. It is a switch on the account.
• They have confirmed once, in game, that they are 18 or older.
• Their access has not been removed. We can take it back from a single account without changing anything else about the game for them.

This is an opt in, not an age check. Steam does not verify anybody's age for us and we do not claim to, so none of this should be read as proof of someone's age. It is a record that a person chose to turn mature content on, and when they did it.

Nothing has to be tagged mature by default. Audience tags are applied when your item is reviewed, so if you are unsure it is worth asking before you upload rather than after, and changing an item after approval sends it back for another look.

Personal means an avatar you made for yourself stays yours. Nobody else can wear it, and it does not appear in their avatar list. They can still see you wearing it, which is the point. Leave the Steam item itself public, because an avatar nobody can download is one nobody can see you in. You can untick it later if you change your mind.