[VRChat] Placing Downloaded Assets: Importing, Scale, Collision, and Pink

You can place floors and walls now. But inviting people into a room made only of grey boxes feels a little bare.

Modeling your own desks and chairs is a lot of work, though. Use what other people distribute instead. In practice, most world creators combine their own work with downloaded assets.

This article covers importing a distributed asset, placing it in your room, and fixing size, orientation, collision, and pink surfaces.

What You'll Learn

• How to pick assets meant for worlds
• The flow from import to placement
• How to fix models that come in giant or tiny
• How to add collision to an imported model

Start from a scene with a floor. If you don't have one, build it in your first world.

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Pick things labeled for world use

There are several distribution sites, but the largest collection of VRChat world assets in the Japanese-speaking scene is Booth. Search with terms like "VRChat world furniture."

Three things to look at when choosing:

• Does it say it works in worlds? Skip anything explicitly labeled for avatars
• Which platforms — PC only, or Quest-compatible? If you plan to ship to Quest, check this first
• The format — unitypackage or FBX. A unitypackage is easier when you're starting out

Avoid putting avatar assets into a world. Clothing and hair usually assume a dedicated shader (lilToon and friends), so bringing them into a world often turns them pink or leaves them clashing with the room's lighting.

The Unity Asset Store has furniture too, but a lot of it isn't tuned for VRChat — different rendering assumptions, no collision. Early on, Booth items labeled for world use are the safer bet.

It also helps to know the difference between free and paid. Paid assets usually come with a Prefab ready to go, collision already attached, and documentation. Plenty of free assets are perfectly usable, but they may lack collision or ship oversized textures.

Hands-On: Import one piece of furniture and place it

Import one desk or chair, place it on the floor at the right size, and make it something you can bump into.

1. Import the unitypackage

Drag the downloaded .unitypackage file into Unity's Project window.

A list of what's inside appears. Press "Import" as is. You can pick and choose, but taking everything is fine at first.

A new folder appears in Project. Inside are models, materials, textures, and usually a Prefab.

FBX files work the same way — drag them into Project. FBX often doesn't carry full material information, though, so things can look pure white or grey right after importing.

2. Place it on the floor

If there's a Prefab, drag it into the Hierarchy. If you can't find one, dragging the model itself (the file with the blue icon) also works.

Once placed, adjust the position in the Transform. If your floor's top surface is at Y=0, furniture goes at Y=0.

At this point the size or orientation is usually wrong. Next we fix that.

3. Fix the size

The model you imported may be five times the height of a person, or the size of a bean.

The cause is that the software that made the model uses different length units than Unity. A model built in centimeters comes into Unity a hundred times too large.

There are two places you could fix it, but the model's Import Settings is the correct one.

1. Select the model file (the FBX, say) in Project
2. Change Scale Factor in the Inspector's Model tab (0.01 for a hundred-times error)
3. Press "Apply"

Now every copy you place comes in at the right size from the start.

You could shrink it with the Transform's Scale instead, but don't. You'd have to shrink every copy by hand, and it affects collision and physics calculations too.

For a size reference, the blue figure (a player) is about 1.6m tall. A chair's seat sits at 40–45cm, a desk around 70cm. Leaving one 1m Cube in the Scene as a human-scale reference makes comparison easy.

4. Fix the orientation

Furniture sometimes lies on its side, or comes in rotated 90 degrees.

That happens because the software that made the model and Unity disagree about which way is up.

Two ways to fix it:

• Set the Transform's Rotation X to -90 (a patch, but reliable)
• Correct the orientation in the model's Import Settings (fixes it at the source)

For a single copy the Transform is enough. If you're placing many copies of the same model, fix it in Import Settings.

5. Add collision

Freshly imported furniture is walked straight through, because it has no collision.

Distributed Prefabs sometimes include it, so press Play and walk first. If you pass through, add it yourself.

The most reliable approach is adding a Box Collider by hand.

1. Select the furniture you placed
2. Add a Box Collider via "Add Component"
3. Press "Edit Collider" in the Scene view and fit the green box to the furniture

For complex shapes, parent it under an empty object and line up several Box Colliders. A desk only needs two: the top and the leg area.

A Mesh Collider would match the visible shape exactly, but it costs performance. Furniture you just need to bump into doesn't warrant it (covered in collision basics).

6. Check your work

Press Play and walk around what you placed.

Check	Expected result
Size	The chair's seat is below your waist, the desk is around waist height
Orientation	Not lying on its side or upside down
Color	No pink surfaces
Walking	You stop against the furniture instead of passing through
Standing on it	You can get on the desk (remove collision if you'd rather not)

You can't judge size without walking around it. Even with correct numbers, standing next to something can feel off. Adjust freely when it does.

Four symptoms you'll meet right after importing

Listed roughly in the order you'll run into them.

• It's pink (magenta) → The shader isn't working. Switch the material's Shader to Standard and reassign the textures. See materials and textures for the details
• Giant or microscopic → Fix Scale Factor in the model's Import Settings
• On its side, or 90 degrees off → Set Rotation X to -90, or correct it in Import Settings
• You pass through it → No Collider. Add a Box Collider

If it looks pure white or grey, the FBX usually carries no materials. Build materials yourself from the included textures and assign them.

Check the license before you use it

Some people get stopped here rather than by anything technical. Distributed work comes with rules about how you may use it.

Check the product page or the included documentation (README, terms of use) for:

• Whether world use is allowed (some assets are avatar-only)
• Whether modification is allowed (changing colors or sizes can count as modification)
• How redistribution is handled (uploading in a world is normally fine, but it's sometimes spelled out)
• Whether credit is required

Conditions on free assets are common. In particular, material ripped from other games, or music and images still under copyright, can't be used. Technically nothing stops you from placing them, so this is on you.

Bonus: Good to Know Up Front

• Don't leave unused assets around: Importing and forgetting makes the project heavy. Be careful about deleting, though — anything referencing them breaks. Keeping a separate scratch project is one way around it
• Only what you use ships in the build: A model that's in Project but not placed in a scene generally doesn't count toward your world's size. It still slows the editor down
• Demo scenes can be heavy: Distributed assets often include sample scenes. They're useful references, but leaving them in bloats the project
• Quest is a separate problem: Loading PC-oriented assets straight into the Android build often blows past the limits. Covered in gathering in one room from PC and Android
• Placing many copies calls for a Prefab: Identical furniture that differs only in position is easier to change all at once as a Prefab. Reusing parts with Prefabs is the entry point

Summary

Distributed assets turn a world into a room in one step.

• Pick things labeled for world use. Skip avatar assets
• Fix size with the model's Scale Factor, not the Transform
• Fresh imports usually have no collision
• Pink is a shader problem. Switch back to Standard

The question to ask before placing something is: "Am I allowed to use this in a world?" Make that check a habit, ahead of anything technical.

Once your furniture is in place, go to reusing parts with Prefabs to manage identical items together, or the path from entrance to seat to think about where things go.