In early summer this year, we had a contest for users to submit their avatars they’ve made to be put on the Featured Avatar row. This row is front-and-center in the avatar menu, and gets a ton of eyes on it.
So, you might be wondering “How do I get on that row??!” We’ve got good news for you — we’re opening up submissions for new Featured Avatars! If you’re an avatar creator, this is the perfect opportunity to get your work seen and worn by the larger VRChat community!
This is how it will work: come up with an idea, put your creative magic to work, submit your avatar to this form, and we’ll review your submission. If the avatar passes our review and we like it, we’ll inform you that your avatar made it, and put it into our avatar row!
This time, we’re looking for unique and interesting styles that are different from what you usually see in VRChat and in our current Featured Avatars. If you want the best chance to get your avatar in, try breaking away from the usual styles you see in VRChat.
Let’s talk about some conditions of this event. Please read thoroughly — if you don’t follow the rules for your submission, you’ll be disqualified!
Rules and Conditions
Avatar Stuff
- The submitted avatar should be around 167cm (~5'6") to 180cm (~6'0").
- The avatar must have both a PC and Quest version.
- The PC and Quest versions must fit within the restrictions set forth by the Good Avatar Performance Rank for their respective platforms (links: PC, Quest).
- The PC version should use higher-fidelity textures, meshes, and shaders where applicable.
- The avatar must have some form of visemes. Ideally, you should use blend-shape visemes, but jaw flap is acceptable.
- The avatar must match aesthetically between PC and Quest.
- You may use Gesture Overrides on both Quest and PC versions, but they can only modify the face blendshapes for emoting.
- You may include emotes on both Quest and PC versions, but they can only animate blendshapes or bone rotation/translations.
- Neither PC nor Quest can use “gesture props”, “inventory systems”, or other complex gesture or emote-activated systems.
- The avatar thumbnail should include your VRChat username (if you want), and must also not violate the VRChat Terms of Service or Community Guidelines.
Licensing Stuff
- The avatar submitted should be a totally original avatar. It should also be aesthetically unique and different from our current featured avatars.
- If the avatar submitted is derived from some other content, the original license must permit modification, redistribution, and use in a commercial application. You must provide a link to the original content, including its license.
- The avatar must be licensed with a permissive license, such as CC-BY-SA-4.0, CC0, or something else that permits VRChat to use the client with no restrictions.
Just like our current Featured Avatars, selected avatars will be placed on the Featured Avatar row. You can put your VRChat name into the thumbnail if you like! We won’t be removing any of the currently-featured avatars from the Featured Row for this, so if you’ve already got one up — don’t worry, you’re good. In fact, why don’t you submit another? 😏
Since we’re in the middle of upgrading to 2018, please ensure that you upload both 2017.4.28f1 and 2018.4.X versions to VRChat. That way you’ll be future-proofed, and won’t have to update your avatar again once we upgrade. If you need some help installing and upgrading your 2018 copy, check out our documentation on upgrading your project. We strongly recommend the use of Unity Hub to keep things organized with multiple Unity versions.
As a side note, If your Unity project only contains the VRChat SDK and your avatar, conversion should be really easy. It’s best to have a “ContestAvatar-2017” and a “ContestAvatar-2018” version of your projects, just in case! You can upload to the same avatar ID with both versions — don’t worry, you won’t overwrite anything.
Submissions for this event are open now! You can submit your avatar using this form. We’ll close submissions on February 3rd, 2020 at 12PM PT.
We’ll be looking through and accepting submissions as time goes on — in particular, we’d like to give you the chance to have your avatar up before the winter holidays. We’ll be doing a run-through around the 18th of December and accepting some submissions at that time, so if you get your avatar in by then, we’ll take a look! We’ll inform the authors of accepted avatars via email, and inform you how to proceed beyond that point.
We’re looking forward to seeing what kind of avatars you create!
