A tool designed to shorten steps needed to import and optimize models into VRChat. Compatible models are: MMD, XNALara, Mixamo, Source Engine, Unreal Engine, DAZ/Poser, Blender Rigify, Sims 2, Motion Builder, 3DS Max and potentially more
With Cats it takes only a few minutes to upload your model into VRChat. All the hours long processes of fixing your models are compressed into a few functions!
So if you enjoy how this plugin saves you countless hours of work consider supporting us through Patreon. There are a lot of perks like having your name inside the plugin!
Download here: Cats Blender Plugin
- Optimizing model with one click!
- Creating lip syncing
- Creating eye tracking
- Automatic decimation
- Creating custom models easily
- Creating texture atlas
- Creating root bones for Dynamic Bones
- Optimizing materials
- Translating shape keys, bones, materials and meshes
- Merging bone groups to reduce overall bone count
- Protecting your avatars from game cache ripping
- Auto updater
More to come!
Join our Discord to report errors, suggestions and make comments!
Discord: https://discord.gg/f8yZGnv
- Blender 2.79 or 2.80 or above (run as administrator is recommended)
- mmd_tools is not required! Cats comes pre-installed with it!
- If you have custom Python installed which Blender might use, you need to have Numpy installed
- Download the plugin: Cats Blender Plugin
- Important: Do NOT extract the downloaded zip! You will need the zip file during installation!
- Install the addon in blender like so:
- This shows Blender 2.79. In Blender 2.80+ go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons. Also you don't need to save the user settings there.
- Check your 3d view and there should be a new menu item called CATS ....w00t
- Since Blender 2.80 the CATS tab is on the right in the menu that opens when pressing 'N'
- If you need help figuring out how to use the tool:
Skip the step where he installs "mmd_tools" in the video below, it's not needed anymore!
- Hotox
- Shotariya
- Neitri
- Kiraver
This tries to completely fix your model with one click.
- Imports a model of the selected type with the optimal settings
- Exports a model as an .fbx with the optimal settings
- Fixes your model automatically by:
- Reparenting bones
- Removing unnecessary bones
- Renaming and translating objects and bones
- Mixing weight paints
- Rotating the hips
- Joining meshes
- Removing rigidbodies, joints and bone groups
- Removing bone constraints
- Deleting unused vertex groups
- Using the correct shading
- Making it compatible with Full Body Tracking
- Combining similar materials
- Lets you test how bones will move.
- Saves your current pose as a new shape key.
- Applies the current pose position as the new rest position. This saves the shape keys and repairs ones that were broken due to scaling
- Translate certain entities from any japanese to english. This uses an internal dictionary and Google Translate.
- Separates a mesh by materials or loose parts or by whether or not the mesh is effected by a shape key
- Joins all/selected meshes together
- Deletes the selected bones and adds their weight to their respective parents
- Cleans up the bones hierarchy, deleting all bones that don't directly affect any vertices
- Removes constrains between bones causing specific bone movement as these are not used by VRChat
- Makes normals point inside of the selected mesh
- Don't use this on good looking meshes as this can screw them up
- Flips the direction of the faces' normals of the selected mesh.
- Applies the position, rotation and scale to the armature and its meshes.
- Merges duplicated faces and vertices of the selected meshes.
This makes creating custom avatars a breeze!
- Merges the selected armature into the selected base armature.
- How to use:
- Use "Fix Model" on both armatures
- Select the armature you want to fix in the list above the Fix Model button
- Ignore the "Bones are missing" warning if one of the armatures is incomplete (e.g hair only)
- If you don't want to use "Fix Model" make sure that the armature follows the CATS bone structure (https://i.imgur.com/F5KEt0M.png)
- DO NOT delete any main bones by yourself! CATS will merge them and delete all unused bones afterwards
- Now you have two options:
- Only move the mesh:
- Uncheck the checkbox "Apply Transforms"
- Move the mesh (and only the mesh!) of the merge armature to the desired position
- You can use Move, Scale and Rotate
- CATS will position the bones according to the mesh automatically
- OR move the armature (and with it the mesh):
- Check the checkbox "Apply Transforms"
- Move the armature to the desired position
- You can use Move, Scale and Rotate
- Make sure that both meshes and armatures are at their correct positions as they will stay exactly like this
- If you want to merge multiple objects from the same model it is often better to duplicate the armature for each of them and merge them individually
- Only move the mesh:
- Select the base armature and the armature you want to merge into the base armature in the panel
- If CATS can't detect the bone structure automatically: select a bone you want to attach the new armature to
- E.g.: For a hair armature select "Head" as the bone
- Press the "Merge Armatures" button -> Done!
- Use "Fix Model" on both armatures
- Attaches the selected mesh to the selected armature.
- How to use:
- Move the mesh to the desired position
- You can use Move, Scale and Rotate
- INFO: The mesh will only be assigned to the selected bone
- E.g.: A jacket won't work, because it requires multiple bones.
- E.g.: A ring on a finger works perfectly, because the ring only needs one bone to move with (the finger bone)
- Select the base armature and the mesh you want to attach to the base armature in the panel
- Select the bone you want to attach the mesh to in the panel
- Press the "Attach Mesh" button -> Done!
- Move the mesh to the desired position
- We worked hard on this feature. If you like it consider supporting us, it helps a lot!
Decimate your model automatically.
- This will only decimate meshes with no shape keys.
- This will only decimate meshes with less than 4 shape keys as those are often not used.
- This will decimate your whole model deleting all shape keys in the process.
