How to deal with skirts in VRChat

There's a billion ways of solving this in a different way, but this is what i currently do with skirts.
00:00 - Making the bones + weight paint
08:06 - If you already have the bones
/ airpaca

[@FukaOni]

So helpful! A thing that you can make on 9:13 instead of rolling the bones manually you can select all bones and press F3 menu and search "Recalculate > roll > cursor" and all bones Z axis will be pointed at the 3d cursor (the center)

[@Airbee]

Ohhh damn, thats cool :D Thanks for sharing!

[@pentothalic]

great comment, thanks!

[@FukaOni]

@@pentothalic ❤❤

[@WeasleFireable]

This really saved me, I didn't have the correct named bones so mirroring didn't help rotate the Z axis to the centre, cheers!

[@colbydiamond]

mvp

[@PyramidCat]

I am such a big fan of (long)skirts and dresses, and almost went mental because its such a pain to make! And there are not really tutorials out there about this specific topic. It's so much trying and failing... Thank you so so so so so much for you tutorial. You are a hero! Really much appreaciated! It helped me a lot!! ♥♥♥

[@pentothalic]

Perfect tutorial: well edited, often misunderstood topic, and you point out the little details that a person doing this for the first time might miss. Thanks for posting!

[@Airbee]

Thanks for the kind words

[@sherrinisadumbass211]

Criminally underwatched absolute life-saver of a tutorial, great work & thanks!

[@Airbee]

Thank you, glad i could help :D

[@Kantorek555]

I've been struggling to work with the skirt of my avatar since I have gotten into avatar creation (2 years plus+) and this is the best looking solution so far, thank you

[@Airbee]

Great to hear, you're welcome :D

[@WackyDemonFire]

I love this, thank you so much

[@tamias3196]

This is infinitely better than what I was doing

[@2scu]

I haven't tried making a skirt since dynamic bones this is neat

[@Jomoko89]

Thank you for this tutorial I was able to have good skirt physics with a "good" performance rank thank to you!!

[@verpiworkshop]

This is what i need! Thank You

[@itsWISHY]

Thank you, this really helped!

[@jakeblade2017]

Thank you so much!, this tutorial has been helpful

[@EL_BUEN_LOS]

I didnt intend to use it for vrchat, but still helped me a ton! thanks!

[@Airbee]

you're welcome :)

[@potto1984]

this helped a lot thank you

[@kuromiLayfe]

very nice... managed to reduce the amount of physbones from 10 for the skirt to just 1 with pretty much the same physics and no colliders accept for floor

[@neodymus]

Amazing

[@KvetaURL]

thank you!~

[@aliakdogan9426]

thanks so much

[@unorgnal7217]

actually saintly

[@AFoulXzeno]

When you are creating the rotation constraint bones, how do you get them to scale on each bone's y axis? When I press S and Y it is not moving them in the same way. It is scaling the position of the bones along the global Y axis.

[@Airbee]

I show it at 09:10 - at the top you need to change the transform orientation to "Normal" instead of Global

[@Oradimi]

Hello! Thanks for the video, it was very helpful. Although, I do have one issue. Since my skirt extends past the knees, sitting makes the bottom of the skirt float in the air, and reveals the underwear in broad daylight. Would there be any way around this? I also chose to have 12 bone chains of 5 bones each, do you think I could more reduce the count without trouble?

[@Airbee]

Should be possible to reduce without trouble, yea. As for how to deal with longer skirts like that... no idea, sorry :/

[@Thawah]

I'm currently working on a skirt that is almost floor length. What I normally do to at least help part of the underwear-reveal issue is I block out the crotch area. You can do this many different ways. What I usually do is just paint the texture black or some other neutral color, or I may even put some modest clothing under there, like shorts or bloomers. Or you could change your sitting pose/animation to something different, I guess? Then there are some other methods like using a shader to turn that under-skirt area completely black/shadowy, not sure how to do that but a friend mentioned it. Just some options. Also, actually a potential fix for the skirt floating in the air when you sit... Another friend mentioned to me that there's a way to weight paint the lower part of the skirt to your lower legs so it kinda sticks to them better. Sorry if this comment was a lil vague but I'm still learning myself lol so maybe you can look further into these methods, hope this helped a bit :3

[@Rinny3105]

I really appreciated that you've made a tutorial video on making skirt physics to work properly for VRChat. It has been a thing I've stumbled across with for as long as I have been into this social VR game. Quick question though. As an avatar creator who cares moreso about optimizing models, if I follow your way of doing skirt bones then apply Phys Bones to them, the number of Phys Bones count components will be a lot, and VRChat's SDK would warn me about Poor performance caused by a lot of them being applied onto the model. In that case, how would you think I can deal with the warning, while still having a decent skirt physics like yours in the video? Or is it something that I can safely ignore, because Phys Bones is known to be much performant than the old Dynamic Bones?

