Glossary

Every term you will meet customizing VRChat avatars, including the Japanese community words, explained in plain English. Every entry has its own anchor, so you can link any term directly. Spotted a missing term? Tell us in the Discord and we will add it.

The basics

Avatar

アバター

The 3D character you appear as in VRChat. An avatar you upload yourself is built from purchased or free parts and belongs to your account, unlike world avatars, which are borrowed.

Base

素体

A complete, wearable avatar body sold as one product: body, face, hair, usually a default outfit. Everything else (outfits, accessories, colors) attaches to a base, which is why choosing a well-supported one matters so much.

Compatible outfit

対応衣装

Clothing made to fit one or more specific named bases. The product page lists which (“対応アバター”). An outfit made for your base attaches cleanly. One made for a different body will float, clip, or T-pose.

Non-compatible outfit

非対応衣装

An outfit made for a different base than yours. Fitting one is real mesh-editing work (or an auto-fit tool like MochiFitter), never a one-click job, so check the supported-avatars list before buying.

Kaihen

改変

The Japanese community word for avatar modification: dressing a base you own in new outfits, recoloring it, adding toggles and accessories, and making it yours. When people say they want “their own” avatar, kaihen is usually what they mean.

Kisekae

着せ替え

Dressing up: swapping the outfits an avatar wears. The everyday half of kaihen, and the part outfit creators design for.

Avatar world

アバターワールド

A VRChat world full of avatars you can wear by clicking a pedestal. Free and instant, but the avatars are shared presets you cannot edit or truly own.

Try-on world

試着ワールド

A world where you can try a specific purchasable avatar before buying, usually linked from its store page. Trying an avatar where you will actually wear it beats any preview image.

Buying and licensing

Booth

The marketplace run by pixiv where most of the creator side of avatar culture lives: bases, outfits, textures, and tools, sold directly by their creators. Our buying guide walks the whole store in English.

pixiv

Japan’s biggest illustration community and the company behind Booth. A pixiv account is the login for both sites.

Jinxxy

A newer English-language marketplace for VRChat avatars and assets, popular with Western creators. The same buying habits apply: check the supported bases and read the license.

Terms of use

利用規約

The license file that ships with an avatar product, usually as a text file in the download. It decides what you may do with the files, and it is the one document machine translation is not good enough for.

Modification allowed

改変可 / 改変OK

The license term that makes customization legitimate, and the norm for avatar products. Its opposite, 改変不可, means hands off.

No redistribution

再配布不可

Near-universal license term: you may not give the files to anyone else, and that includes your modified versions. A friend who wants the outfit buys the outfit.

Commercial use

商用利用

License clauses about earning money as or with the avatar (streaming, VTuber work, commissions). Sometimes allowed freely, sometimes conditional. If money is involved, read this part properly.

Parts harvesting

パーツ取り

Taking pieces from one product (hair, accessories) to use on another avatar. Some creators forbid it, some allow it within your own avatars. Never assume.

VN3 license

A standardized license format many Japanese creators use for avatar products. Conveniently, VN3 terms ship in English too, which makes them the easiest licenses to actually read.

PSD

A layered Photoshop file of an avatar’s textures that many creators include. It is what makes deep texture edits practical, so its presence in a listing is worth checking before you buy.

Customization

Material

マテリアル

The recipe for how a part of the avatar looks: a texture plus shader settings like tint colors. Each part with its own material can be recolored independently.

Texture

テクスチャ

The painted image wrapped around a 3D mesh. Shadows, patterns, and detail live here. Repainting the texture is the deepest form of recoloring.

Shader

シェーダー

The program that draws a material on screen. Avatar products expect a specific one (usually lilToon or Poiyomi), and a missing shader is why an avatar shows up pink.

lilToon

The most common toon shader for Japanese-scene avatars. Free, actively maintained, and what most Booth products expect.

Poiyomi

The other big avatar shader, popular in the Western scene. Feature-rich, with free and paid versions.

Recoloring

色改変

Changing an avatar’s colors, from quick shader-level tints to full texture repaints. Our recolor guide maps every route and what each can and cannot do.

Tint

A color multiplied over a texture. White areas take it fully, dark areas subtly, and the texture’s detail shows through. The fast, reversible way to recolor.

Hue shift

Rotating the colors already in a texture: red trim becomes teal trim. Colorless areas (white, black, gray) barely move, because they have no hue to shift.

