This is a personal project in VRChat that began in 2019. My goal was to port several maps from the Sonic Adventure titles, particularly the Chao Garden maps, into Unity. I then went through each model, fixed their UV layouts, created a shader to use the mesh’s vertex coloring, assign the correct textures, and then program everything to work correctly once uploaded to VRChat.
You can visit this world by searching for the world called “Chao World (Sonic) in VRChat’s world menu.
This project evolved a lot overtime as I learned more about Unity, shaders, and optimization. The above image showcases the visual improvement for the Neutral Chao Garden over the past few years. The right version being the latest (2023), and the left being the first version (2019). Alongside updating the visuals, I also optimized all of the assets used greatly so that the world could run on Quest VR headsets while abiding to VRChat’s limitations.
Alongside the world, I created 3D models for a variety of the Chao that you can find in the originals alongside some custom designed ones. Each of the models were also optimized to fit under the limitations set by VRChat for Quest VR headsets.
Each of these models can be used as an avatar in VRChat and are set up for VR-use. I also created custom animations for them if somebody is to use them outside of VR. While creating these models, I also wanted to allow people to customize them similarly to how they could be in the original games. With the use of a shader called Poiyomi, I used RGB masks to recolor the main texture for each of the models in real time.