[@Airbee]

Ayyy great to hear someone else cares about optimization :D Its a big part of me aswell. Unfortunately, when you really want nice skirt physics it will have to be a little more physbones than i'd like to aswell. However, 2 things that you can do to optimize it a little: - You don't need many bones in your skirt chain. In the video i had 3 bones going down every chain (4 including the constraint). But i've found it to look pretty good even if you only have 2, or maybe even just 1 bone per chain (+ that 1 for the constraint). - You can reduce the number of bone chains going around the skirt. In the video i used 11, but it will probably still be fine if you use for example 8 (4 left, 4 right) or even less. Just a matter of distributing them correctly. Good luck, and thank your for serving the greater good of having good fps :D

[@Rinny3105]

@@Airbee Thank you so much for the suggestions. I will definitely try them out to see which fits best.

[@Oradimi]

@@Rinny3105 Which count did you end up going for? Is your skirt going past the knees, or is it as short as in the video?

[@Rinny3105]

​@@OradimiSorry for late response, I have been busy with work recently. Anyway, I went for 2 bones per each chain, for 6 chains in total. I was doing this for the Quest version of my avatar, and the skirt can still go past the knees since my avatar has a pretty long skirt. So yeah, I didn't add an extra counts of bones just for rotation constraint like in this video, since VRChat on Quest doesn't allow that.

[@Oradimi]

@@Rinny3105 No problem, I really appreciate that you took the time to respond even months later. So you still ended up using physics on the bones even on the quest version? Isn't it clipping?

[@gunmanjack3975]

can this tutorial can be applied to a one peice suit? ive been trying to do what you did but end up with messed up weight painting

[@Snowarc]

I got a outfit the only has a front and back part so i bascially just did the front and rear bones. gotta flip the rear z still. i still think I want to add a collider ontop of this for that extra effect :)

[@Airbee]

Yeah of course you can still add colliders, especially when there is no connection on the sides i think it should work out just fine :D

[@edenmeden3090]

I have a small question, how did you select all in Unity at 11:24?

[@Airbee]

Heyo, i selected the first one, hold shift and then selected the last one :) It will then select all the elements in between. You can also hold down ctrl to select/unselect single ones in between

[@Paperminte]

Hey man, I don't know if you're still answering questions but I am having a ton of trouble with this. The phys bones in game act extremely jittery. I cannot get the bones to move smoothly at all. Do you have any clue what could be causing this?

[@Airbee]

Hoi, 15:05 - 17:00 is the thing you're probably missing. The first bones in the chain, the ones that have the rotation constraints - those need to have a max pitch and yaw limit of 0. If they don't have that, then they will jitter

[@Paperminte]

@@Airbee Fixed! Thank you so much I seriously appreciate it

[@user-vc8kh4hq8w]

Hello! If the skirt mesh already has Spine & Hip weight paint, do I need to remove their vertax group before doing it?

[@Airbee]

i would do so, yes. But keep a backup, just in case

[@rofinatheirin9929]

I got this to work before, but now suddenly when I make rotation constraints, they're grayed out and I can't activate them...if I click on the activate checkbox anyway, my skirt just violently pulls inward to hug the avatar's body TT^TT EDIT: I'm dumb! I had play mode on like a dork >>;;;

[@richy9589]

2:55 after doing this, if i try to duplicate the bones it will reset the Envelopes, any idea what might be happening?

[@BuIlDaLiBlE]

Same here, I think it may be due to "Deform" but even with it being turned off the issue remains.

[@LessFluff]

I get minor clipping at the front-center area even at 1.0 weight, is there a way to go slightly above that value?

[@Airbee]

No, you can't go above 1.0 weight as far as i know. You likely need to remove some weight from the other bones around it (Hip/Spine/Leg or something) Or maybe repositioning the bones a little helps

[@spaghettios2662]

Hello, my phys bones won't move at all with the rotation constraint set, what could be the problem? Thank you for your time.

[@Airbee]

I don't know, but maybe check the curve at 15:00 again and adjust it, feels like that could be causing the issue

[@kokahashinda]

i dont know if you still answering, im not using it for vrchat, followed all the order it was fine in unity, skirt following the leg movement but after i export it with univrm the skirt still pass thru is it possible because univrm is not compatible for Rotation Constraint?

