How to use your CryptoAvatars in Zoom meetings

The Mission

Bought an avatar on CryptoAvatars? Do you want to use one from our 100Avatars project and show it to everyone else? This step by step guide will tell you how!

Resources

• Zoom
• VMagicMirror
• Unity 2019.4 LTS (not necessary)

Getting your VRM ready

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If you bought your avatar from CryptoAvatars.io or you already have a VRM file, congrats! You don't have to do anything here, you can go to next section.

This part of the guide is only for people who want to use one of our +100 free avatars or any fbx model for their meetings.

Get your FBX ready, because you are going to turn it into a VRM file. For this part, you will need Unity 2019.4LTS and the last avaible version of the VRM plugin for Unity, which you can download right here: https://github.com/vrm-c/UniVRM/releases
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Once you have both, just create a new Unity Project and drag and drop the UnityPackage containing the VRM plugin.

Get you FBX and texture into the project too, and create a new material. Make sure everything is correct. Things that you should be on the look out are:

• Material is using the VRM/MToon shader

• Avatar has the right size. Create a 3D cube and put it right next to your model. Cube size is 1x1x1 meter, so use that as reference. Change it via the scale factor parameter, not scaling.

• It uses a humanoid rig. You can change it right here.

• Legacy Blend Shapes is enabled. You can turn it on here.

Now everything is ready, is time to export.
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Select your avatar and go to the top left of your screen, to VRM → UniVRM 0.58 (or whatever version you are using) → export humanoid.

Set the language to english, if you haven't already, and add a title, author and version of the avatar. 

Now click export and save it wherever you want.
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Nice! You now have a VRM file that you can use on the next steps.

Basic VMagicMirror settings

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You should have your VRM file ready to go. First things first, download the program that's used for making your avatar appear and talk, that is, VMagicMirror. I'll leave the link here:

https://booth.pm/ja/items/1272298
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Download the program, extract it and run it. It should be all ready.

Once you start it up you will see a green screen and another window in Japanese. We will set the language to English, of course.

Now is time to load in our VRM file. Use the "Load File on PC" button to find your VRM file.

​The avatar should appear out of frame. Right below the load button there is and Adjust Size by VRM. Click it and should make everything a bit more on focus.

It is very likely that the avatar arms might look broken, we are going to change that now.

Go into the settings menu and into the Motion subsection and you will see Arm menu, and there are 2 options you want to look "Waist width" and "strength to keep upper arm to body [%]"

You can tinker with those 2 options until you get a desireable result.

As a last resource, if for some reason the arms are still kind of bad, you can disable all the arms motion by clicking on the first Motion option called "Always Hands-down mode" and tinker again with the previous settings.

​Every avatar skeleton is different so they always need some personalized changes and sometimes the program doesn't recognize all the bones or how they should behave.

More VMagicMirror settings

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The basic stuff is ready to go, but, if you want to change anything else, these other settings might help you tune what you want.

Changing the position of the camera

Open the settings window and find the "Layout" menu. Here you'll find all the Camera settings you need.
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By checking "Free Camera Mode" you'll be able to move the camera all you want inside the View Window, where your Avatar is. Clicking with the middle mouse button allows you to move the camera and the right click button rotates the camera around. Using the scroll wheel up and down you can zoom in and out. You can also change the Field Of View (FOV) just below the "Free Camera Mode".

The last options in the menu allows you to have different presets for different camera positions. Just move the camera to where you want to be and click on any number in the Quick Save row. Once you do that, the numbers on the Quick Load will light up, and now you can just change between you cameras easily.

Changing the position of the devices around your avatar​
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On the same "Layout" menu, you will see the "Devices" submenu, and just check "Free Layout".

Once that's done return back to the screen where your avatar is, and you will find gizmos in each of the devices your avatar interacts with. 

Use the gizmos to reposition the devices to your liking. On the top left you can change if you want to change the position, the rotation and the scale of the devices, as well as changing if you want the gizmos to use the device as reference of coordinates by selecting "Local" or use global coordinates with "World".

Finally, if you want to go to the Default camera, just click the button on the bottom and the camera should reset itself inmediately.

Turning off all devices

Now, if you don't want to have any device and just want your avatar to stand up and talk, you can disable all the devices on the same Layout menu. Just scroll down until you see the Device Visibility and there you can see different options you can turn on and off. I would suggest that if you turn off all the devices, you also select the "Always-Hands-Down Mode" in the Motion Menu.

