Welcome to ChilloutVR!
I'm Shin, also known as Shinter!
I love creating tutorials for people to learn about Unity and Blender.
and I believe ChilloutVR needs more content for players to enjoy in public lobbies!
This guide is for individuals that are new to Unity, this is very beginner friendly, and this should help you have expressions on your avatar!
If something is very confusing feel free to DM me on Discord Shinter#6986 (Please Refer to this Guide before sending me a message!) or reply to my topic and I'll gladly answer any issues you may face.
Requirements
ChilloutVR Content Creation Kit
More or Less your unity should kind of look like this, If you have learnt how to upload an Avatar for ChilloutVR this guide is to teach you about what you can do after being able to upload a blank slate of an avatar.
There exists an Animation Override Controller that serves the purpose of being able to fill in custom animations. Pressing CTRL+D will allow you to duplicate the CAO. Alternatively you could navigate to the folder that this is located in and copy and paste it, I suggest studying the shortcuts for an easier time.
To assist you further; I have explained it folder by folder basis.
On the Assets Explorer (Under the Scene) Browse to ABI.CCK > Prefabs > Avatar
It should look like this when you duplicate it with CTRL+D, if done successfully.
By pressing the shortcut for renaming [F2] you can rename your new fresh copy of the override. This is required for learning purposes, give it an name that you can remember. Alternatively, you can right-click the file and rename it that way.
Select your Avatar and go down until you see the "Avatar customization" section and drag and drop the new created/duplicated override you made, Alternatively, you could just press the Grey Circle beside the Animation Overrides and search for the newly created override.
When successfully done, it should look like this if you have selected the correct animation override controller.
Clicking on the override allows you to look through on what animations is already built for the override. Which should have nothing in it at the moment since it is a new fresh copy. If there are animations already in this override, I suggest recreating the CVR Override Controller
To recreate the CVR Override Controller (Skip this step If you had nothing in the controller)
Right click anywhere in the Asset Explorer and Create > CVR Override Controller
From the time of writing, these are the supported Animation Clips (In this tutorial I'll be covering the supported animation clips) HandLeft-HandRight refers to which hand the gesture would be in. Loc is for Locomotion/movement related animations such as walking and jumping or sitting, and prone. ToggleDefault-ToggleState7 allows you to use the animation even during an emote.
For now, You should remember this for what clip you want to animate, I'll be doing a Confused Look State, which involves the use of a "ToggleState"
These are the Toggle States I'm referring to in game 👇️
When you toggle a state it stays on until you change your state.
The menu is customized to purple, it should look green to you, to do something similar you can follow tutorials in the forums related to UI customization
In this picture example below, I'm using Toggle State 2 allowing me to have an Smile Expression and I could also use any gestures or emotes, without affecting my expression.
Lets now go back to Unity to begin learning about doing this!
Select "Body" or anything that has a blend shape in your Hierarchy (this is recognized by what you want to animate, this could be named Face or Clothes anything really)
I have split this part of the tutorial into section R & Y & G (Red Yellow Green) I put text to make it easier to explain. In this section of the guide I now test my character's blendshape to reflect what I want to do, have a confused look or be happy. This can be anything you want to do within the blendshape capability, I suggest testing what you want with your character first!
If you don't set this back to normal values your avatar will upload with it enabled or set to the values you put in during this testing.
Here, I only wanted to animate the "O_O3" Blendshape to create a confused face, and now I set it back to 0 which is back to default normal blendshape value.
Now you want to duplicate your avatar by pressing CTRL+D or Copy and Paste with right click or CTRL+C + CTRL+V, up to you really. It should show "Your Character (1)" or the amount of times you duplicated your avatar.
Hide the Original Model so you don't accidently animate your original model, and see two of your models blocking each other.
Select the Duplicated Avatar that you created, and make sure to remove the animator controller and remove the CVR Avatar Script and CVR Asset Info Script, it is not required to remove it, but I would suggest to remove it to prevent you from uploading the duplicated one by mistake.
Add the Animation Tab to begin animating.
If you already have this tab, you can skip this step.
On your Assets, create a new folder by right clicking anywhere around that area.
most preferably name your new folder Anims or characteranims, just for the sake of organizing where everything should be, I would just name it [Animations].
Create an Animation clip by right clicking anywhere around the assets folder area.
Name your Animation Clip the animation you want to create, this is just for organizing what it does, in my case I would like it to be a confused face, so I just easily name it "confusedface" to recognize what this animation clip is used for.
Drag your new animation clip that you just created to your avatar, it should just automatically create an Animator (if you followed the steps and removed the animator from before) and you can now create your first animation clip.
Be careful of what you Record during the animation clip.
Select your Mesh with the blendshapes(For me it's Body) then open the Animation tab and click on the Recording Button(It's a red circle) and you can set the blendshape to 100 and it should record what you do.
Type in the value 1 (this is the next keyframe after) and press the + button (located in the green box in the picture below) It should duplicate what you wanted to do, this is your first animation that works!
Hide your Duplicated Avatar and enable your original model back, then go back to the folder of the Custom Override you made, mines is CAOKanna and put your newly made Animation Clip there (you can put it anywhere you want it, a gesture or toggle state) and then you can upload your avatar to the game and see how it looks like!
If this guide helped you please drop a like below, or if you had trouble following this tutorial, You may DM me on Discord at Shinter#6986 or reply to this topic.
