So.. multiple people came up to me to ask about how i got my hair/body/tail/emissions looking the way they do.. i am a lazy person, i don’t want to copypaste the same messages into 5 DMs in discord.. so.. its less effort to make a blogpost that i can update as i got.. not sure where this will be posted yet.. you will see when the time comes

honestly.. i am not good at unity.. i use some basic things and throw shit against the wall until it sticks.. then i try to remember what combinations worked, see if i can figure out how and if its possible to apply it elsewhere..

I think the best way to go about this is to go over a few sections in the poiyomi shader, specifically the free version, poiyomi 8.1 toon as of writing this. I will try my best to explain what specific values/sliders do (as i understand them) and leave links to the docs

general notes on textures and import settings

compress your textures, except for normal maps nothing needs to me be larger than 1k, and masks and thel ike can often go down to 512 or less.. save the VRAM

DON’T use crunch compression.. (This is stuff i was told by multiple people better at avatar optimization than me) crunch compression jsut decreases download size at the cost of taking more CPU cycles to decompress the textures.. effectively leading to cpu spiking every time the game decides to load the avatar, which can be quite often with aggressive avatar culling in a busy world.. (in case this is outdated information.. feel free to correct me, though some sources and documentation links would be nice to have on this)

for most emission colors i have a sensible default color (some sort of neon blue/purple/pink/green) set and in the dropdown next to it one of ColorChord 0-3 or AL Theme 0-3 chose (this dropdown can be animated)

colorchord is a feature of audiolink that picks a color based on the music/sounds/tones

AL theme is picking the colors based on what the audiolink panel or setup in the world is confured as, in most worlds this defaults to colorchord, but some places have it picked from the screen colors, read from DMX data in the videostream (VRSL) or defined by hand vis the panel

technically you could also switch it to the theme colors which can be defined elswhere in the material setting

Shading -> Shading

https://www.poiyomi.com/shading/main

I like realistic lighting with a second pass using toon, i think it looks great on furry avis

Shading -> Rim Lighting

https://www.poiyomi.com/shading/rim-lighting

Rim lighting, contrary to its implied name can be used with the toggle Invert Rim Lighting and a Rim Texture to make multiple layers of texturing happening on your hair, body or anything really make sure you keep Rim Sharpness at 0 or very close to it to avoid having a visible cutoff between the layers

You can also use a copy of your emissions (with black background, so just reuse the same texture to save on VRAM) with audiolink for another layer of special effects

Special FX -> Emission

https://www.poiyomi.com/special-fx/emission

Ohhh boy… there is so much that can be done with emissions and audiolink.. this section is by no means complete.. just some of the ways i discovered that look cool

always layer multiple audio bands

i always have 3 or 4 of the emission layers active, using the same texture and reaction to different audio bands (bass, low mids, high mids, treble) you can hueshift to adjust how the different layers look, but generally colorchord will take care of it

i personally don’t use treble, some music leads to that channel just be continously on.. leading to overshading any other effects

solid emissions can use masks to break the layers apart

you can use a few masks that are just 1/4 white and 3/4 black compressed to 128 and play with tiling and panning on the different layers to avoid effects from always overlapping

the center out effect has a property called Duration whch can be negative, this leads to the same effect, just played backwards, alternating outwards and inwards effects can look amazing

animate your emission levels, sensitivity and such

your speciffic emission setup.. intensity, colors or something stupid like the world not having a well configred audiolink will lead to stuff looking stupid

almost all properties in poiyomi can be animated and put into radial menus.. tweak your avatar live, put a base level of emission or a blinking effect on a toggle … you can ALWAYS be a shining light

Special FX -> Iridescence

https://www.poiyomi.com/special-fx/iridescence

Pretty simple stuff really, make stuff shine in interesting colors based on the angle you look at it this works really well if you have normal maps like on your iris or fur it also combines well with mettalic reflectiveness