So you have installed the dependencies, you have selected an avatar and downloaded it to your computer. You’ve unzipped anything that needs to be unzipped. Now it’s time to get things started.

Most avatars you buy will come with something called a Unity Package. It generally looks like this:

Some avatars may have multiple. It’s up to you to figure out which one looks like the most likely candidate to contain your avatar. In the above case, the second package looks like it is the correct package. The first one appears to have something to do with nails? We won’t be using the body anyway, so this one seems to be irrelevant.

With your avatar unity project still open, double click the Unity Package. It will begin importing into your project. If you have multiple projects open, I have no idea which one it will import into.

You’ll get a popup that looks like this:

Click import. Unity will do some stuff, and lock you out of touching anything. Just relax while it does its thing. On my laptop with an SSD, it took 21 seconds. If you’re using a hard drive, it could take up to a couple of minutes.

I can see in the screenshot above that the very top folder is MaruBodyAvatars. So I’ll find this in my assets folder.

Now we need to hunt around inside the folder and find the prefab. In my case is contained multiple prefabs.

1. Is entirely clothed. We don’t need the clothes, but if that’s the only option, then import it
2. Doesn’t have a head. Completely pointless for our requirements.
3. Is just a head. If I wasn’t writing a tutorial I would probably use that
4. No clothes. Just body and head. This would be a nice secondary option if its available.
5. A ring? What good is that? Begone, thot!

As we’re writing a tutorial I will use 1, because then I can go through the relevant deleting process of all the clothes that you may have to do.

Importing the new head

I used the little triangle next to NoHeadFem to collapse it in the Heirarchy, then dragged LuciferAngel Into the Hierarchy. You can see now that both avatars exist in the scene together. Lucifer is much taller, but it doesn’t matter.  Again we need to unpack the prefab completely.

In booth avatars, generally they call the face “Body”. We need to keep this of course. We also need to keep the 2 hair meshes, but in this case we can delete everything else. Her actual body is called MaruBody_Sotai. If you can’t tell what something is by its name, you can highlight them in Heirarchy, then click this checkmark in inspector to see what turns off. Turn it back on if you want to keep it. If not, delete.

Some avatars come with hair ribbons, or ears, or head accessories. At this stage you can keep them, but if they take the avatar into Poor performance when it’s time for upload, you will have to choose which components to sacrifice.

This Halo thing on her head was actually hidden in the armature. Following the path down through the Armature to her head, I found it. I will delete all 3 of the highlighted things to get rid of it. Ring collider can also be deleted, but I forgot to highlight it.

Once all the unnecessary components have been deleted, we have this situation. 

Now lets delete all the Armature stuff we don’t need. These are the bones that our avatar doesn’t need anymore. If the head ever collapses when you delete something, just CTRL+Z to go back a step.

As soon as we drop down Armature, then Hips, straight away we know we don’t need any of the legs or skirt stuff, so we can delete those. Don’t drop them down any further, else it won’t delete the things inside. For this we will keep the plane collider though, because that will stop the hair going through her body when she runs backwards.

Heading deeper in the Armature, opening spine and Chest, we find these. We don’t need them… YEEEETUS DELETUS!

I found some more colliders in here, so we’ll keep those for now. But with all of the bones below the neck deleted, our hierarchy now looks like the following image. Remaining meshes in red, and remaining bones and colliders in blue.

Now to resize and position the head. Ensure you have the base of this avatar selected in the hierarchy. Do not try moving individual stuff because it will cause a whole bunch of janky shit to happen. 

1) Select the very base. 2) Select the move tool. 3) Scale tool. 4) You should never need to move the head along the red (side to side) axis. 5) Generally only up and down is required. 6) Occasionally back and forward.

Moving on to the next screenshot below this text. 

If you need to scale (1), ONLY EVER USE THE HANDLE LABELLED (5)!!! This scales proportionally. If you use 2, 3 or 4 it will break everything. You may need to switch between move and scale until you have the head in the perfect place.

Finally she’s starting to look like an avatar. You’re so close now.

SAVE THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW!!!!!

Now we need to drop down the NoHeadFem in the hierarchy so we can see the “Headswap stuff in here” placeholder. We will grab only the meshes and put them in there. They must go in here because this Parent object has animations. If you don’t put them here, you will have a levitating head above a cardboard box when your agent goes into stealth mode.

>>>>>>>>

Next start dropping down the Armatures. Ensure head bone of your new avatar is closed so everything moves with it. Drag the head bone from your new avatar and drop it into head in the Agent. Then drag the neck of new avatar into neck of agent. The chest parent contained some colliders, so I closed the chest first, and then dragged it up into chest so that everything inside it moved as well.

Collapse spine and drag it up into spine. Then collapse hips and drag up into hips. Do not bother with armature. 

Once all the bones are moved, the base can be deleted and the Armature. In this case I deleted LuciferAngel from the hierarchy, and Armature. Nothing else remained. The following is how the hierarchy looks with all the new stuff moved into the agent:

Click NoHeadFem in the Heirarchy. Scroll down inspector until you find this lipsync section. Drag and drop your Face mesh (in this case called body) into that box.

The visemes will auto populate. If they dont, choose viseme blendshape from the dropdown. If a few end up blank, just open the “Mode” drop down and find something that looks similar to what it wants.

Click on every mesh in the hierarchy one by one. Look in the inspector tab. Scroll down until you find Proes. Anchor Override. Drag and drop the hips bone into the anchor override box for every mesh.

Positioning the Sunglasses, Armour and Ciggy

Before we upload the avatar we need to position the head related equipment onto your transplanted head. Each head is a different shape so the shades, ciggy and foil hat positions need to be personalised. I added shapekeys to make this process as painless as possible, but we do need to edit the animations. Don’t worry, it’s easy.

Click (1) NoHeadFem, then (2) the Animations tab and (3) look for Shades On in that drop down menu.

In the next image click the things in order. If you don’t do them in order, stuff will break!

1) Press record. Be very careful what you click and move while it’s recording or it will add keyframes that will break the sunglasses animation. 

2) Highlight body in the hierarchy. 

3) Find the shades sliders in the inspector tab and slide them around until the sunglasses are in the right place.

Once you’re happy where the shades are, click record to end the recording.

Do the same with BOTH the CiggyOn and ArmourOn animations.

1. Click NoHeadFem in hierarchy 
2. Click Animation Tab 
3. Find CiggyOn animation in drop down

      3b) or ArmourOn animation in drop down

1. Click record
2. Highlight body in the hierarchy
3. Move the ciggy sliders until it’s in her mouth 

      6b) if doing armour, move the tinfoil slides until it’s on her head.

1. Click record to end.