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Creator Terminology

If you have any terms you believe should be added, comment or message Tricky#6071

 This is a work in progress! Stuff isn't organized nicely :(

Blender - Blender is a free, open source, 3D modeling program. Many creators on VRChat use it to create models.

Shapekeys/Blendshapes - Shapekeys allow one to deform a model for animations. Shapekeys can be made in 3D programs such as Blender. Shapekeys in VRChat are most often used for facial expressions.

Visemes - Visemes are shapekeys made for lipsyncing, they are 15 different shapekeys made to give accurate lip syncing to avatars when a player speaks. You can view the 15 visemes VRChat uses here.

Texture - A texture is an image that is used on a model to give the model details. UV maps tell the model which parts of a texture should use. There are many different types of textures, but the most common is the "Diffuse" texture, also known as the base colors.

Atlasing  - Atlasing is the process of combining multiple textures into one texture. This is an optimization trick that helps reduce material count.

UV Maps - A UV Map, also just known as UVs, are a set of points that tells the model how to apply a texture. Below is comparison of a model and it's UV map, along with a sort of visualization that may help explain how UV mapping works.

image-1658899687537.png

Armature - An armature is the "skeleton" of a model, it's a set of "bones" that are connected to the model through weight painting, the bones can be animated or posed for motion. An example for a humanoid armature can be seen below.

The armature

Weight Painting - Weight painting how a model moves in relation to it's armature. Below we can see an example of a model's forearm weight painted to the forearm bone of the armature in Blender. The more red it is, the more it moves with that bone, the more blue it is, the less it moves with that bone.

image-1658899061756.png

Unity - Unity is the (mostly) free game engine VRChat uses, this is also what VRChat creators use to create worlds and avatars using the VRChat SDK coupled with Unity.

Scene - Referring to Unity, a scene is

SDK - "SDK" is short for Software development kit, it's a collection of tools that allow people to develop software for certain platforms. The VRChat SDK is what is used to create worlds and avatars in VRChat. You can download the VRChat SDK from the VRChat website.

Prefab - A premade asset made to be used in some manner, some can be used on avatars, some in worlds. An example of this is Franada's GoGo Loco.

Contacts - Contacts is a feature in VRChat which allows an avatar to detect collisions. Open the link that takes you to the VRChat documentation to learn more.

Physbones - Physbones are a feature in VRChat which allows a way to add jiggle physics to avatars, and many other things.

Light Baking - Light baking is a method used in games that "bakes" lights into a texture and gets overlayed on objects to create the illusion of light without the performance hit of having realtime lighting. This is often used in worlds to optimize them. There is a great guide by Silent on how to do light baking.

Occlusion Culling - Occlusion culling is a method used in games to not render objects that are not in view of the camera. This reduces the processing times and is a great optimization trick. There is also a great guide by Silent on how to implement occlusion culling into your worlds.