Modular avatar

A modular avatar is an avatar whose body parts are to some degree independent, able to be detached and swapped out for other parts.

Standards

Rusty Drone

Neolanders Rustybot and alizard with swapped heads and mismatched arms.

Rustybot's Rusty Drone avatar has a defined standard for modular heads, arms, hands, and a few miscellaneous attachments. This standard is supported by several other avatars, especially those belonging to The Neolanders.

Body parts are positioned with the origin at the attachment point (e.g. shoulder or neck), and oriented such that the Z axis points to the end of the bone (or forward in the case of heads) and the Y axis points upward in a T-pose.

Since the Rusty Drone is a head-and-hands avatar and thus doesn't come with the VRIK component, its stock arms use a custom IK system where the upper arm points at a target behind the hand and the forearm stretches from there to meet the wrist. The Rusty Manufacturing public folder contains several example items for learning this method:

Arm Template (unpacked ProtoFlux, rotating shoulder): Open in Resonite (spawns at world origin!)
Basic IK Template (forearm doesn't stretch): Open in Resonite (spawns at world origin!)
Arm Debugger (accepts a RustyArm snapper and controls it with grabbable targets): Open in Resonite (spawns at world origin!)

An unofficial full example avatar was made by hecko: Spawn folder in Resonite

Potato Bot

The Snappable Potato Bot is a standard full-body IK avatar, but without a mesh. Instead, each bone has a child with a SnapTarget (with keywords like "Head" or "LeftUpperLeg"), to which objects with Snappers can be attached. The body part meshes have their origins at their pivot points, and are oriented such that the Y axis points to the end of the bone and the Z axis typically points forward in a T-pose (except for legs, where it points backward).

Examples can be found in the Creator Jam public folder: Spawn folder in Resonite

Vanilla

Main article: Equipping multiple avatars

Some head-and-hands avatars, such as the default avatar, are treated as multiple separate objects, each with its own AvatarPoseNode. With the right setup, an avatar with can be equipped without discarding the previous one, allowing for mixing and matching them. Since such an avatar doesn't have the VRIK component, the only supported body nodes are the head, hands, and feet; any full limbs would require custom solutions or external full-body tracking.