The texture layers in VRoid Studio are good examples of this. UV Mapping: UV mapping is the 3D modeling process of projecting a 2D image to the 3D model’s surface for texture mapping.

These are often blue/purple in color, and can be used to add more depth to a texture by changing how light etc reflects off it, making it look visually different without having to introduce additional triangles into the mesh. VRoid Studio creates texture files from the files provided, as well as providing some addition files such as “normal” textures. Artists typically draw the texture in a 2D paint program such as Photoshop.

Texture: The texture of a model is the imagery (a bitmap, such as a PNG file) that is painted onto the triangles that make up the mesh. VRoid creates a meshes for you, with separate meshes for the body, face, and hair. (With squares, if you move one point in 3D space the result may no longer be flat, making life harder.) Triangles are convenient because, unlike say a square, you can move any point of a triangle and the result is always flat. Flexing a surface is achieved by moving the points of the triangles. hair, arms, or clothes on a VRoid character), many smaller triangles are created near the joint. To make a circle, many smaller triangles are needed (a perfect circle is not supported, although there are fancy smoothing approaches that are beyond my limited knowledge so far). For example, to create a square, two triangles are joined together to make a cube 6 pairs of triangles are used per face of the cube. Mesh: Models are created from a series of triangles in 3D space. The top level directory contains a prefab for the character and the imported VRM file. Here I created an empty directory renamed it to “Elanor” to keep all the contents together.

The asset hierarchy for a sample character is as follows. The UniVRM package for Unity converts VRM files exported from VRoid into the following assets. The following concepts are how characters are built in Unity. You cannot read part of this content without first understanding the previous content, so mega post it is! Characters Note: I was going to separate this into separate posts, but it is really all related to characters. Later posts will provide examples of how to solve specific problems using the functionality available. This post focuses on introducing the terminology for the concepts. This can be quite complex in Unity – there are a lot of concepts to learn and different ways in what they are used to solve problems. To then make models move, animations must be used. VRoid Studio can export files in VRM format that you can then import into Unity using the UniVRM package. Characters, furniture, buildings etc are all models. 3D models are created by external applications and then loaded into Unity as assets.

Unity 2d animation layers