avatar-optimization

[rose sequoia]

so i try to only do it to pieces i've already optimized and and made basically all the changes i think ill foreseeably want to make

[buoyant holly]

do something I would point out is clothing that is not currently rendered still takes up vram

[rose sequoia]

(otherwise i rather sacrifice the minor perf hit for easy of fluid editing)

[buoyant holly]

so don't try to put like 50 outfits on one Avatar

[rose sequoia]

do you know if there is anything you can do during runetime to remove any parts of your avatar from vram usage?

or the whole shebang has to be loaded in there at all times

[buoyant holly]

nope it's all loaded in vram constantly

[rose sequoia]

sadness

[buoyant holly]

which is why there's only a singular vram stat

and like the SDK count everything as if it's on all the time

[rose sequoia]

i guess the UV discard thing doesnt work on quest (because its part of the poiyomi shader, right?)
So we just have to use the less optimized ways on Quest.... which is the platform that needs optimization the most... 😦

[buoyant holly]

honestly would probably just want to have only one outfit on Quest

because you don't really have the triangle budget for multiple outfits

[rose sequoia]

This also means if people are only partially showing your avatar (shaders hidden, animations on) it will be less compatible than if you used one of the older methods of mesh toggling or blendshape squeezing

not the end of the world, but that would be something id consider

[buoyant holly]

the quest crashes if it runs out of vram so yeah you shouldn't be running around with lots of outfits on a quest Avatar

[toxic needle]

last time I went into a public world on standalone quest my game straight up hard crashed instantly even with safety settings on literal maximum so thats not the only problem either :/

[marble rain]

it can be difficult to do if its your first time for sure. but you get there. you kinda want to hover at 40 mb of vram use max. and 10 draw calls

[jovial wing]

Would anyone be able to convert a pc only avi to quest compatible for a freind of mine? I would do it but my pc is broken rn

[hollow root]

Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\moody\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.0\scripts\addons\cats-blender-plugin-master\tools\importer.py", line 880, in execute
bpy.ops.cats_importer.display_error('INVOKE_DEFAULT')
File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 3.0\3.0\scripts\modules\bpy\ops.py", line 130, in call
ret = _op_call(self.idname_py(), C_dict, kw, C_exec, C_undo)
RuntimeError: Error: Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\moody\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.0\scripts\addons\cats-blender-plugin-master\tools\importer.py", line 1113, in draw
row.label(text=t('ErrorDisplay.eyes2', naéme=self.eye_meshes_not_named_body[0]))
File "C:\Users\moody\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.0\scripts\addons\cats-blender-plugin-master\tools\translations.py", line 64, in t
return output.format(*args, **kwargs)
KeyError: 'name'

location: C:\Users\moody\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.0\scripts\addons\cats-blender-plugin-master\tools\importer.py:966

location: <unknown location>:-1

When I clicked export in CATS, THIS error popped out, it broke me?!?!?!!@?@?

[cold yarrow]

You're using the wrong CATS - you need the development version, not the one from the master branch. Get this: https://github.com/absolute-quantum/cats-blender-plugin/archive/refs/heads/development.zip

(this applies for Blender 3.0+)

[hollow root]

In Blender I changed the Tris to 7500 in my model in CATS, but when I put it in unity, it says in the SDK builder tab in the control panel that the preformance is very poor, and it became above 20,001, why didn't it reduce the polygons in unity?

[cold yarrow]

Is there an error in the builder about legacy blendshapes or normals or something?

[hollow root]

I think this will explain

[buoyant holly]

did you actually click on the quick decimate

[hollow root]

Unity is living and is a traitor

[hollow root]

No, but the tris is already low and it said in the warning no more decimation because it's already less than 7500

[buoyant holly]

then your tool wouldn't have done anything if you didn't actually tell it to do anything

maybe you should go double-check in blender edit mode to see how many triangles your model actually is

[hollow root]

I think this explains, I swear I tried to follow the tutorial you sent

[buoyant holly]

that screenshot is only going to tell you stuff related to PC triangle counts not Quest triangle counts

so you literally haven't decimated your model to 7000

[hollow root]

Should this work easier to reduce polygons on quest?

[buoyant holly]

yes that should potentially work the bake function

[hollow root]

Please tell me why it does that?

[buoyant holly]

does what

[hollow root]

When I try to make eyes move in a certain direction in rotation states, the eyes are not proportional, and it completely stays away from the eyelid, just watch the video above!

[buoyant holly]

I wouldn't be able to tell what's causing that just from watching your video

[radiant shadow]

got more eyebones? Eye_L / Eye_R - LeftEye / RightEye

[fading sedge]

Looks to me like the two eye bones have different roll, while they both should have none. In blender, select the eye bones in Edit mode and do Alt+R. Do the same for head, neck, chest spine and hips bones, as they can influence eye rotation as well if they have some roll stored

[cold yarrow]

This ^ issue has come up a bunch lately, fascinating.

[fading sedge]

I find that some bases sold out there often have either a 90 or 180deg roll applied on the hips-head bone chain for some reason - something that is easy to miss

[dull sonnet]

Would any1 know how to make an avi only use 1 type of physbone since whenever I edit one almost all the hair has to go (example being women models use 2 phys on the button and 4 on the chest so then I only have 2 to use)

[mint topaz]

i do not understand the question

youre probably needing to just create a root bone in blender

[dull sonnet]

Oh okay also would u know any good vids for contact toggles. I followed one but didn't work

[mint topaz]

@dull sonnet

[dull sonnet]

I watched him but once I followed the steps it didn't work 🥲

[fading sedge]

In what way did it not work exactly?

[mint topaz]

He has pretty much the best explanation around, what part isnt working? @dull sonnet

[drowsy jewel]

can i decimate geometry / unsubdivide without the texture/uvmap messing up?

[vivid night]

If you only do it a tiny bit

[buoyant holly]

manually dissolving Edge Loops less likely break uvs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWhuCxFXy9k

[vivid night]

That's gonna take foreeevverr lol but you're right ❤️

[buoyant holly]

Checker deselect might be helpful for that

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/meshes/selecting/checker_deselect.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYTmFHQDpHY

[drowsy jewel]

i'm trying to get the avatar that is 250k polys to like 150 but sounds impossible unless i just delete most of the assets

but i guess it's alright if some assets are hidden at a given time, based on the toggles?

[buoyant holly]

sdk count everything on your avatar even if it's hidden

[buoyant holly]

you could try dissolving Edge loops

[velvet crow]

Has anyone tested the effectiveness of mip streaming for VRC avatars? I know that it generates 33% larger textures due to the other quality versions it needs to generate, but I wasn't sure if it actually swaps out of VRAM or what adjustments a user would need to do to get it to work properly.

I mainly ask because, based on the way mip-streaming is defined in the Unity docs, it sounds like it should be drastically reducing the quality of textures to fit within VRAM. But clearly this isn't really something that is happening in practice.

[drowsy jewel]

hmm what is that?

[dull sonnet]

Hard to explain but my hand was grabbing my prop on my waist

And it just works atm like a toggle

[fading sedge]

Can you be more specific? I don't really understand what you mean right now

[dull sonnet]

When I reach down to grab my prop with a gesture it doesn't grab it at all. And it works like a normal toggle atm like on my hip to on my hand.

[fading sedge]

Ok, gonna need more details that that. Can you show us how you set it up in your controller?

[dull sonnet]

Just like a screen shot?

[fading sedge]

Yeah, a screenshot

Your controller setup, the contact setup. Names of parameters

And be more descriptive in how exactly you want it to work and in what way exactly is it doing it wrong

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWhuCxFXy9k

[mint topaz]

part of me believes you havent setup the gesturerigt/left parameter?

[dull sonnet]

Ill have to see idk how to check

[echo ferry]

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong?
Pc uploaded perfectly, but the button is faded out and won't let me upload to quest? So guessing its an optimization problem?

[sick timber]

Show the sdk window

There’s probably errors there blocking upload

If there aren’t

Disable other avatars in the scene

[echo ferry]

Most i see I it complaining about how many polygons and such
Only things in here are the pc and quest version of the same avatar

[velvet crow]

when they say "show the sdk window" they mean "take a screenshot"

[echo ferry]

Was waiting for my pc to load properly

I'll send..as soon as I can

it says it should be quest but then says no

[mint topaz]

@echo ferry click the 'quest' version

its under 'builder'

[ornate fern]

I've really been trying to optimize this avatar. I can't figure out any more techniques that are simple enough for me to do that will let me upload for quest. Does anyone have any other suggestions. I've crunched so many textures and yet I'm still struggling to hit 10mb

[buoyant holly]

this is an editor extension intended for worlds but it will tell you what's taking up file size for a Unity asset bundle so could tell you what's taking up file size on your avatar https://github.com/oneVR/VRWorldToolkit

[echo ferry]

thank you

[ornate fern]

Should I use the one on GitHub or the one in the VRChat Creator Companion (The one in the VRChat Creator Companion is giving me namespace errors)

Used the one on GitHub, unfortunately It doesn't tell me on avatars

[gusty moss]

Need samone with sdk2 to upload 2 avatars that i bought from booth

:3

For me.

Upload to my account

[buoyant holly]

that's because you actually need to upload a test build for it to actually read the file size report

[fading sedge]

I know that sometimes the VRC will be stuck with the MB value and not re-calculate it even as you keep changing stuff. So it could be that you are already below 10mb, but the sdk doesn't know it yet. One way to fix this is to switch to windows build, build a test avatar, and then switch back to android build

[buoyant holly]

you can still download sdk2 from the website

[ornate fern]

yeah that's how I've been getting this value. (The build done was 15 minutes from posting, I hadn't changed anything)

[fading sedge]

Pretty sure you can't upload avatars with an sdk that old

[ornate fern]

I removed all of my expression menus and almost there

[fading sedge]

Most of the size is taken by texture files really

[buoyant holly]

I would suggest swapping back to PC and then clicking test upload to get the exact file size breakdown

[fading sedge]

So keep crunching them. Quest really isn't meant to support a hole bunch of 4k texture material swaps like you can do on pc

[gusty moss]

I dont have a pc im a quest. And the friend who helped me he said he cant help me.

[buoyant holly]

then how would you be uploading the Avatar in the first place?

[fading sedge]

I would suggest you don't ask strangers for that. In order to upload an avatar, they would need your vrc password, and that's a recepy for getting your account stolen

[buoyant holly]

and explicitly against vrchat terms of service

[buoyant holly]

did you actually click test upload yet

[ornate fern]

I've only got 3 textures, all are under 50kb now lol

[gusty moss]

I trust the comunity.

😂

[buoyant holly]

that's explicitly against terms of service having other people upload for you like that

[ornate fern]

yep, that's how i was able to generate this report

unless im missing something

[fading sedge]

And that is exactly how you get your account stolen

[buoyant holly]

okay not sure what's wrong then just from your screenshot? are you having any errors in your console

[fading sedge]

Ok, well that shouldn't be taking up so much. The next heaviest thing is usually the vertexes and blendshapes

[buoyant holly]

sound effects also take up file size

[fading sedge]

Maybe also animations if you have some long dancing sequences

[fading sedge]

Quest does not support sound

[ornate fern]

no errors in my console. no sound effects, but this model does have quite a lot of blendshapes

[buoyant holly]

blendshapes do contribute to the file size

[fading sedge]

That's probably it then. Try deleting a few in blender if not using all of them

[buoyant holly]

I might suggest separating your face mesh from your body so that the blendshapes are only affecting the face so it's not having to store the vertex positions of all the body that's never going to change

[fading sedge]

I'm not sure they work like that. Always thought they only store the vertexes that are actually deformed

But I might be wrong

[buoyant holly]

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips#-except-when-youre-using-shapekeys

[ornate fern]

in speaking of blender, is there a way to see how much the base model itself is taking up data wise? I have two articles of clothing in unity and I wonder what's the size difference

[fading sedge]

No idea, but I would assume its proportional to amount of vertices

[velvet crow]

Wait it is? Then VRC really needs to figure out a solution, because people are giving out their login information constantly. Avatar creators can't share the unity packages, so they have to login to the user's account to upload for them.

