News & Announcements

Built From What You Turn On - Latex Ultra 5.0 & Friends

Every one of our shaders used to carry every feature we have ever written, whether you switched it on or not. All of it compiled into your material, all of it loaded, all of it sitting right against the limit your graphics card allows. We had genuinely run out of room to add anything else. So this release takes the whole thing apart and puts it back together: your material is now built from the features you actually turned on, and nothing else. A default material went from sixty five textures down to five.

Genuinely Modular Now

Sixty five was not a comfortable number. It was one over the point where Unity refuses to load a shader at all, which is a wall we had already hit. Features are now compiled in only when their toggle is on, so what you build is what you asked for.

• Faster to work with: Imports and locks are quicker, because a material with a handful of features on is no longer compiling all of them.
• Room to grow: We can keep adding without every new map pushing the whole thing over the edge for everyone.
• Nothing changes in how you work: Tick a feature on and it appears, tick it off and it goes. One thing to know: if an animation switches a feature on, right-click that toggle and tick Animated (when locked), so the feature is there for the clip to switch on.
• Locked materials tell the truth: Once locked, a feature you left off is not in there and cannot be switched back on without unlocking. Those sections now step aside instead of offering a control that cannot work.

World Lights That Were Going Missing

This one had been quietly wrong for a long time. Lights a world marks Not Important were being dropped completely, and most worlds only run four pixel lights. Anywhere busy, that was the majority of the lighting never reaching you at all. Your material will look brighter in those worlds now, and that is the result it should always have given.

• Lighting Check: A new view under RENDERING that paints your material with the light actually reaching it, so you can see which system a world is lighting you with instead of guessing. All Sources tints them all at once, or pick one to see it on its own.
• Light Volumes: Up to date with 3.0.0-dev.17.
• AudioLink everywhere: Chromatic Bloom, Note Swarm, Spectrum Ribbon and the separate goo, HUD and trail passes were each deciding for themselves whether AudioLink was live, and some ignored the media switch entirely. They all ask the same question now.

Glitter, Hyperspace And The Rest

• Flake sprites have their own slot: Shape set to Texture now reads a Shape Sprite slot of its own instead of borrowing a channel of the glitter Mask. If you already used Texture, drop your sprite in the new slot.
• Hyperspace: The surface stops behaving like a surface. A ray carries on past it into a space that is not there, so what you see has real depth and swings as you walk around it. Tunnel flies you down a twisting glowing pipe, Weave winds a vortex of fine threads away from you, and both move to the music.
• Three glitter layers: Each with its own shape, depth, swirl and twinkle, so fine dust can settle over big flakes.
• Micro Detail: Now its own section under Bent Normals, with its map and settings inside it instead of loose among the normal map rows.

This lands as Latex Ultra 5.0.0, VixForge Toon 2.0.0, Clothing Pro 2.0.0, Fur Pro 2.0.0 and the editor at 2.0.0. Major version numbers across the board, because the way your material is built has genuinely changed underneath. Everything you had set stays set.

The AudioLink & Optimization Overhaul - Editor 1.6.0 & Shaders

You put a material in a club world, the bass hits, and everything pins to maximum and stays there. Then it glows anyway between tracks. That was not you setting it up wrong, and this massive update finally rebuilds how your materials hear the track. Alongside this AudioLink overhaul, we are handing back your texture memory: if you switch a feature off in these shaders, it is now completely stripped from your build.

AudioLink You Can Actually Dial In

Every audio reaction used to run through one fixed curve. The new Calibrated mode gives you Quiet and Loud cutoffs to match how loud the room really is, allowing effects to follow the music across its whole range instead of clipping on every kick.

• Beat Travel & Vortex: Pick a direction and hits will land at one edge and run across your emission layers instead of flashing the whole thing at once. In the Infinity Mirror, Travel sends each beat down the tunnel one ring at a time.
• Motion on the Beat: Brightness is the least interesting thing a surface can do. Outlines now widen and scroll their textures faster to the music. Goo and Wet layers gain the ability to swell, flow, and twist to the rhythm. Emission layers can now be shoved sideways, spun, or color-shifted on the beat.
• Color Cycle: The Beat Speed control drives the hue from the music, spreading the color along the Beat Travel direction so the color physically travels with the beat.
• Advanced Audio Data: We tapped into unused AudioLink data to add Sonar waves that wash over you from where the speakers actually are in the room, Chromatic Bloom for individual ColorChord notes, Note Swarms, and Spectrum Ribbons that draw the last second and a half of the track onto your body.

