Conclusion and Tips

The Standard shader is really misunderstood in VRchat. I've heard many people curse and blame Standard for all kinds of visual issues, but it's just a complicated tool that's easy to use wrong. You can get great results from it. It's efficient and easy to tune. For avatars, it's a better option than most people think, and definitely better for anything striving towards CG-ish realism than flat shading. 

Filamented

With that said, it's worth noting that Standard was introduced to Unity in 2015, many years ago. Meanwhile, shading technology and GPUs have changed and moved on since then. But that doesn't mean we have to be left in the dust! That's why I created Filamented, which replaces the shading calculations in Standard with state-of-the-art ones from Google's Filament renderer. It also adds some useful convenience features for VRC world creation.

You can get Filamented from here: https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/filamented

Crosstone Cel Shading

I also created a shader for avatars, Crosstone. It's designed to follow the same conventions as Standard, while also supporting high-quality anime-style shading. This lets you get high quality results resembling the pseudo-PBR look of modern anime games like Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

You can get Crosstone from here: https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS

Conclusion

Some smart people argue that Physically Based Rendering should be called "Physically Inspired Rendering" because it doesn't really match how the real world works. Even though a lot of the material goes on about "how things work in the real world", there's still even more layers to how reality really works. So, don't forget that there's always more complicated things than can be modelled with just the Standard shader! And if you ever need to ask, feel free to ask me for answers. Until next time, see you!