# Retexturing Your Ready Player Me Avatar

## Overview

In this tutorial, we will look into a few techniques that allow us to make some cosmetic tweaks to our Ready Player Me avatar. For this tutorial, you will need Blender installed. If you haven't already, read the previous tutorial on [Accessorizing Your Ready Player Me Avatar](https://hackmd.io/@metamike/ready-player-me-accessories) before beginning this one.

## Understanding Your GLB File

Apart from your RPM avatar mesh and armature, the GLB file you imported into Blender also contains texture files. These texture files are needed to transform your avatar from a colorless mesh to an avatar with a face and clothes. In the case of the GLB file, these textures live within the GLB. They can, however, be upacked.

In Blender, open a second view within the viewport and change your *Editor Type* to *Shader Editor*. Select your avatar mesh (most likely labeled 'Wolf3D Avatar') and select your *Material Properties* tab. This will bring up an individual texture - in this case labeled 'Wolf3D_Avatar.001'. Click this material to view the material nodes in the Shader Editor view.


What you see may look unfamiliar and scary, and that's perfectly normal. This combination of *nodes* enables the mesh to render the texture. In this case, we have two textures that are being rendered. One is a Base Color and one is a Normal Map. You can think of a normal map as a texture mapping technique used to fake lights, shadows and details. We're not going to touch the normal map, but it's a fascinating concept worth exploring if you have interest in 3D modeling.

## Unpacking Your Textures

Next we'll unpack the texture so we can view it independent from the model. Simply go to your Base Color node and press *Unpack Item*. Select the *Write File to Original Location* option.


This will send your Base Color map to the location noted at the bottom of your Blender window.


Open this file.


If you've never seen a texture map before, this might scare you. What we have in this image is a set of textures that are mapped to the mesh we're applying them to. If you change your second viewport screen to *UV Editor*, select your material from the image selector dropdown, then select your mesh and change to *Edit Mode* (by pressing tab), you can see how the textures are mapped to the mesh. In this case, the texture is optimized so that multiple materials have been combined into one. This is important if you're wanting to create performant avatars that work well for consumer devices.


## Adjusting Your Textures

Now for the fun part. Open the texture from the location it was saved to. Make any adjustments to your avatar you want. I used Adobe Photoshop for my edits, but you can use something as simple as Microsoft Paint to test out this process. Once you've edited your texture, save it and in the Shader Editor window, open the image in your Base Color node.


Below is my slightly adjusted Base Color Map with a *MM* branded hoodie that's been recolored, a slight change in pants and a hardly noticeable Ethereum Eye tattoo.



Next, we're going to blend in another texture on top of the one we just created. To do this, we're going to add another image texture node. You can do this by clicking in the Shader Editor adding an *Image Texture* Node using *Shift + A*.


## Blending Textures

Open up the texture you want to overlay. For me I've created a PNG file that only contains an overlay of a tiled Fendi logo on the sweater (the rest is transparent).


Finally, add a *MixRGB* node using the same process as adding the image texture node. Connect the color of the avatar texture to *Color 2* and the color of the overlay texture to *Color 1*. Use the *Fac* scale to control the mix of both textures. Since I want the Fendi logos to be very feint, I've chosen a high Fac value.


## Conclusion

The possibilities are endless when it comes to retexturing your avatar, so have some fun with it. Shader nodes are a great part of your 3D development toolkit, and there are plenty of [tutorials](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ0qtcSymDI) online to teach you how to create some wild effects using shader nodes in Blender. Next time we'll take our RPM avatar into some new environments.