Blender

Ah, blender. Blender tips and tricks will go here. There USED To be a big page describing how models are put together but that's gone now. I'll check the archives for it.

Mini Guides

Tanlines

Tutorial for making tanlines ezpz:

>get bikini avatar

>remove eyelashes/brows and other layered stuff that you don't want to block the tan (maybe hair too if you don't want the head/shoulders to have any non-tanned parts)

>spread legs

>select verts of body mesh

>add new texture in uv image editor that's completely white and fits the dimensions of your skin texture

>bake AO

>save texture as a new image

>paste AO map onto skin texture in gimp as new layer

>remove black through colour to alpha function

>make now inverted AO map into tan colour through colourise function

>gaussian blur slightly to smooth it out

Enjoy.

Video: https://files.catbox.moe/zx5pdj.webm

Addons

CATS Blender Plugin

Tips and tricks:

The fix model button now just breaks things. To disable the fix model button that I keep accidentally pressing: comment out in cats-blender-plugin-master\ui\armature.py

row.operator(Armature.FixArmature.bl_idname, icon=globs.ICON_FIX_MODEL)

Avatar toolkit

https://github.com/989onan/Avatar-Toolkit

Modern replacement for CATS blender plugin, focused towards avatars in general, not really the whole mmd->vrc thing.

Mios UV Editor

https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mio3-uv/

What: UV editing tools

Robust Weight Transfer

https://github.com/sentfromspacevr/robust-weight-transfer

What: Weight transfer from body to clothing.

Why: When fitting mesh over a body, weight transfers can be used to transfer the weight over for ez weighting of clothing. The built in one sucks. This one is great. It's saved me an ungodly amount of time.

How: Just use the addon, it's a tab on the tool menu. Configure the source, and click the button to transfer to active.