Switched Off Now Means Gone

Turn a feature off in these shaders and, until now, it was still in there. The textures it reserved, the code it needed, and the build time it cost all went onto your avatar whether you used it or not. This release takes it back out.

• Aggressive Stripping: Disabling heavy hitters like Light Volumes, LTCGI, Micro Detail, Toon ramps, or region masks removes them entirely. This hands back up to 16 of the 64 texture slots Unity allows, stopping them from taking up memory on your avatar.
• Inspector Folding: Switch a feature off and its controls fold away instead of sitting greyed out in your way. Nothing is ever stranded out of reach, as the Enable always stays put.
• Setup Button: A new tool under Channel Mapping points to an empty slot, offers to build a packed map, opens the Texture Packer already wired up, and fills the slots from your metallic, smoothness, and mask textures.

New VixForge Editor Tools

• Director Preview Rig: Drops a VixForge Director and an AudioLink into your scene at the origin, already wired together. Put a track on its Audio Source, press Play, and your material reacts the way it will in a world.
• World Lighting Check: Finds every material with LTCGI, Light Volumes, or VRSL switched on. Dropping LTCGI and Light Volumes on a material can slash a 28-second build time down to just 7 seconds.
• Texture Check: Weighs your texture cost against VRChat's 500 MB upload ceiling and flags oversized bent normal maps, saving around 4 MB each with one click.
• Eighteen One-Click Presets: Six for Latex Ultra, and four each for Toon, Clothing Pro, and Fur Pro. They set the finish only, leaving your textures and colors exactly as you had them.

This arc of updates rolls out across Latex Ultra 4.6.0, Toon 1.5.0, Clothing Pro 1.2.0, Fur Pro 1.2.0, and the editor at 1.6.0. Every new control defaults to what your materials already look like, meaning your existing setups will not shift until you decide to reach for a new control.

The Living Goo Update - Latex Ultra 4.4.0, plus Clothing Pro and Fur Pro

Available To Donators And Patreon Supporters (Early Access Benefits) Until Thursday August 20th

The goo stopped hanging still. It writhes, reaches off you onto whatever is behind, dents where someone touches you, and builds itself up your body on a slider. Two new shaders join the package at the same time. Everything new is off by default, so your existing materials look as they did until you reach for it.

Goo That Moves On Its Own

All of this sits under Goo Effects, which is now sorted into groups so you can find things.

• Writhe. The surface swells, sinks and crawls over you like something alive underneath. Fold is the one to reach for if the movement ever looks like it is on a timer: turned up, swellings turn, stall, double back and never come round again. It does not need Sag Distance, so a material can writhe while hanging perfectly still.
• Slime Shading. Turns the melt into wet slime: a deep glossy film with a mirror highlight, light coming through where it thins out, and neon veins threaded through it. Push it above 0, then Colour and Thickness do most of the work.
• Drips. Thick drops that gather, hang on a long string and let go, then land in a flat pool. Stringiness is the one that makes it: at 0 a drop pinches off like water, turned up it stays joined to you as it falls.
• Formation. Animate it from 0 to 1 and the piece builds itself out of the goo, starting at your feet and climbing up you. Put it on a toggle or a radial for goo that rises off the floor and becomes your gear.
• The goo reaches the floor now. It used to stop short and hang in the air. It finds the ground from the avatar itself, so it lands properly in any world and keeps up when you walk up stairs.

Goo That Reaches For Other People

• Cling. Strands reach off your outline and take hold of whatever is behind you, dragging it into the slime as you move past. Stand near someone and it reads as the goo latching onto them. It needs a copy of the screen, so it costs framerate and ships off.
• Touch. The material dents, bulges and goes wet where someone touches you. Paint up to four areas into the Zones texture, one per colour channel, then drive that zone's Press slider from a contact receiver. That is the whole setup, and it works on plain gear with no melt.

Two New Shaders

• Clothing Pro 1.0.0. Fabric-first, carrying the whole toolkit and adding what cloth needs: a soft sheen for silk, satin and velvet, real fur grown as geometry, and 72 one-click fabric presets.
• Fur Pro 1.0.0. Clothing Pro with the cloth half taken out and the fur turned up. Every hair is one continuous strand from root to tip, so it holds up from short pile to a full coat, and the coat grows only the hairs that will actually land on pixels.
• A fur brush in the scene view. Drag across the model and the fur follows your stroke, the way you would brush a real animal. Thirteen brushes, including four that shape the strands rather than only aiming them, and Length and Density paint into the same map.