[buoyant holly]

why can't they share that Unity packages

if you don't get the unity package you can't do your own maintenance so your commissions become ticking time bombs for future updates to break it

[velvet crow]

Many asset or model creators will allow avatar creators to make avatars for other people, but not to share the assets themselves

it's in their licensing agreements

Thry's tools even has an account switcher

[buoyant holly]

then you shouldn't be using those assets in commissions given that that explicitly against terms of service the logging into someone's account to upload

[velvet crow]

VRC should make that more apparent then, because it's the first I've heard of it and I even read most of the ToS and guidelines

Are you saying that you can get banned if you share your account details to let someone else login and upload an avatar?

Or is it the avatar uploader that gets their account banned?

[velvet crow]

This is probably a dumb question (since I can't tell), but did you click on "Build Report"? It looks like you have "messages" selected

the build report should detail all assets from most to least space used

[buoyant holly]

so looks like if you give your account to somebody to upload an avatar and they cause Mischief you would get ban as you're responsible for your account

https://medium.com/@vrchat/account-security-16be982332

@velvet crow

https://hello.vrchat.com/community-guidelines

[velvet crow]

Well that's not the same as what you said

Kind of

The top few pretty much say "You're responsible for your account." They don't say you will be banned simply for sharing the login information for your account

[buoyant holly]

well no account sharing is quite clear in the community guidelines

[velvet crow]

There is a conflict of information then

[buoyant holly]

the terms of service doesn't say account sharing is allowed

[velvet crow]

either way

it happens, so 🤷

if VRC wants it to stop, they should find a better method for uploading avatars

[buoyant holly]

uploading avatars are probably always going to require a computer

[velvet crow]

I'm saying: More explicit avatar sharing rules (allowing to share with specific people rather than public), or allow people to use a temporary, one-time token to only access the API routes required to upload an avatar

https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/avatar-upload-access-tokens
https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/avatar-sendingtrading

[buoyant holly]

personally even if you did have those setup not getting the unity package for the Avatar also sets you up for a ticking time bomb

like unity2020 is likely to break content

[velvet crow]

Sure, but that's just an opinion at that point. Many people have their licenses for their assets as "commercial allowed, but do not share source", and many people don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on avatar, when many people do custom avatars for $20-40

[buoyant holly]

well vrchat made it pretty clear to go Unity package

[velvet crow]

I do agree that people should be getting the Unity packages. But people are still uploading for other people, even if they have a PC and are sent the unity package anyways.

People don't want to deal with using Unity, so they pay people to do it for them if it just means some money and sending their password

[buoyant holly]

yep and that's probably where a good percentile of stolen accounts happen

[velvet crow]

yep, and that's why VRC should add a solution (which would be minimal effort) of adding tokens

dang, even Fusl commented on this 3 years ago 😂

[cold yarrow]

In the settings in Interface under Status Bar you can enable scene statistics

[viral verge]

I have a question I'm expecting a variety of answers for. It's cool I can see texture memory and fight to optimize it but what in people's opinions is like the lines? Ball park estimates. What in your opinion is good, medium, poor, and very poor?

[velvet crow]

Firstly, you can use this tool in Unity to see VRAM usage https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools It is nice because it shows not only textures, but also meshes (which are still loaded into VRAM).

As far as opinions: I try to use some math.

I would argue that 8 GB of VRAM is the most common, and 6 GB is the lower tier of most common. If you leave some space for the world, game, and other programs, it would probably come out to about 4-5 GB for avatars.

As such, if you had a world with an average of 40 people (basically the average upper end from what I see), you can do 4 GB/40, which leaves you at 100 MB per avatar. Though I often do this with 8 GB, so 6 GB/40 = 150 MB per avatar. But this is total VRAM, not just texture memory.

The best way to approach optimization at least for textures is mainly to use Thry's VRAM tool (linked above) and go down the list, since the largest will be at the top. I often turn down the resolution until it starts to look bad from a foot or two away, and then determine if I can do Normal Quality to take advantage of DXT1 (half the size of DXT5 and BC7 (High Quality), which include alpha).

Also, there are a lot of textures that either use Normal mostly or Diffuse mostly. So you may find a normal map barely does anything and can turn it down, same with diffuse or other materials.

[buoyant holly]

poiyomi if you're using it also has a bunch of handy Shader features that could help with the RAM usage like using decals so if you have tattoos on the Avatar you not make the main body texture 4K just to make the tattoo look nice

[velvet crow]

Yeah, a lot of people poop on Poiyomi, but really it just has a lot of features and gives you the ability to actually optimize your avatar and make it look good.

I was able to use a single texture for backface. So I had a 2-sided piece of paper that used just 1 image, instead of needing to do something else that would probably incur more draw calls.

[pseudo obsidian]

I'm pretty sure the primary reason people poop on poiyomi is because the most common place you see his shader is those 500 mat slot, 700,000 tri, 30 mesh avatars that break every performance rule in the book.

So it gets to a point where you see that same, dark rimmed barely lit toon look, several emissions, maybe a dissolve or 2, some toggles and those perf stats and go "man fucking poiyomi and his damn shader."

I may or may not be speaking from experience. However, because it's flexible and full featured, it's also very abusable, as no one bothers to use the tools he provides to stay performant.

I've seen times when people have insisted that locking the shaders breaks their emissions, so they don't do it. I didn't even realize not locking was an option, myself.

It's also where I learned to use rgba masks and tiling normals for things such as shirts and other clothing.

The real champ is those 512x512 sweater and leather normals I use on my avatar.

[heady smelt]

Just because you can animate a hundred properties in Poi, doesn't mean you should 😆

[buoyant holly]

https://twitter.com/VIANVOLAEUS/status/1517951160740687873?s=20&t=JuKh_iJtDl789TDhlGzv1A

V (@VIANVOLAEUS)

Back to shader: Can use seamless tiled normal maps per RGB area - tiny (128/256px) normal maps, but tiled around 50-100 times in the shader, giving you a higher effective TD.

You can combine these with an base nrm map for creases and baked normal details etc: (Blend with Base)

▶ Play video

Twitter · Apr 23, 2022, 7:38 PM

https://twitter.com/VIANVOLAEUS/status/1517951135528665088?s=20&t=JuKh_iJtDl789TDhlGzv1A

V (@VIANVOLAEUS)

Single material, 3.3k △, using RGBA masked 256px normals in @poiyomi's shader. 🧵👇

Likes

283

▶ Play video

Twitter · Apr 23, 2022, 7:38 PM

[dull sonnet]

I re watched the vid and did it again im able to grab the gun but not put it back on my hip

[viral verge]

Dangit, I just wanted a simple number to aim for and all I get is this overly complicated vague non answer that doesn't even give me a specific in the vram offshoot you decided to answer for instead

[velvet crow]

I'm sorry but I told you "100 MB" or "150 MB". It's written in there

I'm giving you context on why I came to those numbers and other useful information mainly so you can actually fit within it and have a better process for optimizing

What is it with people complaining about useful information lately, jesus

[velvet crow]

You also didn't ask for a specific number. You asked for "opinions on lines" and that you expected a "variety of answers for".

Don't be upset when someone goes out of their way to spend time writing up something that gives you a clearer answer with specific numbers that you could have read anyways if you just skimmed it for numbers.

[velvet crow]

yeah for sure. poiyomi getting bad rep 😭

[velvet crow]

But also, at the end of the day, if you want to do something properly you can't really take shortcuts, otherwise you may just cause other problems.

So, deal with it. You got good help, accept it 🤷

[robust anchor]

Even then you can still share a unitypackage file, so long as it only references the licensed files as opposed to containing them. [meaning the recipient will need to have that asset already imported into their project]

[velvet crow]

Is it as simple as exporting the avatar without the other content attached? What if the base itself can not be shared?

[robust anchor]

the unitypackage file format functions more or less as a zip-file. It's not a zip-file under the hood but it functions like one in that it combines project files into one larger file for easy of transfer.
When creating one, you can choose which files should be included and which shouldn't be.
If you do not include a file, it will not be within the unitypackage, and so it cannot be restored on the other end.
Say e.g. that I have an avatar's fbx file, which has a license that does not allow sharing it.
I can still create a scene in unity and fashion an avatar with that model.
Then, when I create the unity package, I only include the scene and the textures and materials I made for the avatar [assuming it was a simple texturing commission].
If the recipient was to unpack the unitypackage in an empty project, only the scene and textures/materials are present. If they open the scene, they will not be able to see that licensed avatar model as it literally does not exist in their project files. [and unity will log an appropriate error in the console].
If however the recipient unpacks it in a project that already contains that avatar fbx file, the avatar will work perfectly fine when they open the scene.

since the unitypackage file I sent did not distribute the licensed material, there shouldn't be any legal issues regarding the license.

and if there are, I think it's unlikely to hold up in a court, although I am not a lawyer

[velvet crow]

I see, that's insightful. Thank you

[robust anchor]

however, this process can be finicky, because if the version of the used fbx isn't the same, the reference MIGHT break [a.k.a unity might not be able to recognize that that file is the one that provides that model]. However, this most likely happens if the "update" is actually a recreation of the file from scratch(so it won't have the same ID unity uses to reference project files)

[worldly hull]

I don't know, what I still can do to enjoy this game...
I optimised my Avatar down to 13k Polygons, 2 Mats and 510KB Diskspace. Now it is even for Quest user as "Medium" ranked. But peoples still can't see me and answer after asking often with: "You are a gray robot". I don't know how can I roleplay in this game, if everyone just see me as a gray robot, even if my Avi is medium ranked for Quest standards.

[ivory sluice]

that will depend on a user's safety settings, i also have it set to show everyone but friends and trusted users as robots since so many people go way over the avatar performance limit, the problem is that most of the ones that are at fault won't do anything about it so there's not much you can do about it

[worldly hull]

BUt I dont get it, why someone should hide medium and bellow ranked users?
Is it even possible to make a "excellent ranked" crasher avatar?

VRChat fells way more like a phonecall, while everyone does play a singleplayer game.

My one is medium and not excellent, but still? How dangerous is it, to have by default all medium and bellow rank user shown?

[vivid night]

It's a normal thing, no one I ever met unless they are new shows all avatars, it's just a lag fest to have everyone all load in unless you're talking to them. If you want EVERYONE to see you, get a fall back. It's just how it goes. Even if 10 people are good, loading them all in lags and yeah, no thanks. You're hidden.

[foggy comet]

Can someone help me? I have atlased my model in Blender and changed material properties but i can't figure out how to save the texture.

[fading sedge]

If you used the CATs plug in, it literally saved the texture in the folder you selected when creating the Atlas

[foggy comet]

Yes it did but I changed the material properties because it looked more dull than before

I want to save that version

[ivory sluice]

it's not blocked by performance rank but by user rank on the shield level, doesn't matter if it's excellent.
and yes, an excellent avatar can crash by using corrupted or crasher shaders, because directx->unity->vrchat does not have a way to guess a shader's performance, that's why i always have all shaders disabled

[velvet crow]

Like dainami said, you can make a fallback. You can take your existing avatar and decimate it further and put it into 1 material. It will probably not look good, but it will at least be something and not a gray robot.

[long glen]

do physbones perform better than dynamic bones?

[buoyant holly]

yes they do which is why they're allowed on Quest

[vivid night]

That's the sole reason they were made

[long glen]

ahhh

I thought they tend to result in worse performance ratings when there's a lot of them?

