ZetsFancyShader is a PC only Avatar shader built for two reasons:

This project started because I wanted a shader specifically for my Auxwave to add special effects and emissions I couldn't find or weren't quite what I wanted from other shaders; this quickly expanded into making a fully-fledged general audience shader once I realized where it was going and how much had already been added.

Once I made that decision, it then became a fun project and a way to offer another option for people and creators to use that is simple, powerful but also efficient.

I'm not charging anything because the fun for me is in the creation and seeing what people can do, improving and just working on things.

Features

Lighting

Three lighting models are available:

Toon Ramp, Realistic PBR, and Cloth (sheen + diffuse wrap)

• Subsurface scattering: warm terminator roll-off plus real backlight transmission through ears, fingers, and thin geometry. Works in both toon and PBR.
• Reflections & specular: metallic, smoothness, anisotropic highlights for hair and brushed metal, stepped anime-style stylized specular, and a second clear-coat layer
• Up to five MatCaps, detail albedo + normal maps, shadow tinting, brightness clamping, and grayscale lighting for problem worlds
• World lighting support: AudioLink and VRSL GI are read straight from the globals worlds publish, nothing needs installing. LTCGI and VRC Light Volumes light up automatically when those packages are present.

Emission & AudioLink

* Multiple independent emission slots, each with its own colour, mask, and full AudioLink chain; band selection, multiplier/additive/volume boost stages, hue shift, blinking, scan sweeps, light-based response, and infinity mirror.

• ColorChord support.
• Tunable AudioLink envelope.
• AudioLink Vertex FX moves, rotates, spins, scales, and scrolls geometry with the music with Chronotensity modes.
• Every AudioLink-driven effect shares the same control set and can be switched off independently, so nothing reacts to music unless you want it to.

Special FX

Audio Reactive

• Plasma Hits: energy hits that land at random points across the avatar and send ripples expanding outward, bumping the surface as they pass. Up to eight hits cycling the four frequency bands, with random, fixed, or per-hit colours.
• Live Screen Display with oscilloscope and EQ bars, LCD subpixels, scanlines, and a crash screen
• Speaker ripple
• EQ visualizer

Stylized

• Interior Mapping: a real 3D room behind the surface, with every window getting its own rotation, tint and depth so a wall of windows never repeats. Includes a furniture layer suspended inside the room that parallaxes against the back wall, interior lights that switch and flicker per window, and a choice of static glass imperfection or animated ripple for water and aquariums.
• Refraction with a physically based mode: the view ray bends by Snell's law using a real index of refraction, and each colour channel bends differently so edges split into a prism fringe. Thickness-based absorption, roughness scattering for frosted glass, and fresnel falloff at grazing angles. Heat haze included.
• Iridescence with real thin-film interference, the physics behind soap bubbles and beetle shells, so hue sweeps correctly with viewing angle and film thickness rather than cycling a gradient. Optional palette ramp lets you pick your own colours while keeping the physical behaviour.
• Hologram: object-space scanlines that move with the body, fresnel rim glow, a travelling sweep bar, flicker and glitch tearing, with dithered or true-alpha transparency.
• Retro / PS1: wobbly vertex snapping, chunky texture pixelation, colour posterisation with ordered dithering, CRT scanlines, and optional affine texture warp for that authentic swimming-texture look.
• UV Morph: distorts texture coordinates before anything samples them, so albedo, normals and emission warp together. Wave, Swirl, Pinch, Noise, Jitter, plus a Texture mode that takes your own flow map for custom motion.
• Constellation and nebula with ray-marching, seven blend modes, a Panosphere projection for a real-sky look, and gradient or gradient-texture nebula colours
• Fresnel rim glow
• Glitter and sparkle
• Glitch outline
• Classic inverted-hull outline (world or screen width)

Geometry

• Geometry break
• Mesh glitch
• Dissolve with glowing burn edge

Visibility & World

* View Visibility: control whether a material appears in normal view, in mirrors, and in cameras, each independently. Hide something on your body but let it show in reflections and photos, or the reverse. Also available per-effect on Constellation, Hologram, Plasma Hits and UV Morph.

Avatar workflow

• UV Tile Discard (WIP)
• Four decal slots for tattoos, logos, and markings, each with its own placement, blend, and glow
• Camera proximity fade so you don't blind people in a huddle
• Stencil masking for clothing cutouts and transparent sorting
• Every effect can be faded or switched from an expression menu, with VRCFury compatible animated-property tagging
• Companion eye shader included

ZFS is All-In-One:

• Custom material inspector with collapsible sections, inline explanations for every feature, and right-click animated-property marking (VRCFury compatible tags).
• Built-in shader locking with value inlining and keyword baking. Unused features are stripped at lock, refraction's GrabPass and a 13-mode debug view.
• Texture map packer for building packed PBR maps without leaving Unity.
• Debug views for diagnosing a material fast, gone the moment you lock.
• It works on clothes too!

Requirements

• PC only (no Quest/Android)
• Unity 2022.3 · VRChat Avatars SDK3
• Optional: LTCGI, VRC Light Volumes, AudioLink all detected automatically, none required for it to work.

Installation

Add via VCC (VRChat Creator Companion)