Blendshape

シェイプキー

A stored mesh deformation with a slider: facial expressions, body shape adjustments, and the shrink shapes outfits use to keep the body from poking through. Also called shape keys.

PhysBones

揺れもの

VRChat’s physics system for the parts that swing and bounce: hair, tails, ears, skirts. The Japanese word 揺れもの (“things that sway”) covers the same idea.

Toggle

トグル

A switch in your avatar’s in-game menu that shows or hides something: an outfit, an accessory, a prop. Toggles are decided when the avatar is built, not in-game.

Expressions menu

Exメニュー

The in-game radial menu (R on desktop) where your avatar’s toggles, emotes, and options live. Only what was built into the avatar appears there.

Expression parameters

The hard budget (256 bits) an avatar has for menu state: every toggle and slider spends a slice. Fancy avatars genuinely run into the ceiling, which is why per-item toggles are worth budgeting.

Non-destructive

非破壊

A workflow that never modifies your original purchased files: changes are applied on top at build time and can always be undone. The community standard worth insisting on, in any tool.

Optimization

軽量化

Making an avatar lighter to render: fewer polygons, fewer materials, smaller textures. What the performance rank measures, and a whole craft in the Japanese scene.

Under the hood

Unity

The game engine VRChat’s upload pipeline runs inside. Avatars normally pass through it on the way to VRChat, which is the wall most of this glossary exists because of. Every way around opening it yourself, mapped honestly.

VCC

The VRChat Creator Companion: VRChat’s official tool for creating and managing Unity avatar projects and their packages. The first install of the manual pipeline.

VRChat SDK

VRChat’s official software development kit. It validates an avatar, builds it into VRChat’s format, and publishes it to your account. Every legitimate upload goes through it, whatever tool drives it.

Modular Avatar

The community-standard Unity tool that attaches an outfit’s skeleton to a base non-destructively. “Modular Avatar compatible” on a listing means the outfit sets up mostly automatically.

VRCFury

Another respected non-destructive Unity tool, popular for toggles and gimmicks. Many products and workflows use it alongside Modular Avatar.

Prefab

プレハブ

A ready-made Unity object you drop into a project: an avatar, an outfit, an accessory, wired the way its creator intended. The thing you actually “wear” in the manual pipeline.

FBX

The 3D model file format avatar products are built from. Raw material, not a wearable avatar: it still needs materials, a rig check, and the SDK build.

Mesh

メッシュ

The 3D surface itself, made of polygons. Bodies, clothes, and hair are separate meshes, which is what makes showing and hiding them per piece possible.

Rig / armature

ボーン

The skeleton of invisible bones the visible mesh follows. Dressing an avatar means attaching the outfit’s bones to the body’s, which is the entire trick behind “compatible”.

T-pose

Arms-out default pose of an unanimated model. An outfit frozen in a T-pose while the avatar moves means its skeleton never attached, the classic first-timer failure.

Clipping

貫通

The body poking through clothes (or clothes through clothes). Fixed with shrink blendshapes, hiding covered meshes, or small adjustments.

Mojibake

文字化け

Garbled filenames from extracting a Japanese-named zip with the wrong text encoding. It looks cosmetic but quietly breaks the package’s internal references, so extract with a tool that reads code page 932.

Pink avatar

Unity’s famous error color for “this material’s shader is missing”. Not a color problem: install the shader the product page names and the pink goes away.

Uploading and VRChat

Upload

アップロード

Building your avatar through the SDK and publishing it to your VRChat account. Colors, outfits, and toggles are baked in at this moment, so every change means a re-upload.

Trust rank

トラストランク

VRChat’s account levels. Uploading avatars unlocks at New User, which brand-new Visitor accounts reach by simply playing for a while. No button, no published timer.

Blueprint ID

The unique ID (avtr_…) an uploaded avatar lives under. Re-uploading to the same ID replaces that avatar, a new ID creates a separate one.

Performance rank

VRChat’s per-avatar rating from Excellent to Very Poor, computed from polygons, materials, bones, and more. Other players’ safety settings may hide Very Poor avatars, so the rank is worth caring about.

Quest compatible

Quest対応

An avatar with a separate, lighter version built and uploaded for the Quest/mobile platform, with tighter limits on polygons, materials, and effects. A PC upload alone does not cover it.

Fallback avatar

The stand-in (often the gray robot) players on other platforms see when your avatar has no version for their platform. The cure is a Quest-compatible upload or a chosen fallback.