[vivid night]

They can be bad when you use lots of them sure but dynamic bones are worse

[buoyant holly]

but if you're not like very poor rank with physics bones you'll probably be fine

[long glen]

well

i am at very poor rank with my 2nd vroid avatar

it definitely has too many physbones where it doesnt need them, but im not sure how to reduce them or what to replace with them

[buoyant holly]

the vroid export tab has a bone reduction setting

but here is some video tutorials that covers optimization of vroid in blender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyRmBKBCq9k

[long glen]

is there a way to optimize it directly in unity?

i can re-export it, i guess, but it would be a bit of a hassle since I also have a blender mask to attach to it

and also the tail needs to be bone weight transfered

[buoyant holly]

not really in unity as it's not modeling software

[long glen]

ah, alright, thanks

I guess I'll have to re-export it then tomorrow

[velvet crow]

For physbones, you can often combine the root if you have symmetrical or similar body parts. For example, breasts can have a "breast root" bone. Hair can also have a "hair root bone". This reduces the number of physbone components, which AFAIK is more performant, even if you have the same number of transforms (number of affected bones, basically).

You can also get away with weight painting tricks to reduce the total number of physbones, but maintain a similar amount of dynamic-ness in the way they look

If you need help in Blender I'd be happy to give some guidance 👍

[worldly hull]

R.i.P...
Its not easy with detailed anime Models, even not with MMD. Thats why I only see small simple cartoon characters under 5k like this here as fallback.

[velvet crow]

Right

[worldly hull]

if someone would try to make the standard anime avi to a fallback, I think it would look similar like this

[velvet crow]

You'll have to strategically decide what features you are okay with keeping and decimate where possible. I would probably prefer a very basic, crappy fallback that is somewhat representative of what I'm wearing, versus a robot or completely different fallback.

[velvet crow]

A lot of these were probably decimated with cats or something, where it can't necessarily make smarter decisions on what to change or remove.

[worldly hull]

thats notg possible witgh that many details.
My only idea would be to also have a that looking avatar but maybe with a sign on the head with the text; "Please show me, to let let me NOT stay this lowpoly-Mess for you" or something:

[velvet crow]

thats not possible with that many details.

Exactly. You have to compromise

You can choose to remove or simplify certain details for the sake of making the main model look better

[velvet crow]

but yeah, you can do that too. "please unhide my avatar" fallbacks is something a lot of people do

[worldly hull]

Oh hell no. R.i:P
And are you sure that fallback avis can not be hidden my tghe safty system?

[velvet crow]

They can be hidden yeah

Or wait, hmm

I can't remember. I think if "avatar" is hidden, it's still robots, so it doesn't matter

[worldly hull]

I am talking about the satfy system. if peoples have hidden everyone by default without pressing "hide Avatar" directly on me

[velvet crow]

Though my point was: You can probably remove/simplify certain materials to bring it into good/excellent rating for quest. Questies unfortunately just will miss out due to the: abhorrent inherent peformance of VRChat and the limits of the quest

Yes, it usually is just robots anways afaik

as long as "avatar" is not selected in the trust level for safety

If "avatar" is enabled in safety for a trust level, then it will show the avatar

[worldly hull]

I atlas the hell out of it already. I even made my avatar have their items and weapons weightpainted on a bone on the hand, that is scaled to 0 and scales up to 1 if I "enable" the item.

[velvet crow]

🤷

At the end of the day VRChat is inherently poorly optimized due to letting users make various avatars, so the limits are tight. It doesn't help that the Quest 2 is a mobile phone

I'd say if you already have medium for quest, then you probably did more than enough

If you can't sacrifice certain details or features, then you'll have to accept that your avatar is medium

[worldly hull]

but does fallback avatar not have a special permission or something, so that they are visible for everyone and must manully be hidden because they doesen't can harm anyone with that less permissions.

[velvet crow]

fallbacks only happen when the avatar hits the "minimum performance rating" under performance. It is separate from safety

If avatar is hidden in safety, they're just a robot

[worldly hull]

only a few mats and 5k poligons should never be ableto harm/crash someone.

[velvet crow]

What is causing the avatar to be medium? 5,000 should be good rated on quest no?

[worldly hull]

I hoped they have some admin-like visiblity permissions over the safty system.

Is it even possible to harm someone with a fallback rated avatar? if not, why not giving everyone the visiblity permission, that stays over the safty system? and even if someone would missbehave and make something like a 4k poly giant c_ck or something. they still can be manually be hidden globaly.

[velvet crow]

idk what to tell you. They probably decided that robots is the easy thing for safety settings, rather than performance settings

[worldly hull]

but without having any rights. This game is more like a phonecall conversation than a videochat or even a game.

[velvet crow]

Your only option is to further remove details/decimate, or deal with it being medium. 🤷

[worldly hull]

but I thought that atleast fallback avatars have permissions to be seen?

[velvet crow]

I'm not sure what you're saying

[worldly hull]

If I make a fallback version of my avatar, can peoples still see me, even if they have avatars disabled in their safty system?

[velvet crow]

Fallback avatars are if the avatar falls below the "minimum performance rating" set in the users' performance settings.

Only robots are shown if the user has a trust rating and that trust rating has "Avatar" hidden

[velvet crow]

If someone chooses to hide all avatars except friends, that's their own choice and they will override the avatars anyways

Even if your avatar is excellent

[worldly hull]

they turn it off for everyone, for visitors and thrusted users. no one have any permissions my default without microphone.

[velvet crow]

That's their own choice

If they are like that, then they are probably not worth talking to

Nothing you can do on your end besides asking them to show your avatar

[worldly hull]

but how to play this game, or even roleplay if even hightly optmized fallback avatars are counted as evil?

[velvet crow]

It's not about "evil"

If people are hiding everyone's avatars, that's their own choice

it's a safety setting for a reason

If you're a visitor or new user, your avatar will probably be hidden anyways because IIRC that's the default setting

so 🤷

idk what to tell you, that is just how this platform works

if you don't like it, try to provide feedback on feedback.vrchat.com, go to a different platform, or make your own social VR platform :

[worldly hull]

tell me please the reason... (I mean I thought there is no danger from any fallback avatar?)
I asked the people and they always tell they don't want to be crashed. but is it even physically possible to crash someone with a fallback?

[velvet crow]

perhaps, idk

most people on VRC use the platform with notions and knowledge that is false

As far as I am aware, with the fallback requirements and shader requirements, it shouldn't be possible to crash people on Quest with a fallback

but at that point, it's up to you to convince them it can't happen 🤷

Even if something is some way, people believe things they are told, even if they aren't true

[worldly hull]

is quest not banned already?
I heared about it something, atleast quest1 and quest 2 and the comming quest 3 should have more performance.

[velvet crow]

If someone chooses to hide all avatars like that, it is their own choice and they are reducing their own experience 🤷

[worldly hull]

and even fallback does being affected by that, right?

that's what I am trying to ask.

[velvet crow]

The Safety settings override anything else and, yes, will also hide fallbacks

it's just the way it is

[worldly hull]

so no need for a fallback then...

[velvet crow]

🤷

fallbacks are for performance

Again, if someone is hiding all avatars and only shows robots, they are reducing their own experience and they are probably not worth talking to

I personally show all avatars for the most part, and just hide shaders for all users

So... yeah. IDK what else to tell you

[worldly hull]

but what is with some teching knowledge or making a "Don't hurt me" performance option, where peoples can be sure that they can not be crashed, but dont hide the hell out of the game.

many users just don't know what to hide to be safe, so the decide to just hide everything to make sure this will not happen.

[velvet crow]

Because someone can be obnoxious/a nuisance even with fallbacks avatars

it could be the size of the avatar or shape of it

someone could make a fallback that is a giant penis 🤷

idk

Someone could make a fallback that is a really offensive meme, idk

again, fallback is for performance

safety is not performance, and safety is not all about being crashed

Some people might be sensitive to certain colors, idk

there's a lot of reasons someone would prefer to see robots instead of fallbacks

especially since people can make custom fallbacks

You can't force people to see your avatar, if that's what you're getting at

People can always choose to hide your avatar, even if its a fallback

[worldly hull]

thats another topic. I am just asking for being safe for being crashed. many peoples don't care about that but does care about being laaged out or crashed. peoples that make really sure can still hide everything, but the thinking is of seperating it, maybe with a warning that it protects your for being crashed or laaged out, but still can contain: "obnoxious/a nuisance" contents.

[velvet crow]

https://feedback.vrchat.com

make a feature request then

Because really at the end of the day, even if you factually can not be crashed by a fallback, people clearly believe they can. So it's not a matter of features, it's a matter of people's mentality

[worldly hull]

Just adding a small red text in the UI panel with a new button, with pre-chossen setting, that have everything included for peoples that don't know what they have to hide and what they can still show.

[velvet crow]

Why are you telling me this? Make a feedback request. There is nothing I can do about it

[worldly hull]

I am just asking, maybe I just have a bad idea with many reason why this is not and never should be... IDK

[velvet crow]

You're not asking, you're telling me about something you want, despite it being a minor issue

if people are hiding all avatars, that's not your problem

if you don't like it, don't talk to them

simple really

now please stop pinging me

[zealous wigeon]

There are things the system doesn't account for, on PC you could have an excellent ranked avatar that takes up GB of texture memory.
And on both PC and Quest you could have an animator so heavy that it causes everyone's game to freeze for several seconds.

[worldly hull]

The thing is, I don't wanna ask all the time (also its annoying for everyone) but I don't know, where can see me and where does not?
Currently, I make medium rank optimised avatars for PC and Quest about trending games or movies and if they don't react by just seeing me, I don't know if it's just the safety system censoring me into a gray robot, or if my avatar / the movie or game where my avi is based on, is really that unknown and even if they see my, they just don't know where my avatar is based on...

If I stalk around corners with my avatar and noone is reacting, is it because they have blocked my by their safety system, or if they just know my character and what game or movie it is based on?

[zealous wigeon]

Haven't you brought this up before?

You cannot have a marker saying whether they can see your avatar or not because that would create a culture where you are forced to enable everyone's avatars (to your detriment) because otherwise you'd get people walking up to you and pressuring you to do it, VRChat is filled with socially anxious people, adding something like this would be a very dumb idea.

And that is ignoring the performance side of things, because if you show an avatar then it is costing you performance, no matter how optimized it is.

[worldly hull]

no matter if 5k or 500k poligons or if it have 2 materials or 200?

[zealous wigeon]

Well yes, it will always cost you performance.

At most VRChat could have a system allowing you to swap out the default robot, but then it would have to be out of VRChat approved avatars that perform similarly.

You cannot allow User created content to be always shown.

Far too many ways it can be used maliciously

[worldly hull]

IDK why or what does it mean but some players try to point with a laser on me.

[zealous wigeon]

Probably just people checking your bio.
If I am not all that engaged in VRChat then I start checking avatar metrics and the bio's people have written.

[worldly hull]

and if they disappear in front of you?

[zealous wigeon]

Then they blocked you.

Or just left

Not unusual for people to just leave if they aren't friends enough with the person they are talking to.

[worldly hull]

It always confused me all the time, then I ask some players and they also disappear in front of me.

[long glen]

how do I do that?

[zealous wigeon]

Create empty game object at the bone (in the armature) where the things you want to "combine" are and drag all bones (at the same level) that you want to be affected by the physbone to be a child of the empty game object and just add the physbone component to that empty game object.

[worldly hull]

Back then 2018, VRChat had a website with a entire list of peoples that you blocked and peoples that blocked you...
Someday it turn into error 404 or something and the only way was to check, over the "In Room" tab of the current lobby if someone disappeared in front of you...
But One day, even this did also disappeared on the only situation you can notice that someone did blocked you is if many peoples are "talking with the air". yesterday someone did inadvertently blocked me because:

"he miss-aimed while trying to block someone else that was voice-spamming loud: "ERIKAAA!" music."

[velvet crow]

doesn't this constrain the bones, so its less performant than just multiple components?

and less performant than doing it properly in blender?

[zealous wigeon]

I have no idea.
Good that you mentioned it.

[long glen]

trying to do it in blender broke it, but it worked with optimizing in vroid

although now, it randomly removed the physbones like my first avatar and i dont understand why

do i have to tell it not to auto fix things?

