ChilloutVR AudioLink

Linking audio to effects on ChilloutVR avatars and worlds

AudioLink is a system that analyzes and processes in-world audio into many different highly reactive data streams and exposes the data to ChilloutVR world shaders, and avatar shaders.

Technical overview: The audio amplitude data is read into shader parameters via the CVRAudioMaterialParser component. It is then sent to the GPU for signal processing and buffered into a CustomRenderTexture. Then, the CustomRenderTexture is broadcast globally (called _AudioTexture) which can be picked up by shaders both in-world and across all avatars.

For the original VRChat version see llealloo/vrc-udon-audio-link.

Documentation for shader creators

0.2.8 - May 14th, 2022

New features

• AudioLink theme colors are now configurable via the AudioLink controller with a slick color-picker GUI. (Thanks, DomNomNom)
• Added the ability to get the time since Unix epoch in days, and milliseconds since 12:00 AM UTC. Additionally, a helper function, AudioLinkGetTimeOfDay() has been added, which lets you easily get the current hours, minutes and seconds of the time of day in UTC.
• An editor scripting define, AUDIOLINK, which will be automatically added when AudioLink is included. (Thanks, Float3)
• AudioLink can now compile without VRCSDK and UDON, for use outside of VRChat. This kind of usecase is still experimental at best, though. (Thanks, Float3)
• Added a few new helper methods to sample various notes of the DFT. (Thanks, Float3)

Changes

• AudioLink theme colors have been cleaned up, including a new demo in the example scene, and the ability to change the colors in realtime in the editor. (Thanks, DomNomNom)
• Changed a few default settings on the AudioLink controller to be more responsive. (Thanks, DomNomNom)
• Changed folder structure to put less clutter into user projects.

Bugfixes

• Fix vertical UV flip of the AudioLink texture on Quest. (Thanks, Shadowriver)
• Fix error when using "Link all sound reactive objects to this AudioLink" button. (Thanks, Nestorboy)
• Add a header guard to AudioLink.cginc to prevent duplicate includes. (Thanks, PiMaker)
• Fix various warnings in shader code. (Thanks, Float3)
• Fix NaN-propagation issue in the included video player. (Thanks, Texelsaur)
• Add a player validity check to the included video player. (Thanks, Texelsaur)
• Use Networking.LocalPlayer.isInstanceOwner instead of Networking.IsInstanceOwner, which is broken. (Thanks, techanon)
• The logos on the AudioLink controller were using point filtering, which was changed to bilinear. (Thanks, DomNomNom)

First time setup

Requirements

• ChilloutVR CCK
• The latest release: https://github.com/DomNomNomVR/cvr-audio-link/releases/latest

Installation

1. Install the requirements above
2. Have a look at the example scene, "AudioLink_ExampleScene". It contains a lot of visual documentation of what is going on and includes several example setups. Or cut to the chase:

Getting started

1. Drag AudioLinkController into scene
2. Link audio source by dragging the AudioSource gameobject into the audio source parameter of the CVRAudioMaterialParser component on the controller.

Installing to test Avatar projects

TODO. Currently you will need to test in-game.

Compatible tools / assets

• Poiyomi Shader by Poiyomi
• Silent Cel Shading Shader by Silent
• Mochies Unity Shaders by Mochie
• Fire Lite by Rollthered
• orels1 AudioLink Shader by orels1

Thank you

• Khodrin for the initial connection to ChilloutVR
• phosphenolic for the math wizardry, conceptual programming, debugging, design help and emotional support!!!
• cnlohr for the help with the new DFT spectrogram and helping to port AudioLink to 100% shader code
• lox9973 for autocorrelator functionality and the inspirational & tangential math help with signal processing
• Texelsaur for the AudioLinkMiniPlayer and support!
• Pema for the help with strengthening the codebase and inspiration!
• Merlin for making UdonSharp and offering many many pointers along the way. Thank you Merlin!
• Orels1 for all of the great help with MaterialPropertyBlocks & shaders and the auto configurator script for easy AV3 local testing
• Xiexe for the help developing and testing
• Thryrallo for the help setting up local AV3 testing functionality
• CyanLaser for making CyanEmu
• Lyuma for helping in many ways and being super nice!
• ACIIL for the named texture check in AudioLink.cginc
• fuopy for being awesome and reflecting great vibes back into this project
• Colonel Cthulu for incepting the idea to make the audio data visible to avatars
• jackiepi for math wizardry, emotional support and inspiration
• Barry, OM3, GRIMECRAFT for stoking my fire!
• Lamp for the awesome example music and inspiration. Follow them!! https://soundcloud.com/lampdx
• Shelter, Loner, Rizumu, and all of the other dance communities in VRChat for making this

Developer Notes

reup.bat for auto syncing a developer branch

First, fork this repo into your personal github account using the github GUI, then make a new unity project called AudioLinkWork then, check out your copy of of this repo, and move its contents, .git included into the Assets folder of the project you made. Once done, place the following .bat file in that Assets folder.

I recommend executing this following reup.bat from the command line to address merge conflicts and other errors.

rem be sure you're on the `dev` branch!
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/DomNomNom/cvr-audio-link
git pull
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME_HERE/cvr-audio-link

Version update processes

• Update readme in both places (root and AudioLink folder)
  • Check section on how to update
  • Copy over changelog for the new version to readme
• Update documentation where necessary
• Update changelog
• Bump version number in AudioLink.cs
• Clean up assets in wrong folders
• Test it
• Make release GitHub release with new relevant changelog attached
• Update the live world