- This will let you choose which meshes and shape keys should not be decimated.
Eye tracking is used to artificially track someone when they come close to you. It's a good idea to check the eye movement in the testing tab after this operation to check the validity of the automatic eye tracking creation.
- Disables eye blinking. Useful if you only want eye movement.
- Disables eye movement. Useful if you only want blinking. IMPORTANT: Do your decimation first if you check this!
- Configure eye movement speed
Mouth visemes are used to show more realistic mouth movement in-game when talking over the microphone. The script generates 15 shape keys from the 3 shape keys you specified. It uses the mouth visemes A, OH and CH to generate this output.
Useful for Dynamic Bones where it is ideal to have one root bone full of child bones. This works by checking all bones and trying to figure out if they can be grouped together, which will appear in a list for you to choose from. After satisfied with the selection of this group you can then press 'Parent bones' and the child bones will be parented to a new bone named RootBone_xyz
- List of bones that look like they could be parented together to a root bone. Select a group of bones from the list and press "Parent bones"
- Clears the group bones list cache and rebuild it, useful if bones have changed or your model
- Starts the parent process
Texture atlas is the process of combining multiple textures into one to drastically reduce draw calls and therefore make your model much more performant
- Combines all selected materials into one texture. If no material list is generated it will combine all materials.
- Lists all materials of the current model and lets you select which ones you want to combine.
- Split transparent and non-transparent textures into separate atlases to avoid transparency issues
- Make sure that the created textures are not too big, because Unity will downscale them to 2048x2048. Split them across multiple atlases or reduce the individual texture sizes. This can be easily done in the MatCombiner tab.
- You can tell Unity to use up to 8k textures. Do so by selecting the texture and then choose a different Max Size and/or Compression in the inspector: https://i.imgur.com/o01T4Gb.png
Lets you reduce overall bone count in a group set of bones. This works by checking all bones and trying to figure out if they can be grouped together, which will appear in a list for you to choose from. After satisfied with the selection of this group you can then set a percentage value how much bones you would like to merge together in itself and press 'Merge bones'
- Clears the group bones list cache and rebuild it, useful if bones have changed or your model
- Starts the merge process
Apply Shape Key as Basis
- Applies the selected shape key as the new Basis and creates a reverted shape key from the selected one.
This plugin has an auto updater. It checks for a new version automatically once every day.
- Cats is now fully compatible with Blender 2.83!
- It was compatible with 2.82 all long
- Fix Model:
- Added "Keep Twist Bones" option to Fix Model
- This will keep any bone containing 'Twist'
- Added "Fix MMD Twist Bones" option to Fix Model
- This will apply a fix to make the MMD arm twist bones usable (Thanks Rokk!)
- You do not need to enable "Keep Twist Bones" for this to work
- Added "Remove Rigidbodies and Joints" option to Fix Model
- This is solely intended for our non-VRChat users
- Added compatibility to more models
- Disabling the option "Remove Zero Weight Bones" now also keeps unused vertex groups
- Added "Keep Twist Bones" option to Fix Model
- Importer:
- Imported meshes from VRM files now get automatically parented to their armature
- Imported armatures now always show their bones in front and in wire mode
- Fixed export warning being empty
- Fixed importer error when the FBX importer was not enabled
- Fixed importer error when a zip file contained another zip file
- When importing a model, objects of a new scene now only get deleted if all three of them are present
- Custom Model Creation:
- Added "Remove Zero Weight Bones" option to Merge Armatures
- Decimation:
- Added "Remove Doubles" option
- General:
- Fixed some bugs
- Fixed objects getting unhidden when doing any cats operation in 2.80+
- Updated mmd_tools
- Fixed export warning bug
- Cats is now fully compatible with Blender 2.81!
- Importer:
- Added support for ZIP files
- It will only extract the zip if importable models are found
- If multiple models are found in the zip, you can select the one you want in a popup window
- Japanese zip files will be extracted with the correct encoding
- Models can now be imported with Cats via the Windows command shell
- Added support for ZIP files
- Fix Model:
- Hips bone will now be larger than before, to comply with the VRChat recommendations
- Read through them here: https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/full-body-tracking
- FFXIV models are now compatible
- Added "Fix Materials" option in Blender 2.80 and higher
- This will apply some VRChat related fixes to materials
- This has always been done in Fix Model but now you can turn it off
- Hips bone will now be larger than before, to comply with the VRChat recommendations
- Model Options:
- Remove Doubles no longer effects meshes with no shapekeys
- Custom Model Creation:
- Added "Join Meshes" option
- Merge Armatures and Attach Mesh no longer require a mesh on the armature
- Fixed bones from the merge armature sometimes getting unintentionally deleted
- Optimization:
- Added manual download button if Material Combiner is outdated
- Copy Protection:
- Removed Copy Protection panel
- It is no longer a good method for protecting against cache ripping and it can cause performance and lighting issues
- Removed Copy Protection panel
- General:
- Armatures will no longer be forced into rest position after any action
- Fixed armatures sometimes not getting detected
- Small bug fixes
- Updated mmd_tools
Read the full changelog here.
- MOAR updates on the armature code
- Texture translation should have an option to rename the filename also
- Automatic lower lid creation for eye tracking
- Manual bone selection button for root bones
- Full body tracking proportion adjustments
Do you love this plugin or have you found a bug? Post a response in this thread or send your feedback to the official discord server of the plugin for real-time communication: https://discord.gg/f8yZGnv and look for people with the developer role ;)
If you enjoy how this plugin saves you countless hours of work consider supporting us through Patreon: