Chapter 01

What Dreamer Pro is

Dreamer Pro is a timeline editor for VRChat worlds. You lay a show out on a timeline. Every visitor sees your world perform it in time.

A show made with Dreamer Pro is called a Dream. A Dream can:

  • Bring objects on stage and take them away again. Entrances and exits have their own effects.
  • Keep objects moving while they are there: hover, pulsate, sway, jitter, rotate, orbit.
  • Glide an object somewhere, hold it, and bring it back.
  • Play a sound from one spot in the world. Or from everywhere at once.
  • Show text and image cards in front of each viewer.
  • Ask each viewer a question. Branch the rest of the show on their answer.
  • Change the sky for everyone. Or for one person.
  • Teleport the audience to a spot and arrange them in a line or a curve.
  • Change how people sound to each other: quieter, louder, farther, muffled, echoing.
  • Change how a viewer moves. Hold them still, or set their walk and their jump.
  • Put a Dreamwalker on stage. A Dreamwalker is a performer recorded from a real performance in VR - body, voice and face - replayed in your world on any avatar you choose.
  • Make that performer look at each viewer. Walk it along a path. Change its costume. Let visitors pose it with their hands.
  • Frame a shot. The viewer sits in darkness with one window on the world, and the world moves behind it.
  • Fade a viewer's sight to black and back.
  • Point a viewer at something. Or draw them a path on the floor.
  • Swap an object's material at a set moment.
  • Play an animation clip on an object. Once, or on a loop.
  • Open a VRChat group at the right moment: its page, its join listing, or its store.

A Dream can run in time with a video. It can also run on its own clock with no video at all. The whole room can watch one playthrough together, or every visitor who walks in can get their own. A presenter can step through it slide by slide. It can sit behind a pin until someone opens it. And you can save the whole thing to a single .dream file and hand it to someone else, who imports it into their world with everything it needs.

You do all of this in one Unity window called the Dream Editor. There is no code to write.

What you need#

  • Unity 2022.3, the version VRChat worlds use.
  • The VRChat Worlds SDK, version 3.10.3 or newer, through VRChat Creator Companion.
  • VideoTXL, the video player Dreamer Pro plays in time with. Installing it is covered in the next chapter.
  • A VR headset is needed for three things: recording a Dreamwalker performance, posing a performer in the world, and showing cards on the viewer's hand. Everything else works from a computer.

How this manual is arranged#

The chapters follow the order you will meet things: install, make a first Dream, learn the editor, then one chapter per part of the toolset. The last chapters cover sharing Dreams as files, building your world, fixing problems, and the words this manual uses.