[@Airbee]

I am not 100% sure, but yes, i think univrm does not support any type of constraint.

[@kokahashinda]

​@@Airbeei see, so the other alternatives way is through manually parenting it from blender?

[@Airbee]

@@kokahashinda i guess that could work, yeah. But you won't be able to have only a partial constraint (for example 70%)

[@elvaaan]

how do you export this file and import it to unity so perfectly tho? I've been trying for days and my character's armature won't move in unity.

[@Airbee]

Export as FBX - drag and drop into unity :o

[@elvaaan]

@@Airbee yeah thats what I do but it seems like there is a problem I can't find out. still thanks tho, awesome tutorial.

[@Airbee]

@@elvaaan thanks ^^ hard to say like that, could really be a million things :/ Hope you'll figure it out D:

[@dr.feelgood9829]

I have to be misunderstanding something, I'm having trouble with my skirt phys bones jittering a lot when they move. Please help me.

[@Airbee]

Hoi, 15:05 - 17:00 is the thing you're probably missing. The first bones in the chain, the ones that have the rotation constraints - those need to have a max pitch and yaw limit of 0. If they don't have that, then they will jitter

[@Thawah]

Okay, I followed this tutorial exactly, and I finally just finished it all. But sadly, when I test it in play mode and move my avatar around, the skirt jitters like crazy. What could be wrong?

[@Airbee]

Hoi, 15:05 - 17:00 is the thing you're probably missing. The first bones in the chain, the ones that have the rotation constraints - those need to have a max pitch and yaw limit of 0. If they don't have that, then they will jitter

[@Thawah]

@@Airbee Thank you, and I appreciate you answering my questions ☺️

[@xaviercanada7452]

I'm having a problem with my blender not letting me assign from bone envelopes is there anyway I can fix that?

[@Airbee]

does it give an error message?

[@xaviercanada7452]

@@Airbee nope, its alright if you dont have a solution though cause i have a few alternative outfits i can use

[@Airbee]

@@xaviercanada7452 Maybe the mesh is not properly parented to the correct armature? Or the Mesh doesn't have the Armature Modifier added, and the correct Armature selected there?

[@TheRhythmNeko]

i have one issue the skirt clips to my models uh cheeks eeeh

[@InqyKitti]

does this work on quest at all? i really wanna try it since im a questy :'3

[@Airbee]

Unfortunately Constraints do not work on Quest, no

[@InqyKitti]

@@Airbee damn :'3

[@zarephlae]

You use more bones that needed for this. You don't need a dozen to pull it off. It can be done with less and still look good.

[@Airbee]

Yep, nowadays i also use less bones.

[@Thawah]

I have a question! What is the purpose of rolling the bones?

[@Airbee]

You see it at 17:30. If you don't rotate the bones, and all of them are facing to the front, you cannot properly use the Limit Rotation Pitch. They would all rotation forward, and not inward/outward. Making the limit less practical.

[@Thawah]

@@Airbee I see, thank you!!

[@BlueVenom101]

Good tutorial, the only downside is that this isn't quest compatible.

[@Airbee]

Thanks! Yeah, can't have everything unfortunately >.

[@rutabaltvilka1352]

When i select all skirt bones after assigning the constraint it doesnt let me activate them... Why is that?

[@rutabaltvilka1352]

Nvm, i was in play - scene mode. :D

[@rutabaltvilka1352]

But I am getting clipping still. :/

[@Airbee]

@@rutabaltvilka1352 ya same xd can't ever get it perfect ^^' but its better than nothing

[@counterfeit6089]

The physics didn't help, still clipping all over the place.

[@Tiniuc]

*laughs in magica cloth from ChilloutVR*

[@crimson-foxtwitch2581]

This guide is outdated, it was recently discovered that rotation constraints are actually a LOT more expensive than additional PhysBones are. Plus, they don’t work on Quest at all.

[@Airbee]

"There's a billion ways of solving this in a different way, but this is what i currently do with skirts." There is no right/wrong way to do it, and optimization is always about a balance. Adding 10 rotation constraints to your avatar won't make the entire lobby lag. VRChat recommends staying below 15 Constraints, which is the case with this method. Also you can't get the same/similar effect with just additional physbones. To get something comparable you'd need to replace every constraint with its *own physbone component*, (not one component with all the skirt bones). Which alone would already be worse in performance than the constraints. But in addition to that, you'd need to add multiple colliders to each physbone chain, which again makes it less optimized. I am aware of the cost of constraints, and you certainly should use them with caution. But i wouldn't really call this outdated. Not yet at least :D

[@mercurymoon16]

instructions are so unclear