[long glen]

oh wait i see what i did wrong, i forgot to use the duplicate and convert function

[long glen]

I am kind of annoyed that the VRC SDK will say this, but doesn't really give you a way to fix it in unity

I wish it would have some way to edit physbones in unity that doesn't require getting into scripting

[buoyant holly]

how's the ever-loving heck do you have that many physics bones

[long glen]

vroid

the converter converts all the springbones to physbones, but it doesnt seem to give you any way to edit them or say

"hey, maybe dont convert basically every pixel into a physbone"

it's because there's physbones in the dress and hair but the converter doesn't differentiate them and turns every spring bone into a physbone

i dont really know what it's talking about with the collision check

[buoyant holly]

then maybe edit it in vroid so it doesn't have so many bones in the first place

[long glen]

vroid's editor is pretty limited

i cant tell if i somehow have a different version, because on videos it looks different, but it says it's updated on steam

it has 24 physbones but a lot are just unnecessary

[buoyant holly]

yeah they did change up the UI in a major version about a year ago

[long glen]

it doesnt seem to have a good bone editor

it's just like "this is how many bones there are" and doesnt let you control where they are or where you even want them

blender seems to have a good bone editor plugin but when I tried putting the avatar in unity it totally screwed up the textures and even some shapes

the physbones are what i need to optimize right now, but i dont understand how to make certain parts of the avatar (like the dress) move without using them, or even how to edit them or see what sections are causing the most performance issues

[mint topaz]

you can choose to not import any

when you duplicate the vroid to vrchat ready

theres an option

then you can add physbones yourself

[long glen]

it can remove the physbones if i dont use the duplicate and convert option, but I dont have any idea how to add them myself

the other thing is a lot of the physbones it does have are needed for the hair to move

and i cant tell how to reduce or edit them directly in unity

[gentle summit]

does anyone know how to combine materials and atlas textures? also combine multiple skinned meshes?

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTTnWUkswkU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT6wO01dwTU

[velvet crow]

PhysBoneColliders should be a separate script from Physbones, and often people don't add that many of them.

Though either way, if you want help learning how to edit bones in Blender I'd be happy to help you in my free time.

[toxic needle]

Soooooo here's the thing, I have:

1. reduced skinned mesh renderers from 5 to 3 (face and body separated + body shapekeys deleted, main body is now once piece instead of separate torso and legs, and clothes are now one mesh)
2. material slots overall reduced from 12 to 11

HOW THE HELL DID MY DRAW CALLS INCREASE

[toxic needle]

I followed every optimisation tip I could find, I even learned to weight paint elbows and shoulders on clothing, and this is the reward I get?

[fading sedge]

I'm no expert, but 11 material slots still sounds like a lot. Any way you can combine some materials of your clothing?

[toxic needle]

all are referenced from 2 atlases (and one for emissions) but I need them separated for hiding clothing etc until I find a better method

I have found something about SCSS which is supposedly good but there is zero information about it except for the wiki which is not particularly easy to interpret

[fading sedge]

Separate meshes means separate material slots, even if they use the same material. If you have like 10 different clothing items, then that's the best you can hope for

[toxic needle]

there are no materials spread across, and everything else is combined excluding the ones that need separate shaders or toggling on/off with the material

I've searched so many guides for any solution but none of them go any more in-depth than telling you to atlas your materials and combine meshes

[void violet]

Draw calls should only be influenced by the material slots called to draw in the scene. IE, if I have a clothing item that is inactive the the material slot on it should be irrelevant as its not being rendered.

But, once you get the slots and meshes optimized only other methods I know of to reduce would be something like GPU instancing though that is not applicable to Skinned Mesh Renders and requires two or more of the same mesh.

[fading sedge]

Sorry, this doesn't tell me much. How many meshes do you have total?

[toxic needle]

3

[fading sedge]

Why do you have 11 material slots on just 3 meshes?

[toxic needle]

To toggle clothing, accessories, and tail, as well as for each necessary shader, eyes and different emissions

For what I could gather, materials are less resource intensive than individual meshes

[fading sedge]

Still quite heavy though

Try toggling some things with blendshapes instead of materials

Also I would think that not having all the meshes on at the same time is more optimized than just disabling some materials while still technically rendering the same mesh.

[toxic needle]

I was told that they all still had to be rendered anyway so it doesnt matter

[void violet]

They are not all rendered if the game object is inactive.

You can look at your batches when you go into unity and view the stats on a scene

[fading sedge]

Vrchat still counts them for their rating on upload, but if the mesh is disabled, the game won't render it

[toxic needle]

I have the screenshots for the render analysis

bottom is the supposedly better one

So currently I need individual shaders for everything that needs toggling, and for ones with unique properties like metal glasses, eyes, glowing hair emissions etc. What other method is there of doing that?

[onyx harness]

what shader are you using?

[toxic needle]

poiyomi

[onyx harness]

You can use Udim for toggling

1 material with up to 16 toggles

[fading sedge]

You could use texture maps for things like metal ness and emissions instead of using separate materials/shaders

[onyx harness]

especially with Poi

[toxic needle]

where should I look to find an explanation on how to set that up?

[onyx harness]

Poi has a website with good docs

https://www.poiyomi.com/special-fx/uv-tile-discard

[toxic needle]

After all this time is was in the docs all along

Does that work for unique shader properties as well?

Like the glasses need metallic but nothing else, eyes and clothing have different emissions, probably half are because of this

[onyx harness]

you can turn on metallic and put a mask in to only work on the glasses part of the texture

black off, white on

[toxic needle]

How does having like 5 different masks affect the material count?

[onyx harness]

got my face with metallics like

though 1k will be reduced xD

masks will affect the vram/bundle size but you could have 1000 masks on 1 material

idk what 1000 things you'd be masking but...

[toxic needle]

Looks like I'll be remaking my altases

Thank you so much for the advice

[onyx harness]

one of the materials I use has 16 toggles, 2 unique emissions, metallics, plus smoothness and specular, matcap and audiolink on there too

[toxic needle]

Is there any place that identifies different optimisation techniques or is it just f around and find out

[onyx harness]

without udim this would be like 5-6 materials

it's just past knowledge from the community really.

[toxic needle]

Someone who has more knowledge than me should consider making one with links to each thing

There are so many complaints about people's unoptimised avatars but theres no easy way to get started

[onyx harness]

if you can get down to even Poor on the rating system you're ahead of 95% of the people that talk about vrchat content being unoptimised

[toxic needle]

My goal is stable frames when I'm mirror dwelling, only one of my home worlds can currently do that so whoever made the world did it really well

[onyx harness]

there is a good amount of people that just don't want to work for more than 10 minutes on it in unity let alone blender. The info is out there but you gotta be willing to ask questions rn and a lot of people aren't.

[toxic needle]

But still how are you supposed to ask for help on how to do something when you dont know what youre asking for. This is maybe the 5th time I've been here for help and you're the first to mention UV tiles and masking which completely solves the issue

I need to stop complaining and go to bed, lots of things to think about for tomorrow

[onyx harness]

udim is 'new' to the vrc community. Shaders have had it for a while but people either haven't explored it, or have and it did nothing because of the setup it needs. it has been recommended in her for a while though, it's just not a common thing that people talk about

[toxic needle]

Actually one last thought, none of this will work if people have shaders hidden right?

[cold yarrow]

UV tile discard is my next task, definitely.

been meaning to get to it.

[onyx harness]

same with material toggles

and if animations are off then nothing will work

[cold yarrow]

which is why it's good to make sure your avatar's default state is kinda sane. A thing I need to do, actually 🙂

[long glen]

Yeah I looked deeper in unity and it's basically spamming colliders under all the physbones. Is it best to edit them in Blender?

[heady smelt]

i have an avi i want to upload but it takes up to much memory somehow, anyway to fix this?

[cold yarrow]

if you mean video RAM, decrease texture sizes, number of textures. If you mean overall upload size, do those plus compression. Maybe fewer props, clothing, etc.

[zealous wigeon]

However, "texture memory" size (and total VRAM size if you use Thry's VRAM checker) is far more important to look at.
A low download size isn't very good if your texture memory (and total VRAM) is really high.

[heady smelt]

i mean parameters taking up to much memory, i cant really delete anything so idk waht to do

[cold yarrow]

Yeah no real choice there, that's a hard limit. You can see if you're using floats when you want an int, or ints when you want a bool.... or you can split the avatar into two, and only put half the accessories on each.

[heady smelt]

thankyou illl see what i can do

[velvet crow]

The colliders are a unity concept and should be editable in unity, at least to remove them.

[long glen]

Is there a way to export a VRC-ready prefab from unity to Blender, and then export it back to Unity?

I tried exporting from VRM to Blender and that worked, and but when I tried to import that to unity it messed up the textures and shapes randomly

I think I tried dragging it into unity as an fbx file? not sure

It was the file type that begins with f when exporting from blender with one of the add-ons

[cold yarrow]

You can import a VRM directly into Blender with an add-on

if that helps

[long glen]

I think I have that add-on

but I'm not sure how to export it from Unity once it's already ready for VRChat

I don't want to mess up the scripts by doing it wrong

[serene tinsel]

anyone know how to use the material combiner in cats? I've got my model from VRoid with 19 materials that imports just fine, but as soon as I click on "save atlast to..." it immediately turns into this

the ... makes me think there's supposed to be a dialog or something where I could maybe play around with more settings, but nothing pops up, the model just breaks

[fading sedge]

Did you update the material list before creating the atlas?

[serene tinsel]

ye, it had all 19 materials in the list

[fading sedge]

Hmm, looks like a weird bug

Is the model 1 mesh or several?

[mint topaz]

if its a vroid, its one mesh

[serene tinsel]

i think it's one mesh yea

[mint topaz]

speaking of; you're able to atlas in vroid studio

just a little bit more limited than blender, but you can do it in vroid studio

[serene tinsel]

ye i tried that, but it imported without eyes

[mint topaz]

huh

and so i assume blenders your second option for atlasing

[mint topaz]

spooky

im not sure whats wrong with it tbh

the atlasing*

[serene tinsel]

should mention that the vroid atlasing shows up just fine in blender

it's only when I export the vroid-atlased model to unity that he loses his eyes and body

have you been able to get the cats atlaser to work at all? was it some special version of blender or a different plugin mix?

[serene tinsel]

turns out that it actually originally imports as three meshes, but clicking on fix model merges them all as one of its steps. However, trying to atlas before the meshes are joined doesn't really help either

[long glen]

yeah vroid has an atlas function that works

but if you need to get it to 1 material slot it doesnt let you do that

or if you want to make use of the 4 material slots i guess, it doesn't let you choose anything but the preset numbers

I was having issues when trying to atlas with blender and not vroid yesterday

i saw a youtube comment that kind of fixed it, you have to choose file > external data > unpack all into files and make sure you have the file in a folder also

it still seems to make certain vroid things like the skin, hair, and certain clothes/accessories automatically have a weird texture, even if you literally only atlas them by themselves

[radiant shadow]

to atlas with cats/whatever in blender , you have to do something first or it will fail since i has no idea where the textures are

if you dont do it - you get this

[velvet crow]

Honestly, I've found texture baking/atlasing with blender to be a bit easier than CATS. Though I also often manually make a new single UV map rather than atlas the textures. Mainly since I can then prioritize materials differently. Like having some small accessory take up way less space, rather then being the same size as another texture for skin/clothes.

It is technically harder and more work than CATS, but in the end, I find it less of a headache than trying to get CATS to work how I want

[pseudo obsidian]

I always describe it as "Atlasing is better than nothing, but I'd investigate baking to a new UV setup, rearranged or re-done, instead of atlasing materials as is."

However, I'm glad they do anything to try, as the latter is better than the former, but the former is much better than nothing.

It's kind of a shame that most of the time, material optimization ends up being in the hands of users when they get a model. I get allowing some customization and an easy way to simply remove something and not have to go to blender to fix it is nice, but if that's the goal, why are we selling fully done packs that are 20 plus things stapled together?

People want avatars, but they don't want to commit an avatar to the "Done" bin and move to the next; the one avatar must always be modular and always be able to be back pedaled on the off chance that I don't like piercing A or Jacket F.

Sorry this turned into a rant. Long story short; Atlasing is much better than nothing, but if you want to really keep the quality AND lower your material count, UV baking is the way to go, even if all you're doing is rearranging all your existing UV's into one single material, pack em tight and bake to that.

[velvet crow]

Yep, completely agree

I wish there were better user moderation/performance settings that allow users to hide avatars or at least let it be known that their avatar is hidden for performance reasons.

One of the mods did this pretty well by allowing you to hide avatars based on more specific characteristics, even down to shader draw calls or something (iirc)

[pseudo obsidian]

I give VRchat props in the sense that They've given us some semblance of control on what we do and do not see AND kept the limits from being hard ones as sometimes some really neat creative avatars by responsible people can be made.

However, as neat as that mod sounded, I already have issues getting people to get familiar with the current performance settings; getting that granular would require I start opening up "Performance Settings and You" seminars.

And then no one will listen and will just blast "Let it all through"

I still find Quest users who simply do not care that they suffer crashes and Low spec PC players who "Simply cannot play if I don't see everyones avatar."

I feel if they can get the avatars performance stats (Minus the vram, as this obviously wont be accurate until it's unpacked/loaded.) to kind of precede the avatar itself, you can safely block avatars of a certain ranking and they never enter your RAM/vram/storage in the first place.

The only way to flat block an avatar, outright, is to have a download limit that is egregiously low and to not show them.

Man, I'm wordy as hell tonight.

[pseudo obsidian]

Even if I don't like it for a broad usage, I definitely personally wish I could do some things like that. You know how great it would be to block based on shader limit? God, I could pretty much set that as a catch all and live comfortably.

[velvet crow]

I think part of the issue is that the performance settings are simply not intuitive, and they can probably have presets if they do open it up to a boarder range of blockable statistics

Like the current options are: Download Size, fallback threshold, and then general quality and MSAA. Nothing else, besides kind of the safety settings, but I don't consider the safety settings performance settings

[wet harness]

question for someone who knows a bit how unity performs:
If I want to create a "thing" with lots of movable parts (let's say 50 for that example), what would be better optimized: skinned mesh renderer with 50 bones, skinned mesh renderer with 50 blendshapes, or 50 static meshes?
Assume about 10k polygons and 1 material.
I'm sure 50 static meshes is out of the question, because every mesh would create 1 draw call.
So bones or blendshapes?
Please ping me, so the answer doesn't get drowned ;)

[fading sedge]

50 bones doesn't sound too bad. 50 blend shapes will contribute to the file size if that is your concern

[cold yarrow]

UV tile discard could help cut this down a lot

[wet harness]

I'm talking more about a prop, that has movable parts, as far as I can tell UV tile discard can't move the mesh

[cold yarrow]

oh I see, I was thinking you were using the blendshapes for hiding the parts. Definitely bones then

[wet harness]

as I thought

[buoyant holly]

50 bones would be better because that would be one draw call whereas 50 separate objects would be 50 draw call and blendshapes can't really be used for rotations easily and also would be more expensive than the bones

[wet harness]

I didn't think of rotations...
in that case skinned mesh renderer with a rig is basically the only option ;)

[marble rain]

depends on how many polygons. is affected. and how often. cause you may not even need 50 blendshapes for it. or 50 bones.

but 50 bones is quite abit

[toxic needle]

I'm looking at the poiyomi UV tile discard setup in the docs and one of the steps is increasing the grid size to 4 by 4, but the option isnt there in my blender setup and no explanation of how to get it. Any advice?

[proper grail]

if you cant find it, just L+select islands what you would like to discard and add 1 x and/or 1 y to it

its just a visual helper

I know it wasnt in the blender version I was using when I set that up

[wooden prism]

Can someone pls optimize my avi kazutora for it to be available to get uploading on quest

[velvet crow]

found something that might be useful for avatar optimization
https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer

[velvet crow]

this too
https://twitter.com/VirtualRazgriz/status/1581970467963142144?s=20

Raz (@VirtualRazgriz)

wrote up some notes on the @poiyomi docs blog about optimizing VRAM usage and bundle filesize using texture import settings

https://t.co/rblO3iKI7f

with VRC adding avatar texture memory in the UI2.0 update, I want people to understand why it's important, and how to optimize it!

Twitter · Oct 17, 2022, 11:28 AM

[dreamy oasis]

Hey guys i kinda need help well i find that prefab of a rocket launcher but the hard part its that he have 200k polygon !!!

Do you have any way to fix it in unity like a plugin to remove some polygon ?

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/Whinarn/UnityMeshSimplifier

[dreamy oasis]

he wont add me with the .git adder

[buoyant holly]

well your error message says you don't have git installed

[dreamy oasis]

i need to install it ?

wait i didnt know that im sorry

[buoyant holly]

well that appears to be what your are messages is telling you

[dreamy oasis]

how to install git ?

[buoyant holly]

https://git-scm.com/download/win

[median wharf]

Any idea if liltoon is well optimized?

Im trying it out, I don't wanna be a lag source

[dreamy oasis]

I use it its realy cool dont be worry

realy easy to control too

[buoyant holly]

like checking the page it auto rewrites the Shader to turn off features you're not using so it should be fine

[median wharf]

Weird, i felt like it wasn't doing this, like it doesn't lock like poiyomi

[buoyant holly]

https://lilxyzw.github.io/lilToon/#/

[median wharf]

yeah i did read that

yeah it does lock on upload, i guess its just more subtills?

[dreamy oasis]

it worked but too be honest ive been reading the doc i realy dont understand how the lod generator work

[buoyant holly]

no clue myself as I use blender to do that kind of cleanup work

[dreamy oasis]

well i read a lot and test a lot and it work thank you !

[buoyant holly]

Cool

[marble rain]

what i dont like about that one is that he states mipmaps will make it look worse when that is a full on not true. the only thing it does is using extra vram to store multiple lower resolution textures etc.

[velvet crow]

I think "worse" as in it swapping to the lower res ones. It should also be swapping the lower res versions in and out of VRAM, not storing all of them. The only extra space would be on disk and buffering adjacent resolutions to the current mip level in VRAM.

Though it doesn't matter either way because VRChat doesn't actually use texture streaming.
https://ask.vrchat.com/t/unity-mipmap-streaming-in-vrchat/15858/3

[marble rain]

yea. atm it wont do anything and no it pretty much stores all mipmaps on the gpu

[velvet crow]

That defeats the purpose of mipmaps though

This system forces Unity to only load the mip levels needed to render the current Camera
position, instead of loading all of them by default. It trades a small amount of CPU resources to save a potentially large amount of GPU memory.

You can set a total memory limit for all textures in an application, and the system automatically reduces mip levels to stay within this budget.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/TextureStreaming.html#getting-started

mipmaps don't store all the mip levels in VRAM at once

unless you're saying with the way VRChat works now, it is storing all the mip levels in VRAM no matter what

[marble rain]

thats only if streaming. otherwise it just stores it in gpu

[simple wagon]

I don't see where it says that mipmaps are bad. For me, it says the opposite. That DISABLING mipmaps will make it look worse.

[ivory sluice]

mip maps are basically texture lod so it helps the renderer to get more avegarged results for the pixels depending on how far it is, disabling them for high detail textures results on the pixels being "jittery" because it can only take one texel per pixel on the screen, to avoid this without mip maps you'd have to iterate the texture varoius times.

In my case i disable them for low detail textures on big objects like lightmaps or objects with simple gradients or small color variations, and have them enabled for things like normal maps, detailed textures and any texture that will be tiled

[finite flax]

Bruh quest is so hard to publish for 😦

Can't get my model below 15k, and I need to get to 10k?

[zealous wigeon]

10k is only if you want to use it as a fallback, the medium barrier is at 15k and poor at 20k. At least medium is good since then Quest users can see you automatically, without changing settings themselves.

[finite flax]

I see

I'm still in a bad place then, I do want to use it as a fallback 😭

I'll be using a higher poly version so I want questies to still see the avatar

[buoyant holly]

do you have any mesh hidden under clothing?

[finite flax]

Deleted most of it already

I think most of the polys are in the hair I exported from Vroid

[buoyant holly]

I suppose you could separate the hair from the rest of the Avatar and whack it with a decimated modifier

[finite flax]

Wooo that did some work

[buoyant holly]

cool

would you mind hosting a wireframe of the Avatar so I can make suggestions for reductions?

[finite flax]

Face and hands also have a lot of polys, I've been trying to reduce them

At this point it feels like I'm reducing polygons by the unit

[buoyant holly]

are you familiar with dissolving Edge Loops as that would make much less of a mess tackling the hands and face

[finite flax]

Yeah I've been selecting edge rings and loops and collapsing/dissolving them depending on what I need

[buoyant holly]

and honestly even if you can only hit medium ranked on quest you're still miles better than most folks

but yeah it would be handy to have a custom fallback so you only have to go through this mess once

[finite flax]

The problem is I want to use it as a fallback, so I can still use the og

Yeah I'll only do this again once I want a new fallback but I'm prob fine with this one

[buoyant holly]

not sure it would get you a lot of polygons but I suppose the interior of the mouth would be somewhere that could be reduced with minimum visual impact

[finite flax]

OHH thanks

Also eyesockets

[buoyant holly]

yup

and the hair you could probably chop off every other Edge Loop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJB0vKYetA

[finite flax]

Oh...

Checker deselect...

After I did the same thing but manually

I'll keep it in mind next time

But yeah no, the hair is already obliterated enough, I think if I take any more polys she'll be bald

[buoyant holly]

there's some spots in the tips of the hair I was noticing lots of edge loops

[finite flax]

Mostly broken up, I still need some polys there to keep the hair curves

[buoyant holly]

yeah now the hair seems as low as it can go

what's your current triangle count

you could probably simplify the ears

or even just move some vertices around to completely cover the ears so you can completely remove them

[finite flax]

That sounds better actually

I'll try

I'm at 11134 rn

[buoyant holly]

I'd probably remove the ears first and then worry about moving the hair when you know how much it helps?

[finite flax]

Oops I forgot to mirror the fixed hand

Also did the ears anyways

[buoyant holly]

awesome you did it

it can all fit within fallback triangle count now

and now you know where to Target for next time

[finite flax]

Holy fuck

[finite flax]

Yeah I'll keep the 10k limit on mind next time I make a fallback

Also, some reduced parts can still help me on the original model, like the shoes

[buoyant holly]

have you compressed your textures

[finite flax]

I tried it but it doesn't remove the warning

[buoyant holly]

do you have like lots of unnecessary blend shapes?

have any 4K textures where you don't need them?

[finite flax]

I packed all textures in a single 2048px texture, and I only have blendshapes for lipsync, blinking and a single additional blinking

I have a lot of animations, it's probably those 😅

[buoyant holly]

yeah that might be a good idea to try to cut out some unneeded animations

this tool is technically intended for worlds but will tell you what's taking up file size in a Avatar just swap back to PC and use the local test build option and it'll tell you what's taking up file size https://github.com/oneVR/VRWorldToolkit

[finite flax]

I kept the important animations and thanos snapped the rest, I can now upload it!!

Thank you very much for the help

[buoyant holly]

glad to be of help

and now you can be done for a while with having to hyper optimized that much

as all the quest users will see your fallback if it's a pc-only avatar or a very poor Quest Avatar

[finite flax]

Lesgooo

Is there any way I can see the quest version on pc without uploading a standalone of it?

[ivory sluice]

no

[zealous wigeon]

Only thing you can do is upload the Quest version to PC, doesn't catch everything, but is the only thing you can do without a Quest.

