Here’s some useful resources for VRChat that I use and recommend. They’re in no particular order, but keep an eye out for these emoji:
- ⭐ = Essential for my own experience or workflow.
- 💸 = Requires purchase or subscription.
Some of these may be useful for other VR experiences, but I personally mainly use them for VRChat.
This is an actively growing list...
These are just some of the things that I have personally used. This is not intended to list all good resources. There are many resources out there that I haven’t tried or just aren’t quite what I personally need. If you have any recommendations that are not on here however, feel free to drop a suggestion on the Bluesky post! This page will be updated over time.
External Tools
Web Tools
- ⭐VRCTL - See current and upcoming public music events
- VRC List - Discover and rate public VRChat worlds
VR Overlays
- VXMusic - “Music Recognition Overlay for Social VR”
- VRHandsFrame v1 (Free Booth version) - Take a quick photo with a hand gesture
- 💸VRHandsFrame v2 - Improved version of VRHandsFrame
- 💸⭐XSOverlay - Desktop Overlay application for OpenVR
- 💸Virtual Handheld - Handheld gaming overlay for VR
- 💸Vermillion - VR Oil Painting. Spawn a canvas in any VR game as an overlay and start painting. I personally don’t really use this much as I suck at painting… but it’s very cool if you like that sort of thing!
VR Tools
- 💸⭐OVR Advanced Settings - Dashboard with many advanced settings and utilities, notably playspace drag.
- VRCOSC - “A modular OSC program creator, animation system, toolkit, and debugger made for VRChat”
- ⭐VRCFaceTracking - “VRCFaceTracking creates a bridge between facial-tracking hardware, and applications compliant with the Open Sound Control protocol”
- 💸Standable - Full Body Estimation
- ⭐Space Calibrator - “Space Calibrator is a tool that lets you use VR devices from multiple vendors together!”
Avatar Resources
Prefabs
- Nameplate Accessory - Add a nameplate pin to your avatar.
- 💸DXOverlay - In-game indicator / decorative overlay whenever you open XSOverlay
- 💸HoloSpace - Hologram system — take 3D hologram pictures / videos and display them in worlds.
Systems
- ⭐GoGo Loco - Avatar flight, poses, animations.
- BUDDYWORKS Poses Extension - Great avatar posing tool. Useful for taking nice photos in desktop mode, though I found it’s a little buggy when used together with GoGo Loco (this might be fixed since I wrote this, give it a try anyways!)
- 💸VRCEmoteManager - Quick and easy tool for adding animations and music clips to an avatar to set up dance emotes, including dance sync between same avatars.
Creation Tools
- ⭐VRCFury - “Non-Destructive Tools for VRChat Avatars” — Quick and simple way to make toggles, setup outfits, and install addons. An absolute must-have for any avatar project.
- Modular Avatar — Another set of non-destructive tools for avatar creation. I prefer VRCFury over this, but both are widely used.
- ⭐PumkinsAvatarTools - Quickly copy specific elements from one avatar to another. Useful when creating several versions of the same base, especially if they each have modified models from Blender.
- ⭐d4rkAvatarOptimizer - Non-destructive automatic avatar optimisation — essential when working with purchased base models. Merges skinned meshes, removes unused stuff.
- Lightbox Viewer - Preview your avatar with different lighting setups.
- ALCOM - Alternative to VCC — apparently meant to be faster and more stable.
- Thry’s Avatar Performance Tools - Great tool for finding which textures are eating up your texture memory.
- ⭐BUDDYWORKS Avatar Scence- Great default scene for Unity avatar projects
- 💸⭐IconGen - Generate toggle icons in-editor.
Shaders
- Poiyomi Toon Shaders - Great avatar shaders with most of the options you’d need. Solid starting point, but I would recommend updating to Poiyomi Pro for more advanced effects.
- 💸⭐Poiyomi Pro Shaders - Very nice avatar shaders with a ton of effects and more frequent updates than the free shader.
- Neitri Shaders - Various effect shaders. Most notably the wireframe shader, which I use to make wireframe panels / scanners on avatars.
- lilToon — Very popular toon shader. I personally prefer to use Poiyomi shaders instead (they can even seamlessly convert lilToon to Poiyomi), I vary rarely use lilToon. However, lilToon has a nicer fur shader compared to Poiyomi.
