Recoloring Made Easy

EZRecolor is a Unity tool allowing to easily recolor assets such as avatars using only shaders and a custom baking Editor Window, useful for getting yourself a retexture quick and easy while eliminating the need of expensive tools such as Photoshop and Substance for simple recolors!

Fully creator driven

Unlike other systems, making assets compatible with EZRecolor is completely creator driven, and is not locked to the sole developer of the tool (me) to get assets supported! This allows for a much more open and accessible ecosystem for all creators to experiment with!

An expandable shader

The first part of the tool is the EZRecolor Shader. The shader takes in channel packed textures to assign colors you set in the properties of the Material to the correct part of an asset. Sample shaders are included, and it is easy to implement the property fields into custom shaders, either via Amplify Shader Editor Function Nodes or through raw HLSL shader code.

From Shader to Textures

The second part of the tool is the EZRecolor Baker. It takes an EZRecolor Prefab from the scene, then bakes the materials (using a shader only usable within Unity and platforms supporting custom shaders) into fully reusable textures that can be taken anywhere for any use case! You can then spawn in a Prefab of the finished bake in the scene once the baking process is complete!

Templates with infinite possibilities

To glue everything together, the final part of the tool are the EZRecolor Baker Templates. These are asset files created by asset creators (such as avatar makers) to dictate how an asset should be baked. You can:

• Create multiple materials using any shader
• Bake multiple textures using "Texture Instructions"
• Assign these textures to the baked materials' properties
• Reuse past baked texture files to save on video memory
• Set properties on the baked materials individually
• Create multiple prefabs with different material assignments to match

API Access for Extensions

EZRecolor also includes a scripting API so that you can write your own Scripts, Components and Editor Windows to access functions of the Baker!

Documentation

All documentation can be found at ezrecolor.net/docs

Join the VRChat Group which has Supporter Perks! EZR.7699

Known Limitations

• This tool has been made to make recoloring assets and avatars easy for people, but does not replace proper texturing software (especially for more complex patterns and details).
• Templates mostly need to be built on a per-asset / per-avatar basis. There are some exceptions possible, but creators need to make their assets compatible with the Baker. A full list of officially supported assets is available at ezrecolor.net/assets. Get in touch with me if you wish me to get your own assets supported / Get the asset's creator to enter in contact with me!
• Emissive textures with HDR values are not currently able to be baked with perfect precision, and thus will not look exact to the shader version. This is being worked on.

Known Bugs

• In Unity 2022.3.22 (the version the VRChat SDK uses), when creating a Template, the fields get auto-filled with default values that work. However, after confirming the name of the file, these fields reset to be empty. This does not happen in Unity 2021.3.23 (the version the ChilloutVR CCK.
• The properties of a Baked Material do not get cleaned properly from the old EZRecolor fields (which do not exist in the final shader), resulting in the VRC SDK counting those textures towards the VRAM usage stat (you can safely ignore this as the VRC upload process does remove them successfully).
• Trying to offset a texture outside of the bounds of the Baked Texture does not work.

Planned features (no release time frame yet)

• VRChat auto-bake non-destructively on upload
• Full recoloring and Template Editor from within the Play window
• Potentially a standalone app