[wooden prism]

Can someone pls optimize my kazutora model for me to have on quest and upload it for me I been waiting months for it

It’ll and it sucks ik it’s gonna be a lot of work

[cold yarrow]

it is a lot of work 🙂

[buoyant holly]

folks are unlikely to optimize your model for free

[wooden prism]

Yeah ik

[rose sequoia]

Thry's avatar evaluator tool mentions that having states without a motion "might cause issues" and suggested playing empty animation clips in them... Does anyone know what these "issues" might be? (are they performance-related issues?)

If it would optimize performance i might go and fix them up,but otherwise meh

[frozen pumice]

Is there any way to find an avatar on its own without having to use an avatar world?

[toxic needle]

you can find free ones on gumroad, jinxxy, booth etc by searching vrc avatars + lowest price first

Or are you searching for one specific one

Because if thats the case then no, ask #avatar-search-old or search the name of the exact model you're looking for, theres a chance the creator has an avatar world containing it advertised

[frozen pumice]

Ok, thank you

[onyx harness]

Write Defaults Off literally stops working completely if even a single state is left with no animation applied. Some Write Default On creators and tutorials advise to leave it blank as unity takes care of animating things for you basically. But if you swap to Off or already use Off then you'll have a amazing time filling all those states in.

[rose sequoia]

Ah, ok cool thanks - inconsequential for me.

[undone cradle]

WD Off for the win. :)
https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatars-30#write-defaults-on-states

Hate that Unity still hasn't made WD Off the default, it's a leftover backwards compatibility from before Unity 5, ancient stuff that isn't needed any more.

[onyx harness]

This page is quite frustrating. It talks about setting a standard for all creators to use Off, mentions they're On by default and need to be disabled, goes on to recommend using Off and explain that this may then require some "reset" animations just o end the whole argument with this

Who wrote this xD

[mint topaz]

bruh lol

[proper grail]

Honestly, I just use write defaults off with a topmost layer that plays a single 1 frame animation on 0 speed that has all of the defaults I care about
Same thing more control

[heady smelt]

I only appreciate how the community first favored wd on, now not
https://github.com/hai-vr/combo-gesture-expressions-av3/issues/146

[raven geyser]

Anyone else knows that a lot of avatars tend to be flagged as very poor. It seems like it's pretty hard to write avatars that are poor or better

[buoyant holly]

yes a lot of folks don't give a hoot about optimization

[cold yarrow]

yeah, it's quite annoying

[heady smelt]

impossible if you need multiple light source, if you know...
difficult if you want toggles n clothes, polygons...
annoying if you do, because your avi autoshows but in shield status. therefore hiding things. others wont click your avi to enable "show all."
not if its already showing. annoying to have to say "hey, you can see me but you still need to click and enable 'show all..."

[mint topaz]

uh huh

its your own fault for commissioning someone here, mind you

take care next time

[rose sequoia]

I just like Write Defaults On because it makes setting up animations for things easier most of the time. With them off I have to consider all the changes the last state did and potentially reverse them with a counter-animation before moving on to do whatever I want to do next (vs just moving on and only needing to animate what will differ from the avatar's default state).

Unless someone tells/shows me it actually has performance benefit to use WD off I'd rather just save the time of making double-ups of animations all the time.

[proper grail]

Hmm it might just be a different thought process, wd off always made sense to me as all the animations in a layer control the same set of things.

[proper grail]

did you just say he scammed you

[onyx harness]

This man looks like he just lost control of his account. Went from saying this person is a scammer just a couple hours ago in every channel to recommending them in every channel.

[mint topaz]

this

sounds like a scam

lol

[tropic sonnet]

True lmao

[vocal kite]

Hey y'all, I'm trying to reduce the polygon count on an avatar by quite a bit. The tool I managed to find that looked nice is unfortunately outdated and no longer works (Mantis LOD Editor Online). Does anyone have any tools or modern guides that would still work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thFhsYGDEJw Here's the unfortunately outdated guide I found.

[cold yarrow]

decimate in Unity? weird. Just do it in a modeling app like Blender.

[vocal kite]

Fair! I'm still new to VRchat, unity, and blender in general, so I'm not sure what the best way to do it is. Still happy for any guides or tips!

[heady smelt]

this tool still works, but is no longer free...Ill let you figure out how to ethically solve that one

In Blender, there's three good ways to decimate
this video explains two of them in a few minutes (cats and manual edge looping): https://youtu.be/8MkgXcidxg4?t=182
the other way is to select the mesh in object mode, enter edit mode, select what you want to decimate, click on mesh in the top left, select cleanup, select decimate geometry

[vocal kite]

Thank you! I've been messing with cats for a little while and having some issues, I'll look into these other ideas!

[buoyant holly]

not the most exciting thing in the world but as preparation for the next furality condensed all of my badges down to a 1k material

[ivory sluice]

Man the luma badge brings me so many memories

[tawdry garnet]

How much texture memory usage would be considered fine for the Quest 2? I know there's no official performance rating for it yet, but I want to know roughly how much I should aim for

[runic slate]

is it more optimized to have separate image textures for toggleable clothing, or to put every single texture onto one (large) image so there's only one material?
the full image texture is 3600px

[ivory sluice]

it's more optimized to have it one material because it reduces the draw call count

[runic slate]

even if its a large image?

[mint topaz]

more material slots = more draw time

so yea

[runic slate]

alright, thanks

is there a specific image size i should keep the texture less than? what is considered "too big"

[ivory sluice]

the avg is 2048x2048 for thing like the body texture or various pieces of clothing in one material, use 4096x4096 only if it's to combine a lot of objects in one.

Another thing you can do to reduce texture size is reducing the resolution depending on how small is the object, because it will be less noticeable and it will cover less pixels than a big object like the main body

[eager field]

hey guys im currently trying to make a super optimized version of my personal model to use as a fallback, I know you can only have 1 material slot for an avi thats fall back so im going to have to atlas everything, only issue is some of my materials usually need to be transparent and cutout, is there anyway to still do that with an atlassed texture

[vivid night]

Fall backs are technically quest as far as I've experienced so, no.

[eager field]

damn guess i'll have to figure out a way around it then

also is there any sort of limitation for how many blendshapes can be on a fallback?

[vivid night]

I'm no expert but as far as it goes, having blendshapes adds more size to the avi, so make sure you have very little.

[worldly hull]

Is thwre a way to filter extreme very poor avatars from low very poor avatars?
Because I have shown every avatar, because my PC can handle 100 mats and 300k polygons, but it can not handle avatars with 2mio polygons and 500 materials...
Is there a way to filter them out?
Because if I only allow poor and bellow, 90% of the players are hidden my default because most peoples are very poor.
I just want to filter them for myself, so that i can still see peoples with 300k polys, but hide that peoples that would lag the hell out of my PC or even crash me..

[ivory sluice]

No, but you can try with memory size because the poorer the avatar, the more memory it'll use

[worldly hull]

Its on 200MB for me.

[ivory sluice]

I have it on 35

[worldly hull]

Why by the way is there no option for it?

[ivory sluice]

No, very poor is already the over-the-limit rank, maybe they'll make it higher some day but for now it's set as if it was the worst case flr performance, where an avatar uses very heavy shaders and there are various of these avatars on the instance, and also being run on a normal computer

[worldly hull]

The thing is, even if you just 1 pilygon ocer 70k the qvatar would still run well on most PC's vut you get durectly k7cked in the same topic like the 2mio poly, 500 mats avatars.

And if you want to see most of the players, you have to enable very poor.

[ivory sluice]

Yea, in vrc it's ranked by tresholds, it would be cool if it used some kind of "performance points" system where you could limit performance by a specified amount of points, but apart that it hasn't been requested on the canny, it would have to be a very big change and since some people just want to be hated by everyone, they'll find any possible exploits to crash or just be annoying.

For now what people have to do is to meet the minimum performance rank (poor) with their avatars, because if they are doing something, then they have to do it well.

[worldly hull]

Excellent zip bomb avatar.

A bunch of cubes crunched to 6MB but with 16K textures

[ivory sluice]

Yeah i don't even know what this kind of people that crash, annoy and do other malicious stuff in vrchat just for the fun of it do after closing their computer

It's like they only exist to be the worst kind of person because they don't have anything else to do i. Their life

[worldly hull]

The fact that it makes you angry let them enjoy their missbehavior even more. (Paradox)

[ivory sluice]

Yea that's what they are aiming for at the end
For now i am just staying away from publics like black cat or any spanish lobby since there's always someone with clients or being straight up toxic.

And that's helping me to be less paranoic but it's gonna take its time

[worldly hull]

Last time, i got my 8 tundra trackers and tried it with my virtual desktop pico 4 for my first time...
But after I joined a lobby, i got a very loud high pitched peep sound to hear that are close to destroy my eardrums and my game started to no longer respond until i closed it over the task manager.
After I rebootet my entire vr setup, virtual desktop, recallibrated my headset to my lighthoused with open space callibrator, put my safty higher and rejoined the lobby. I got crashed again by the same person.

[ivory sluice]

My safety is as strict as everyone with everything on and only friends with the avatar activated (only the avatar, no light nor shaders nor animations), max download size 35 mb and all very poors blocked.
Because low ram and the sane people with exploits to crash other users.

Because fucking up someone's game it's hilarious apparently.

[worldly hull]

Would it possible to peogram a crash protection that turns the safty mode to true, if the ram or xpu is over floating?

[ivory sluice]

there was a way to activate a more strict safety mode by clicking some buttons but i don't know if they changed
but in general, there's no feature afaik that will automatically activate it, you'll have to do it manually
i was working on some thing that i haven't finished yet that automatically skips rendering anything but the skybox when your delta time is extremely high using a crt and a shader that renders over everything, but i don't know if it'll prevent crashes, it does skip rendering and works at max performance but yea, some crashes happen during 2 or 3 frames and others just crash instantly

[modest blade]

what cause a lag spike when loading a avatar? cloth and physbone initialization? or texture decompression? or anything else?

[proper grail]

Its usually loading textures yeah, but each shader has to compile as well.

[modest blade]

I'd like to know the most critical part, or acknowledge their impact sorted in order, so I can do optimization effectively

[proper grail]

its just that its usually just the worst that makes a stutter, they all start at the same time using different parts of the 'puter but if there is one thing that cant be done in 1s/144hz = 6.9ms than the whole thing waits till it can

So i guess if i were to rate; Textures first as they decompress as they nyoom to the gpu, large audio files that compete with texture decompression with a certain setting (but honestly if it makes stutter worse you choosing between stutter at avatar load or stutter at first play), Shader compilation as every avatar pretty much has multiple unique shaders. I wouldnt consider things that would happen every frame for rating this

[modest blade]

if I understood your rate correctly, its

Texture Compression > Audio Compression > Any Compression > Shader Compilation > Anything Else

one more thing, how performant is Physbone we are currently using? is it performant enough to let temporarily unused Physbone left on?

[empty geyser]

Quick question regarding quest avatars: if my PC avatar is rated "Good" performance, does that mean quest only users can see it? Or, does it have to be a quest only avatar so that they can see it?

[zealous wigeon]

PC avatars and Quest avatars are entirely separate, the only thing connecting them is the blueprint ID.

For each platform you need to specifically make a version

Unity asset bundles are platform specific

[empty geyser]

I know that, what I'm asking is if my avatar will be rated as PC & quest compatible.

[zealous wigeon]

If you uploaded both versions with the same blueprint ID, then its rating will depend on what platform you are on, Quest ratings are stricter.

[empty geyser]

It is over the polygon limit for android build, I know that much. I was just curious if having the PC avatar as "good" rating would allow quest users to see it.

[radiant shadow]

no

[empty geyser]

Thank you, that's all I needed to know. I will have to optimize it then.

[radiant shadow]

quest care not what rating a pc uploaded rank is, they only see the quest version

[empty geyser]

Quest users can see very poor quest uploaded avatars right?

I see the VRC website doesn't mention very poor status, so I'm not sure.

[buoyant holly]

very poor avatars have to be manually turned on on Quest

[empty geyser]

Ah okay.

