Offering some freelance VR work

I haven’t managed to put much of a dent into my VRC Wishlist I wrote up back in September last year, and some of these annoyances are actually keeping me from wanting to hop into VR and be social because they bother me so much.

I noodled with the idea over on Mastodon of putting together some kind of bug-bounty style “Bod Bounty” for VR avatar work. Few of my projects are the kind of big, sustained “Entire model from scratch” kind of work that more professional VR artists take on, and social anxiety can make it tough to ask talented people I hang out with if they’d be comfortable (or even have the time) to do some model work and what they might offer in exchange.

So here’s my pitch – I’ve got three annoyances I’d like to fix, and they all seem like they’d be pretty straight forward to solve, if I actually understood Blender/Unity, so I’ll potentially pay you 45$USD to fix one of these annoyances for me.

If you reach out to me (See my contact page – ping me on Masto, bsky, discord, or hit up the blog name at gmail) with some good-faith indication you’ve got experience with VRC AV’s, or an idea about fixing my issues, I’ll pay 15$ for a 15 minute discord call to discuss the problem and share any relevant files you might need. Following that I’ll pay 30$ per fix. My estimate and assumptions are that each of these problems is likely under an hour of work, if that. However, I am open to negotiate and accept an invoice if your rate is higher than 30$/hour or I’m seriously underestimating the work involved.

With all that said, the rest of this post is describing my particularly pressing AV issues:

Avatar: Customized Foxipaws Felix Feline avatar. This AV’s baseline is immensely under optimized. I managed to make a somewhat lower poly version without all the bells and whistles but it has some lingering issues. Most of these asks likely require exporting to Blender and fussing with geometry and FBX files.

Issue 1: Wandering Tail? Syndrome: My “Friendly” baked-down AV has some extra geometry – It leaves a scrungled Lynx tail (or something) at the origin coordinates of the world that I can’t ever seem to delete properly.

Issue 2: Lack of Thiccness. I’d like the rather waifish Felix AV to have a bit more heft in the thighs, ideally done in some way that makes readjusting all of the clothing straight forward, or one set of clothes is adjusted alongside the remodel (Refs of Ghost are available on specifics.) I also want this to be a “friendly” (performance-wise) model, so this can either use my existing “friendly” version or export, modify, and bake down the full Felix model.

Issue 3: New Threads. I’ve got a Kimono model I’d like to add on to the Felix, including rough fitting and the VRCfury style toggle menus. I’ve done this with some clothes already but felt like it was a rough hack and figured I would include it here as an option as well.

If these sound like AV problems in your wheelhouse, reach out to me as outlined above!

Ghostpaw’s list of VRChat projects

[This is a crosspost rescued from cohost.org]

For the last few months, I’ve spent a fair bit of time learning blender and getting into VR Chat.

This post is mostly for me, and just like… Having somewhere with this all written down to refer back to.

If you’ve got the time or skills to help with just outright handle one of these, feel free to reach out to me at the usual places – Email, Discord, Telegram, or DMs on social media are all fine.

I’m relatively technical and willing to learn but also happy to commission people too. My goal has really been to know what I’m asking for and be just technical enough that I can work with more skilled people in the community. So without adieu, here’s a project list broken down by avatar:

Foxipaws Felix (Ghostpaw / Snow Leopard)

  • Model bodyshape adjustments (I miss having hips!)
  • General clothing swap setup
  • Clothing – Corset (has an FBX, pre-fit and pre-rigged mesh)
  • Clothing – Kimono (Mesh and Material only)
  • Clothing+ -Hack of Metal’s Hyenid zipper suit (Cross-avatar port, lots of blendshape nonsense) I’ve done this! Mostly! Then I lost it! It could be done better I’m sure.

Battle Bunny Wildcat (Snepbot)

  • Trying to get new base layer shaders to work without destroying neon emission effects.
  • Base Opalescent shader for white/cyan version
  • Carbon Fiber base shader for black/purple version
  • Interactive ‘thermal sensitive’ underside with shader/touch interaction magic

FFXIV to Unity Export for Shadow Mountain

Currently can readily export to gltfs with different clothing assets from XIV

  • Limited talking / emote / gesture setup in Blender
  • Initial Unity import, mostly the blender prep I did this! Then FFXIV changed all their shaders. I need to do a lot of hacking to get the in-game AV to really look like the XIV version.
  • POSE FIXES. It turns out that Hrothgar’s arms are kind of silly huge, and I need to do some magical IK stuff to make this look not terrible in VRC :\
  • Gear / Clothing toggles in Unity

Novabeast Stuff

  • Custom color setup Done! I can swap between a cool purple novabeast and a red/white
  • Additional skin blending
  • Loooots of clothing swaps
  • I want more 2000’s vector art / wipeout inspired clothes and design elements! My red and white Novabeast is kind of inspired by the AG-Systems livery from Wipeout HD, be nice to back that up with the look.