Avatar Updates! (Patreon)

Hey guys! I've been hard at work completely rebuilding my avatar from the ground up. I know this is just boring news, but there's many reasons why I decided to go down this route.

The main one being that in my previous workflow, if I made any one change to an avatar, I'd have to manually replicate that change on all my other avatars. Since I split my personal avatar into multiple "versions", this gets tedious once you have 5 different versions... (One with canine bits, one with horse bits and so on)

After this rebuild, I'll be able to make changes to my "base" avatar, and those changes will retroactively apply across the board. All I'd have to do from there is reupload via the SDK. Woohoo!

The Nerd Stuff

Close friend enlightened me about Prefab Variants in Unity. The TL;DR here is that if I properly set up and use prefab variants, I can make a change upstream and propagate these changes across all the other prefabs based on the "base" prefab. This really helps when it comes to things like changing some fundamental item on my avatar.

Additionally, the newly created prefab variants can have their own overrides. I could install things on a variant but still keep base changes from the original. Even though this variant may have different objects and toggles, anything that changes on the base still applies here.

This will make my life so much easier, especially when I need to update things across avatars. The old way I was doing this just sucked and I just didn't know any better.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk! 💛