The avatar in question is over by 10k polys

[radiant shadow]

yet to test any on my quest , my fallbacks are all <10k poly anyway

[buoyant holly]

so basically you'll have to optimize at the very least to poor if random people want to see you

[empty geyser]

I see..

[buoyant holly]

could you show a wireframe so I can make some suggestions for triangle reduction

[empty geyser]

Uhh, sure, but I'm well aware of where it could use work 😅

[buoyant holly]

question do you have mesh under your clothing

[empty geyser]

no

It's a single mesh, only has one toggle for a weapon.

the problem is that I'm using a few prefabs in unity that aren't attached to the rig, so I'd have to convert them to FBX then optimize in blender, which is a hassle tbf.

[buoyant holly]

are you could potentially drop the prefabs from the quest build?

[empty geyser]

I would but this isn't my avatar, working on it for a friend, they want the prefabs. 😅

[buoyant holly]

you should be able to find the original fbx files that make up the prefab somewhere in the project

[empty geyser]

Yep I just now did that

[buoyant holly]

cool

question is the friend primary platform PC or Quest

[empty geyser]

PC

[buoyant holly]

cool just wanted to know so I know how pretty you have to worry about making the quest props

[rose sequoia]

Supposing I have a puppet hand that I've set up rotation constraints for, to mimic the hand/finger rotations of one of the avatar's hands, but I only have that puppet hand visible sometimes. Will disabling the rotation constraints while the puppet hand is not visible improve performance? What about if I just change the weight on the constraints to 0? Does having a bunch of disabled constraints affect performance at all, or is it the same as if the constraints were not even in the scene?

(the puppet hand would be "hidden" by scaling its parent bone to 0,0,0)

[proper grail]

as this is a small indie dev game, scaling to 0 might/probably will cause issues if udon references (aim for 0.001), and scaling to 0 does nothing for changing what needs to be done performancewise. Uncheck/disable the entire gameobject if youre worried about such things

[rose sequoia]

unchecking a gameobject which is a bone does not do anything. But either way, I am looking for information regarding the performance impact of active, inactive and 0-weighted constraints - the way the "puppet hand", in this example is made not visible is not relevant, I just added it for extra context.

[proper grail]

Disabling an object does nothing, okie

[rose sequoia]

eh? If the object had a skinned mesh renderer on it, then it would hide the mesh. Disabling an object with no components on itself or any of its children will not noticeably change anything. Are you suggesting that disabling a game object with children that have rotation constraints will have a performance impact of some kind? (I'm not saying it wont, i haven't tested that)
edit: Just tested this - disabling a gameobject that has constraints does not appear to have any effect - the constraints continue to stay in effect.

[proper grail]

I dont think your constraints are necessary if disabling them changes nothing?

[rose sequoia]

Disabling the constraints... disables them. Making the gameobject the constraints are on inactivate does not disable the constraints.

[proper grail]

It does, and should

odd, i guess just disable the constraints

[rose sequoia]

I will test again, I may have made a mistake, But I feel like this very unlikely to be the case - toggles for world-constrained objects would be made very differently if disabling the gameobject they were parented under also disabled all of the constraints under it.

[rose sequoia]

Right, so my question is regarding the performance impact of disabling constraints vs setting their weight to 0 vs there not being any constraints to begin with

[proper grail]

256 copies of my avatar with a gameobect disabled, 26.6ms. Parent constraint disabled gameobject enabled 32.0 ms. Enabled at 1, 34.6. Set to 0, 36.4ms.

Doesnt seem like theres much of a difference between enabled/disabled/0/1 with a constraint. But turning off the gameobject it holds does it

[rose sequoia]

I have a feeling we're having some miscommunication around the disabling of game objects the impact that has on constraints, but I dont think its too importantto worry about.

But your findings that the performance impact of the constraint being enables/disable/0/1 is sad news if true... because it sounds like it doesnt matter what the current state of the constraint is at, its performance impact stays

[proper grail]

Even i found it weird that disabling the constraint via its own on/off button didnt change much.. Lemme test again with more lag

[rose sequoia]

My ideal scenario would be that I could have 16 or so rotation constraints set up to allow for a gimmick that might be used once every now and then. But if allowing for that to happen means I cause a continual performance impact even while not using it (ie. even if i am setting the constraints to be off/0 when not in use) - it not really worth the cost

[proper grail]

512 avatar deleted a buncha extra stuff test! object+constraint disabled 75.5ms, object enabled constraint disabled 76.0 ms, constraint on 1 76ms, constraint on 0, 76ms

yeah imma go with dont even worry about it

[rose sequoia]

Unity, why you be like this. Just let me optimize things in you!

oh wait i misread a number. Was that a typo or did you get 176ms with the constraint enabled, and 76 with the constraint either disabled or 0 weighted?

[proper grail]

it was more or less 76ms no matter what bleh

guess constraints are cheap

[rose sequoia]

hmmm

Without any more information i guess i'll just go ahead and include this thing and just assume it will not actually have any noticeable impact even if unused 90% of the time

[proper grail]

but if you wanna test this yourself just get a constraint in attached to the avatar instead of the armature and name it something unique, enter play mode and duplicate the avatar till happy with the amount of lag, type in the hierarchy search bar the name of the gameobject constraint, select all and play with all the settings at once!

[rose sequoia]

ahh, that makes sense

[tough wave]

So ignoring VRC's ranking, is it generally better to keep outfits as separate meshes to toggle, use the shader to make them transparent, shrink them with blend shapes, or some combo of those?

[buoyant holly]

the Shader method would potentially have lower amounts of draw calls https://poiyomi.vercel.app/special-fx/uv-tile-discard

and the blendshape method would probably be the worst as it would be having the calculate the blendshapes every frame and the cost of blendshapes goes higher the more vertices are affected

[rose sequoia]

Would the blendshape route really necessarily be the worst option? I thought that having a bunch of skinned mesh renderers going at once is pretty bad on performance for their draw calls?

well, tbh it really does depend on how many verts. So if you are planning to combine 25 outfits into one mesh then the blendshape option might be not very amazing xD

[buoyant holly]

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips#-except-when-youre-using-shapekeys

[tough wave]

Oh perfect, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

[rose sequoia]

Heres a question regarding animation files: which is better for performance (or is there even a difference)?
In both scenarios you have two states, one state is for having an item toggled off, the other is for having the same item toggled on.
A) 2 animations with 1 frame each, one toggling an item off, the other toggling the same item on.
B) 1 animation with 2 frames. First frame toggles item off, 2nd frame toggles item on. use Speed = -1 in the "off" state and speed = 1 in the "on" state.

I assume the only impact will be on... avatar size? Is storing/accessing two animations with not many frames more/less costly than storing/accessing one animation with more frames?
What if you exaggerate the scenario to something like 10 single frame animations vs 1 animation with a large number of frames that you use a motion time to specifically play the frame that contains the combination of toggles that you want (simulating 10 non-mutually exclusive animations).
Are animations basically free real estate and not worth bothering to optimize/combine where I can?

[mild estuary]

animation clips are barely any data at all. it's way more important to optimize the number of skinned meshes used, blend shapes, and unique materials used

[heady smelt]

Option A is what you have to use. EXCEPT it has to have two frames, toggling the item on&on (or off&off if its an off toggle), with Loop Time on. Then it'll run 60 times a sec. Any other option, or no loop time, then it'll desync. And others might see you with wrong clothes/items. So doesnt matter if any other way is less laggy. Remember transition speed should also be 0.02, minimum, according to docs

[rose sequoia]

can you explain why you believe option B would not work?

[heady smelt]

https://ask.vrchat.com/t/developer-update-26-january-2023/16072

avatar sync bug. read that section

you can make an alt, meet yourself, and test or take my and docs word for it

[rose sequoia]

This isnt just an issue you you are using write default off, perhaps?

its hard to imagine why a running animation with 1 frame would be running for a remote user and not actually be animating its thing

[heady smelt]

the only way option B will work is if you set speed paramater in the state to a float and control it via a radial in menu. but controls will be weird.

[rose sequoia]

why would you need it to be controlled?

[heady smelt]

elsw its default at frame 1.

[rose sequoia]

not if you have hard set to -1

[heady smelt]

if you set it up as described, t force sync

[heady smelt]

And it might be. If youre using WD on ( which docs say you shouldnt) then you might not have to worry.

[rose sequoia]

right. My question was only regarding the performance impact, not the functionality of the setup, but yes for context im only considering this from an "all write defaults on" perspective

[heady smelt]

its happening because if you toggle on a toggle, bool rhat activates it isnt sent to remote, so anim isnt run.

[heady smelt]

If you want to make something broken, that docs and the cokmunity advice agaijst, to save 0.2 frsmes. sure

[rose sequoia]

then the item would be whatever the default it, at least until the param syncs, sure. It seems like the isse would occur for either

I understand that you dont agree with setting up an animator this way, but I am still wanting to learn what the potential relative performance impacts would be if one was to setup a configuration like this.

Regarding "saving 0.2 frames". I dont know that i actualy want to save the frames specifically , im trying to figure out if saving them reduces the overall avatar size/perf impact (because i dont know )

[heady smelt]

I dont know if the impact is even measurable in frames, as itd be extremely low. But yes, cant answer during your specific conditions. Recommend someone else takes a lookat the linked question

[rose sequoia]

Thanks, your opinion that it would probably be extremely low/negligible is good info!

[proper grail]

I dont think B would even work, animations tend to play even tho they are 1 frame. Sorta like a counter. 10 seconds on -1 play would mean youd need 10.01 seconds on 1 speed to get back to the next keyframe

But using Motion time on something with 0 play speed works for choosing the 0 or 1st keyframe

[heady smelt]

That's what I was trying to say earlier, but couldn't type well as I was in VR.

[rose sequoia]

I used option B before and its worked, but i usually dont because its more organized (imo) to have a single animation for each toggle state.
(if you don't agree this works thats fine I'm not trying to argue/discuss that point, just looking to figure out the size/performance impact difference, if its not negligible)

[undone cradle]

Unity plays single-frame animations for a full second in animator states, so yeah the 2-frame thing isn't really needed unless you specifically need a state to last for a single frame with exit time.

[wet harness]

why would you enable loop time? that is not needed if you toggle something on/off

assuming you have a bool as parameter:
[off state] -- bool = true --> [on state]
off and on state both have a one frame animation with loop time turned off. Of course, make a transition back with bool = false.
The transition time doesn't really matter, as it just switches and stays in that state, if it desyncs, it will sync the next time the data is sent.
I do it like that since 2020, and it works without any issue with transition time of 0.

(works of course as well with ints)

works with WD on and off

[heady smelt]

Because that will rerun the animation. Without it, it'll run out after 2 frames.
This will cause desync (maybe for the slower machines?) or material swaps/transforms to show wrong for only some. The dev log I posted above explains it. And yeah, it'll sync the next time. But that implies a change will occurr. What if you have your avi spawn in ready to go, and you dont change anything, and clothing on naughty parts didnt show up.

[sinful moss]

Does anyone know how to deal with the “too many animators” error on the sdk control panel?

[rose sequoia]

It might sound a bit too obvious, but how many animators do you have in your avatar? Is there a reason ?
(Also this channel probs isn't the right place for that kind of question)

[wet harness]

the slowest parameter sync is 1/s and can be as high as 0.1/s, that's plenty fast.
And: "clothing on naughty parts didnt show up." Just design the animator so that doesn't happen. It's not hard to do.

[onyx harness]

Sorry for coming in so late but I don't believe that's how unity handles the animations.
You can have animations with just 1 keyframe, unity treats it as a 1 second animation when it comes to Exit time, % transition time and Loop Time iirc. You don't need Loop Time either as unity will continue animating the object(s) to the values of the last keyframe for each property of said animation. The animator may be in a desynced state for a brief moment after the avatar loads in on remote, if the local user is not currently in the uploaded state, but it'll sync as long as the user is receiving the Expression Parameter List values. As for transition duration, though I don't recall reading about the recommended 0.02s, I'd say 0s transition duration does about the same. Both would transition to the next state in the next frame.