Effects
- ⭐BUDDYWORKS Avatar Dynamics - “Avatar Dynamics is a simple system that gets you headpat and noseboop interaction quickly.”
Toys and Weapons
- 💸Hawk Bow by Liindy - Fun bow asset with several arrow types, including light arrows which can actually be pretty useful.
- 💸Saber/Blade Katana by Liindy - Fun swords.
World Resources
Systems
- ⭐LTCGI - Realtime lighting for video players.
- ⭐Audiolink - Makes audio-reactive shaders on avatars work. Put this in any world that has video players, even if you don’t put any Audiolink-reactive things in the world itself. This will ensure avatars with Audiolink shaders work correctly :) (I get annoyed when I find a nice world with a video player that doesn’t have Audiolink, it tends to be a deal-breaker for making it my home world…)
- ⭐VRCLightVolumes - Volumetric lighting, compatible with modern avatar shaders.
Shaders
- ⭐Mochie’s Shaders - Good quality shaders for worlds, the free tier has most stuff you’d need for regular worlds. These are my go-to shaders for my worlds.
- Orels Shaders - More good general-purpose world shaders with some nice effects.
- Silent’s Filamented - Good quality PBR shaders, although doesn’t offer as many options as the alternatives.
Prefabs
- 💸HoloSpace - Hologram system — take 3D hologram pictures / videos and display them in worlds.
- ⭐QvPen - (VCC Listing) — One of the best world pen prefabs.
- 💸imagePad — Tablet for allowing users to load custom images in a world. There are probably other similar free prefabs but this is the one I use.
- 💸UGraffitiSpray — Spray paint can prefab. Allows you to create a wall that can be spray painted. Nice for making graffiti worlds.
- 💸Polaroid Camera for Vrchat World — Nice instant camera you can place in a world. Not as necessary anymore as we have VRC+ prints now, but still nice to have especially since anyone can use this one.
- 💸Yodo PotatoChips — Add some snacks to your VRChat world. These used to be pretty popular in worlds but I feel like they’re not used as much these days.
- ⭐ProTV - Very good video player.
Misc
- 💸VRCDN - Paid CDN for livestreaming optimised for VR. Used by most VRChat music events. Great for streaming music into VRC worlds.
Blender Addons
These can be useful for both worlds an avatars if you’re making or editing them in Blender
- ⭐💸uvFactory - Automated, stable, realtime automatic UV unwrapping. Works great for making basic structures for VRChat worlds.
- ShapeKeyWrap - “Blender Addon for Shape Key Transferring”
General Software
These are not specific to VRChat or VR but I tend to use them when I’m in VRC:
- Voicemeeter Banana - Managing and routing virtual audio cables. Makes it easy to route mics and outputs for more complex audio setups.
- 💸Voicemeeter Potato - Like above, but with more inputs/outputs and more effects. You can try it for free but it will start turning itself off every few hours after the trial period.
- (💸/ Free) Voicemod - Popular voice changer / soundboard. I mainly use it to clean, noise cancel, and monitor my mic input. Free version is fine for this purpose, but you have to pay if you want more voice options.
- ⭐ Vencord / Shelter — Modified Discord client. Notable for the XSOverlay Vencord plugin which shows Discord notifications in VR through XSOverlay. Vencord is nice but Discord updates uninstall it sometimes. You can use Shelter as a more persistent way to install Vencord that doesn’t break with updates.
My Creations
I’ve put this in a separate section as this post isn’t intended as self-promotion, but there are some things I made myself which are worth mentioning.
- VRC Photo Manager - I use this to automatically upload most of my photos to a discord channel for archival and sharing purposes.
- Yer’s FBT Seat fix (not published yet) - A custom sitting controller which allows FBT tracking to work when in seats. There are other tools like this out there but I found they tended to break after SDK updates. I will probably make this publicly downloadable at some point.
- VRC Sticker Manager - This is not as useful now that we have the VRC Inventory with more sticker slots but it lets you keep a local archive of stickers and switch the in-game uploaded ones with a couple clicks. The UI is optimised for VR use with big buttons.
- Free LGBT Pride Pin Pack - Simple circular pins with pride flags. I put them on a lot of my public avatars.