There's also a little option you can play with and that's "Typing Effect" and that's the effect that will play everytime you type something with the keyboard. You can select "None" if you don't want anything.

Changing the background

You can change the background color if you dont wan't the bright green color of the chroma by going into the "Window" menu and using the Background Edit color option. Now is up to you how you want the background to look.

You can also make the background completely transparent by going into the "Basic settings" just above the Background submenu and toggling the "Transparent Window" option.

Setting up some animations

Wouldn't it be nice if you could make your Avatar wave at the camera by just clicking one button?
You can, and it's fairly easy to do.

You need to go to the last option on the settings menu, just below "Devices". There you will see a lot of different actions. Each of them is a bunch of different actions, differinciated by 2 icons, Facials expressions (The ones with a head highlighted) and body motion (Ones with the body highlighted)
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By default, the way to activate any of the actions is to write the name of the action in your keyboard, so for example, if you wanted the "Joy" emote to play, you just type "joy" on your keyboard and it should work.

​You can set different ways to trigger the different animations and expressions. You can use a gamepad, a MIDI Controller or you can use the different numbers on your keyboard to trigger them.

Saving and loading configurations

Do you have your place set up and want to save it for other time? You can! Just head back to VMagicMirror Menu, not the settings, the menu where you can load your avatar, and on the bottom right, you will see different options under the name "Setting Management".

There you can Save, Load and Reset to default if you want.

Saving creates a .VMM file with all the information inside about how everything is set up. Once you have that file saved on a folder, you only need to click on load and everything will set up correctly.

Zoom time

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Now is time to set up Zoom. This one is easy and fast. Since VMagicMirror is a program, you must use the "Share screen" option instead of a webcam. Find the window your avatar is in, and just click share.

Be mindful, if it ever says that the screen sharing has stopped, because you minimized the screen or any other reason, you can always restart it by clicking Resume Screen Sharing on the menu toolbar that appears on the top or botton of your screen. This will make that your VMagicMirror screen is always sharing to other people even when you interact with other programs.
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​Other Options: 3teneFREE

Is a free, VRM compatible with similar characteristics to VMagicMirror. One of the differences is being able to highly customize the background, with the possibility of even adding other 3D models to the scene.

Trouble-Shooting

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Mouth not moving?

It is posible that your microphone isn't being recognized by the program. To fix this, go to Settings, and then to Face. On basic settings, you should see the first option that is "LipSync". Make sure that's enabled, and to the right of that use the drop down menu to find your microphone.
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If it's not there, restarting the program should fix it.

If that still doesn't work, it's possible that the blendshapes are not correctly set up for the VMagicMirror.

We are going to fix that, and we are going to need Unity 2019.4 LTS and the lastest VRM plugin for Unity which you can download it here.

https://github.com/vrm-c/UniVRM/releases

Just download the UnityPackage file and drag and drop into Unity to install it. Now do the same with your VRM. Drag and drop it into Unity.

When it finishes loading all the file, it will appear a bunch of folders, referencing the VRM.
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One of these folders is called "Blendshapes". Enter it, and it will appear a bunch of different names. For the sake of simplicity, the only ones that we will take a look are:

• A
• E
• I
• O
• U

Double click any of them, and on the right side, on the Inspector tab, you can see a bunch of different options. Just go to the last one al click on the little triangle to unfold more blendshapes. Now you only need to find the correct one and match it with the vowel you want.
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For example, if you are on A, you need to find "vrc_v_aa" since thats the one that matches.

Same for every other:

• aa for A
• ee for E
• ih for I
• oh for O
• ou for U

Once that's done, just export the avatar again.
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Drop it into the scene, click on him, go to VRM → UniVRM 0.58 (or whatever version you are using) → export humanoid and just click export, since it already has all the information inside.

My arm is not bending correctly

Unfortunately, VMagicMirror is still fairly early in development and this kind of things can happen. Just the way some of the IK are set up makes it impossible from our end to fix these kind of problems.

If changing the arm parameters like I said before doesn't make the result better, you might want to try other program for a more permanent solution.

Pedro Solans

3D ANIMATOR

​​Junior 3D Animator improving every day possible. Videogame and cat enthusiast.

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