And More To Play With

• Custom Noise and Custom Particle. Drop in your own noise texture and it drives the whole goo effect at once. Drop in your own droplet image and the same physics throws sweat, bubbles, sparks or petals off you.
• Gravity Flow. Wet streaks run down in the world rather than down the texture, so they fall correctly however the model is unwrapped and however you tilt.
• Outlines stop breaking up at seams. Run Bake Outline Normals on your avatar, set Outward Direction to match, and an outline that traced part of a shape and then stopped closes up.
• Masks for Viewer Context and the AudioLink reactions, so one patch can vanish in mirrors or pulse to the music while the rest of the material stays normal.

Two Things To Do After Updating

• If you use an Alpha Map, invert it. It now marks what to remove, the way a body-hiding mask is painted: black keeps the pixel, white takes it away. An empty slot shows everything.
• Re-lock any material with an animated colour. Marking Color as Animated used to catch every property whose name ended the same way, so the slime, glitter and pathing colours came back at their defaults. Unlock and re-lock anything this caught.

Full notes for all five releases are on the shader changelogs, and every control is written up on the shader docs.

The Detail Update - Latex Ultra 4.3.0 and Toon 1.2.0

This one is all about fine detail. The texture you painted comes back out of the surface, there are two brand-new Special Effects, and there is a pile of quality-of-life work underneath. Everything new is off by default, so your existing materials look exactly as they did until you reach for it.

Detail That Actually Reads

Your maps do more with the light now, and most of it needs no new textures to bake.

• Cavity sharpens the fine detail already in your height channel. Pores, seams and stitching sink into shadow, ridges catch the light. It reads the Packed PBR Mask you already have.
• Micro Shading and Micro Lighting make your occlusion react to where the light comes from - creases go dark under a side light, raised detail brightens - instead of just dimming everything evenly. Each has a trim per lighting system.
• Bent Normals let ambient light follow the shape of the surface, so crevices stay dark and forms read solid. Drop in a bent normal map baked next to your AO.

Your Maps, Made Easier

• A Height Map slot of its own, so Substance and Marmoset height exports go straight in instead of being repacked by hand. It drives Parallax, Displacement and Cavity.
• Auto on every mask channel. Masks read black-and-white and alpha-carried images without you working out which is which. Set a channel to Auto if a mask ever comes out blank.
• Detail Strength works without a Micro Detail Map now, sharpening the fine detail already sitting in your normal map. Pores and skin grain, with no second texture.

Two New Special Effects

• Infinity Mirror. The surface reads as glass over a light that reflects away into the distance, a receding tunnel that shifts as you move around it. Pick a ring of lights, a dot grid, or your own pattern.
• Inner Cosmos. A window onto a living galaxy with real depth: look in from any angle and it parallaxes and swirls, and it never repeats. Fully procedural, no texture needed. Turn on Living Energy with AudioLink in the world and the whole volume moves to the music.

And More to Play With

• Flipbooks - an animated overlay from a GIF, an image sequence or a sprite sheet, placed on the mesh like a decal.
• Car Paint - a pearlescent flip-flop that travels with your view, with metallic flake and a wet clearcoat gloss.
• Transparency slider - fades the whole material out in the Fade and Transparent modes.
• Toon gets a gradient editor - build the shading ramp right in the inspector, no external texture needed.

Full notes, including the fixes and a couple of "heads up" items for existing materials, are on the shader changelogs.

Thank You for 1,500+ Downloads

It's official: the Vixens Toolbox has crossed 1,500 downloads. Every single one of those is a creator who trusted our tools with their avatars and their worlds, and we could not be more grateful.

When VixForge Interactive started, the goal was simple: kill the repetitive, mind-numbing parts of the VRChat pipeline so creators could spend their time actually creating. Fifteen hundred downloads later, that mission is resonating far beyond what we ever imagined.

What 1,500+ Means to Us

• Every download is a creator we get to build for, and a reason to keep raising the bar.
• Non-destructive Quest conversion, real QEM mesh decimation, multi-ecosystem world auditing, and a full animation authoring workspace, all shipping in one free VPM package.
• A growing community that files issues, shares screenshots, and pushes these tools to their limits.

To every creator who installed the toolbox, reported a bug, requested a feature, or simply told a friend: thank you. You are the reason this project keeps growing, and we are only just getting started.

Here's to the next 1,500. Onward.