Avatar Dynamics is Now in Open Beta!
Want to high-five your friends? Give your pal a *real* headpat? Unfurl your wings? Grab and manipulate your face? Press a self-destruct button on your friend’s avatar? All of that is now possible – and so, so much more. Avatar Dynamics unleashes an entire new set of possibilities for VRChat avatars, far beyond anything we could summarize here.
And on top of that, Avatar Dynamics is also significantly more performant than Dynamic Bones. That means more frames for PC users – and the ability for Quest users to finally see their friends’ hair, ears, and clothes move with real-time physics!
And most importantly, Avatar Dynamics is completely free. You do not need to have VRChat Plus to take advantage of these new features.
There’s a lot to these new systems though, so let’s go through all of the new features that Avatar Dynamics will be adding to VRChat!
PhysBones: A free, direct and significantly more performant (we’re talking roughly a 12–20x improvement) replacement for DynamicBones in VRChat. Additionally, PhysBones allows avatar interactivity – meaning grabbing and posing bones on your own avatar, as well as your friends’ avatars, too!
PhysBones… on Quest: Yep! PhysBones aren’t just for PC – Quest users can see them, too!
Contacts: Contacts allow users to create unique interactions on their own avatar, as well as with other avatars. It uses simple collider-like components and a tag system to detect certain types of colliders, enabling an entirely new kind of interaction. Existing AV3 systems – like the action menu and OSC – can work together with Contacts.
Ever wanted a headpat to cause your avatar to self-destruct? Or maybe change color? Or… play a sound effect? Well, now you can! (Editor’s note: do we tell them about the headpat counter?)
By default, all avatars will have standard colliders defined, such as the head or hands, but you’ll be able to set your own for specific interactions, if you’d like.
Permissions System: You have complete control over how others can interact with your avatar. If you wish to entirely opt out of the system, you can. If you want to make it so only friends can interact with your PhysBones, you can. Alternatively, if you want everyone to be able to play with your hair, or shake your hand, you have the power to do that, too.
We know that not everyone wants their avatar to be interactive, and ultimately, we want everyone to be as comfortable as possible.
Debug View: Not sure why your ears aren’t floppy enough, or your hair seems to be moving before you touch it? We’ve got you.
To make it simple to see what’s going on with your setup and uncover any problems, you can turn on a Debug View in your Action Menu that lets you see an overlay of PhysBones, Contacts, and Colliders. This view works in the editor as well as in VRChat!
Automatic Dynamic Bone Conversion: We want to make the transition to PhysBones as easy as possible for creators. Anyone familiar with Dynamic Bones should be able to easily switch over, as we’ve tried to make the systems as intuitive as possible.
Likewise, while support for Dynamic Bones will be going away in the future, for now you’ll be able to upload avatars using either system to VRChat.
Users will be able to choose in their VRChat Settings if they wish to still load Dynamic Bones, or if they want them to be automatically converted to PhysBones. By default, this will be enabled – meaning that all bones will be loaded as PhysBones, regardless of what they were uploaded as.
We know users have been extremely thrilled to get started with Avatar Dynamics. We have an internal, “When are Avatar Dynamics coming out?” counter and just trust us: the number is very scary and haunts our dreams. But no more! As of today, you’ll be able to see exactly what we’ve been working on – and we encourage you to give it a shot!
We're excited to get your feedback as you find inventive ways to take advantage of all the improvements this set of features will bring to VRChat. As always, we'll be looking for feedback here.
Between OSC, IK 2.0, and Avatar Dynamics, we’re well on our way to achieving some of our major goals for this year – but we’re not done yet. We've got much more in store and can't wait to share more as soon as we're ready.
In the meantime, we want to see what YOU are working on. Share what project you are working on with Avatar Dynamics and @VRChat on Twitter using the #AvatarDynamics hashtag!
For press or media inquiries, please contact press@vrchat.com
We’re hiring! Check out open positions on our site
