I've been working on an avatar for VRChat for a while now!

Indeed. I have.

I've been working on an avatar for VRChat for some time, I've done a great deal of streaming doing work on it too.

Most recently though, i.e today, I've been getting to grips with textures, UV Maps and shaders.

It's honestly turned out to be far simpler than I expected. OK there were a large amount of issues with the UV Maps since I've been messing with the mesh getting it's optimized down from 58k triangles to just under 30k triangles.

That left the maps in a bit of a mess with random vertices going all over the place, Fortunately it wasn't completely impossible to fix, simply moving verts back where they were meant to be, merging a few and most of the issues were fixed, Some aspects needed to be re-unwrapped, but in most cases I could just cast a projection and get acceptable results with the texture I have at hand.

My next endeavour was to see if I could get it looking the same in blender as it would in VRChat. This too turned out to be very simple.
For the most part I just needed to feed a texture to an emissions shader and mix the too into the output. That got my feather dots showing again!

For the main body though it would appear lighter than the rest so as shown below I added an emissions shader to it too but fed it a solid black colour, this brought everything together to look how I'd expect it to look.

The look so far!

I'm very happy that it's coming along so well.

I'm about to embark on fixing the bone count and rigging, which would require me to almost completely redo the bone/rig weights which I'm not looking forward too honestly. But perhaps it to will be an easier task than I initially think.

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