SDK Client Side Imposter Preview
Spiro Renard
Enable users to create Imposter avatars seamlessly using their own hardware through the VRChat SDK. This functionality provides a preliminary glimpse of the avatar's appearance, allowing users to refine and make adjustments before uploading to VRChat. This not only streamlines the creative process but also avoids unnecessary consumption of VRChat's server resources through repetitive regeneration and reuploads.
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NyakumaEmi
Bumping this, as it's been over a year and imposters are now non-experimental and are on track to replace fallbacks since mid-2025.
Having at least some sort of preview in Unity for impostors before uploading would be very useful.
I've witnessed multiple people's avatar imposters be unintentionally generated with the clothing toggled off, due to the way that some clothing toggles are set up.
And it can be frustrating for users debugging and adjusting imposters due to the 10 impostors generation per day limit on the VRChat website.
Being able to generate imposters on your own hardware (provided, if your hardware is capable / strong enough to generate imposters, I'm not sure what the requirements for this would be) would help streamline the current imposter fine-tuning process significantly.
Currently, seeing the results of changes made to the VRCImpostorSettings and the VRCImposterEnvironment on a VRChat avatar means:
1 - Signing into the VRChat SDK in Unity
2 - Re-uploading the avatar again with the new or adjusted VRCImpostorSettings and VRCImposterEnvironment components.
3 - Logging into the VRChat website after the new upload is finished.
4 - Deleting the old imposters on the VRChat website.
5 - Generating new imposters.
6 - Waiting for the generation to finish (this can take as little as a few minutes or longer depending on the avatar's complexity).
7 - Once it's done generating, opening VRChat on desktop / in VR / on your phone or tablet to preview the generated imposter in your menu.
8 - Repeating this whole process over again if you don't like how the imposter turned out, until having to wait until the next day if you manage to generate 10 imposters in one day.
Currently, there's no way to preview generated imposters directly on the VRChat website or in Unity, so viewing them in VRChat in-game is the only way to preview them.
Providing a button to push inside Unity to generate the imposters, like others have said, would reduce the amount of friction involved in generating imposters, which currently involves remembering to go login to the VRChat website directly after uploading an avatar.
NyakumaEmi
Also, providing a way to actually wear the imposter in-game, even if it's only local and not visible to remote players, would make it a lot easier to know if there's something wrong with your imposter when it moves as well: https://feedback.vrchat.com/impostors/p/provide-the-way-to-wear-impostor-avatar-itself
This would be similar to how you can preview your Fallback Shaders in VRChat, and should be added to the action menu next to "Fallback Shaders" + in settings as well. (See screenshot of VRChat action menu attached).
Adding a way to wear the imposter in-game reduces the reliance on having to have someone else in an instance with you take screenshots or record a video or relying a second account to see how the imposter actually looks in motion.
VRCImposterEnvironment is also still not documented in the creator-docs: https://feedback.vrchat.com/impostors/p/documentation-for-the-vrc-impostor-environment-component-is-missing | https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-impostors with no mention of how 'Sky Color', 'Equator Color', and 'Ground Color' impact the imposter generation result. (see screenshot).
Additionally, the current documentation for "Transforms To Ignore" doesn't specify if the component includes child items or if it will it ignore all child items or not. It just reads "Ignores these transforms when capturing data for the impostor. This will hide them from the final result. This is independent of the bone that VRCImpostorSettings is placed on."
Someone asked about this in the VRChat discord to the chatbot a few months ago and the chatbot said this in response:
"There is no mention of recursive behavior (children being automatically ignored) in the provided sources. Because of that, I can't reliably say whether children are also excluded or if you must list each transform you want ignored."
With imposters set to fully replace fallback avatars in the near future, improvements to the avatar imposter generation experience and documentation would be very appreciated and would reduce confusion around imposter generation settings going forward :3!
Thank you for reading!
NyakumaEmi
Remember to click the upvote button at top of this page, to the left of the "SDK Client Side Imposter Preview" title of this post if you want to show your support for generating imposters through the SDK on your own hardware!
Commenting under the main original post as well will also help show support for this feature if you want this :3!
Even a simple "Bump!" or "Agreed!" comment helps push this and other feedback requests like it onto VRChat's radar and potentially their future roadmap / get a feedback request marked as 'Tracked' or at least 'Interested'.
Be sure to upvote and comment the other feedback posts linked in this post if you are interested in seeing those be implemented / updated as well!
Layfe_Kuro
Just being able to trigger the imposter generation inside the sdk control panel should be enough, and when the generation completes you should be able to preview it inside the unity editor (perhaps a custom scene for it?)
Having to go to the website for advanced features like this while everything else is accessible inside the sdk control panel is just annoying)
Wunder Wulfe
I heavily agree. Firstly, the daily upload limit is really restrictive and limits how creators can test and make corrections on impostors
Secondly, impostors may fail without reason or have issues such as severe clipping problems or sprites may be missing or placed incorrectly, and it is difficult to see and fix these issues when they cannot be inspected up close, nor quickly re-generated
Lastly, it would allow for impostors to be generated with a unique mesh designed to enhance its appearance as an impostor, such as a version with no skin underneath the clothes, or with enhanced mesh detail to compensate for reduced texture detail
Overall, would love to see this in action in the SDK to help reduce reliance on cloud server for computation, especially if the implementation is GPU-optimized and can calculate quickly on modern NVIDIA or AMD hardware
kitlith
Agreed. (I was just about to request this myself if there wasn't already a request for this.)
In the long term, this might not be necessary once the queue has emptied and the vast majority of avatars already have impostors created, leaving just new avatars/content and people tweaking their impostor using VRCImpostorSettings.
It would still be nice to have.