As for the issue you linked to a bit later in the dev blog concerning desyncing on remote load. This is a bug referring to an Expression Parameter List issue where it would either receive the incorrect values from a previous load or no values at all, resulting in all 0's. This led to controllers progressing the layer(s) with those values leading to an undesirable state on remote until the local user loaded into the model and sent the correct Expression Parameter List values. The issue wasn't due to any variations of animation or state setup/design.

In their example, B is a design that has be popularised recently in an effort to reduce the number of animations, and thus size, of the avatar. As unity will 'hold' the values of a keyframe when loop time is disabled, having the Off and On values be 1 frame after the other and transitioning between states that use -1 and 1 as their speeds, the layer will act the same as any other toggle.

[heady smelt]

I used Sippbox's method to create a toggle state. One state into a state and back. Other methods still have the problem. Desync, that were resolved by turning on loop time and am inimum transition time of 0.02.

Here, is a VRCContactReciever looking for an OnEnter hand event.
The wearer of the avi can always initiate it, but almost always do only show for them.
Maybe one hit in 10 is shown over the network. I can never initiate it either.
The animation starting the particle effect after a collision, has 1 frame to turn it on, no loop time.

Here is the same avatar, same build. Except now the animation to turn on the particle effect has two frames, that turn on the particle effect. Loop time is on.
And now the wearer can always activate, and it syncs properply through the network for others.
As well can I now activate it, and I see it.

Addendum is that, nearly every Booth avatar always has two frames and loop time. So, an onanimation has two frames to turn it on and loop time on. Vice versa for off. This happens with everything, including clothing. Don't know what specifically cause it, maybe avatars that has really much stuff going on (like 30 toggles). Quest seems to be more affected than stronger computers.

This is the same, or very close, to the bug mentioned in the dev update.
https://ask.vrchat.com/t/developer-update-26-january-2023/16072
The fix is just to make an animation with two frames, each one doing the same. And Loop Time on.
But if you want to make something that's not going to sync properly over the network by instead turning off LoopTime and using only one animation, be my guest

@wet harness @onyx harness

[onyx harness]

This is the same, or very close, to the bug mentioned in the dev update.
Is this in reference to the "Avatar Sync Bug" or something else?

[heady smelt]

Yes.

I'm not a world maker. So I don't know if that part specifically refers to this. SO I added, "it's very close if it's not."

[onyx harness]

That bug is in reference to avatar initialisation differences in the Expression Parameter List values where remote users receive the wrong values for an avatar before the local user has loaded into an said avatar.

Basically in the time frame between Remote loading the avatar and Local not, it leads to controllers transitioning through logic using unintended values animating things it's not meant to such as changing materials or disabling objects (depends on what's animated in the 0 value animation)

OnEnter, being that it only triggers as True for 1 frame, has always given people issue. It's interesting that giving the animations 2 frames and loop time actually consistently resolves this though

I'm definitely going to try it and look into it further

[heady smelt]

This doesn't only occur with VRCContact Recievers. It happens with everything.
Including a simple material switch toggle, or a mesh on/off toggle.

I only know it's fixed with LoopTime on, and two frames doing the same thing.
Only reference to this bug I can find, is the warning here:
https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/state-behaviors

[onyx harness]

if you've ever seen someone load in nude and then clothing enable this is why

[heady smelt]

I see. But what I'm talking about, is when the clothing doesn't enable even afterward.

It continues to say off, until turned back off then on in the menu.

And 2 frames/loop time resolves that, as Unity is constantly spamming the clothing back on

[onyx harness]

I've never seen a case where a player will enter a state, stay in said state and not animate the property loop time or not.

I haven't used loop time on toggles since sdk3 dropped and haven't had a desync issue on remote sides to date.

[heady smelt]

It's very rare. I had the problem until I turned on Loop Time. But my avatar is optimized to use its bones as toggles for scaling stuff, like a hat is turned to 0 0 0 scale.
Others who've had this problem, set up the avatar as a typical, unoptimized one, with mesh toggles.

I can only guess it's related to device speed, as quest seems more affected than PCVR. Or it's an internet speed thing

[onyx harness]

I can only speak for what I've done/experienced but be material, mesh, bone, alpha, udim, I've touched just about every toggle method with loop time on and off without any difference in desync between them. My Quest experiences are considerably smaller but even then, bone or mesh, using 2 keyframes with loop time off hasn't resulted in desync yet.
When things are/were desyncing, was it all toggles or a select few?

[heady smelt]

It was random each time. At times, nearly every toggle failed. At times, it was only one, like a belt buckle on a pair of shorts. And very hard to reproduce with a friend. Best way to catch it in action is just to go to a public world, and ask everyone if anyone is seeing anything missing

Usually, there'd be one who says "Oh yeah, I can't see the socks!"

I did have success, seeing it in action by meeting my alt. But not reliably every time

[onyx harness]

It is a shame people can't bring up some sort of debug view of another person's model. Even just to see what parameter values they currently are receiving. Though I'm sure people would find some way to abuse it

Well I can't really just sit here and say you didn't experience desync. I'll keep an eye out for it in my 2 frame looping off vrchat adventures. See if I can replicate it at all. Maybe I'll try some 1 frame, loop off avatars too

[hybrid rampart]

Help, I tried and use the merge material a.k.a save atlas to thingy with the Cats blender addon and now my most of my avatar seems turn into this hair abomination

I think it´s the UVs staying the same, using the hair texture instead of the rest

[radiant shadow]

looks like vrm, they have a quirk with atlas

[buoyant holly]

well for one I know the hair uses tiling stacked uv's

[heady smelt]

How I'd fix that, is to import it to Unity before atlasing. Then drop into scene, right click the avi, use FBX exporter, to reexport it. Then use BetterFBX plugin on Blender to reimport. Then I'd do the atlas and export. BetterFBX is optional, but it'd be very messy when importing it to Blender otherwise, and you'd have to use Cats to refix some bones. Might be a better way, this is the only way I know to fix it

[rose sequoia]

You mentioned a reason people do this would be to reduce avatar size. Do you have any idea on the scope of size being saved by people using this method? Like, an avatar probably will have less than 100 toggle animations. Optimizing that into , let's say, 50 - is that actually saving any significant amount of space?

And would this affect only avatar download size, you think?

[dull sonnet]

What would be the best way to get physbones on because the hair itself has well over 8 but only 8 are aloud can some1 help out

[proper grail]

Physbones support a root bone! Parent all the hair bones to a hair.root and put the script there. Dont use end bones, use endpoint position in the physbone script

[dull sonnet]

Oh okay thank you very much

[untold acorn]

Dose the “texture memory” in the avatar details means how much VRAM the avatar is taking? No matter what my shader safety strategy is, as long as this avatar is showed.

[buoyant holly]

yes that would be how much vram the Avatar takes up and safety settings wouldn't change the vram usage

[untold acorn]

Thank you, is there an article that I can refer to?

[buoyant holly]

unfortunately the only spot in the vrchat documentation that mentions texture memory

https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools this Unity editor extension will try to estimate vram usage of the avatar

[zealous wigeon]

It only refers to how much VRAM the textures are taking up.
It doesn't count the mesh or for example any audio files.

Thry's avatar evaluator does however.

In regards to what is good and bad hasn't been established yet, that will probably wait for when they can add it to the performance metrics (adding it isn't simple, as the game only knows the texture memory after it has already loaded in the avatar).
I would assume 100MB of texture memory would be medium or poor, but anything they have said about it has been very preliminary.

[untold acorn]

Super thanks for both. Appreciated!

[buoyant holly]

but yeah try to see if you can get your avatar as low as possible without looking bad

https://twitter.com/FaraVR/status/1612185972766130189?s=20 example of a handy Shader trick that can help with vram

Fara (@FaraVR)

Showing the use of Detail Normals with RGBA Color Masking in @poiyomi . Still on my quest to reduce the use of 4K normal maps in VRC. This entire set is a single 2K normal but still has low frequency cloth detail with the use of DNs. DNs are all 256px

▶ Play video

Twitter · Jan 8, 2023, 8:34 PM

https://www.poiyomi.com/blog/2022-10-17-texture-optimization

[turbid pendant]

Hi im making an avatar but it has 2 million polygons how can i make this less?

[buoyant holly]

this video shows various ways of reducing triangle count https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MkgXcidxg4

[turbid pendant]

i used the disintegrate

changed the subdivide to 2 and it divided it in half

[buoyant holly]

why are you using a subdivide modifier on your avatar

[turbid pendant]

idk but i changed the iterations and it workede

[dense olive]

I have changed the UVmap of my catears in blender, and the shadow looks strange, anyone has an idea?

The uv is changed to match the 2nd texture.

[dense olive]

I also have apply all shape keys of the mesh. It looks like a problem of normal, and I have tried export a modified_UV_Catear with unmodified shapekeys, but the problem still occurs.

[proper grail]

This button will 100% clear any oddly locked normals

[dense olive]

Thanks for your reply, but the problem can not be solved.

[proper grail]

darn, nuclear it is. Delete materials and all old textures that use the old uv map hmph

So strange

[ivory sluice]

for me it looks like you are using the wrong normal map on the material

[hollow root]

How are the posts being deleted in the wikis, posts that I post in a wiki are not all spam, and they all get deleted

[modest blade]

how does vrchat handle shadow and reflection? are there something like invisible shadow and reflection clone for every avatar instance?

[buoyant holly]

avatars would just be using the baked reflection probes for their reflections

[ivory sluice]

There's no invisible shadow for every avatar individually, if it was the case then the game would run vay slower than how it runs now with the current avatars and worlds

[mossy stump]

Does anyone have a visual representation of the cost of shapekeys on a model?
I know there's a point where it's better to just separate off the head mesh but I'm wanting to see if there's any specific numbers

[zealous wigeon]

VRChat's given point is when above 32k polygons. https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips#-except-when-youre-using-shapekeys

[mossy stump]

I’m more looking for benchmarking.

[zealous wigeon]

I have unfortunately not seen one, would like to see performance graphs for things in general, but only seen one comparing physbone components growth to constraints, physbones seem to be logarithmic, while constraints are basically linear.

[mossy stump]

Yeah, I know the person who made that graph

[simple birch]

is there a way i can have transparency on a material with it being quest optimized? i tried all mobile shaders but theres no result

[buoyant holly]

transparency is not supported on Quest avatars

[rose sequoia]

Does anyone know if there is any significant impact to having a trail renderer emitting vs not emitting? Does the material required only cost a draw call while there are parts of the trail still existing (and so if you wait for all the trail parts to stop existing and stop emitting - do you save 1 draw call during that time?)

[winged spire]

It is very slightly possible through the VRChat/Mobile/Particles/Multiply shader but that is not proper transparency and doesn't support using a texture

[wet harness]

just disable the trailrenderer entirely if you don't draw, and enable it when you want to draw and emit / stop emitting

that should save the draw call while not in use

if you want, you can take a look at my pen prefab:
https://github.com/tschaerni/OtterPen

[rose sequoia]

I was trying to figure out if disabling it entirely did actually stop the draw call (because if it didnt, i figured I'd re-use it as some kind of flare/extra effect while not drawing - like have it change to give a short trail effect elsewhere).
But I suspect your probably right, that simply stopping the emitting probably doesnt free up the performance impact as disabling it would

[wet harness]

as far as I understand it, as long as something is active, it's loaded in to the VRAM and causes drawcalls. But if it's completely disabled, it's still loaded in to VRAM (but gets swapped first if VRAM is full), but doesn't cause a drawcall

[median wharf]

anyone has exemple of any state animator abuse

[buoyant holly]

https://twitter.com/dtupper/status/1496216046474502144?s=20

tupper (@dtupper)

hey

don't use massive amounts of transitions out of Any State. you're asking the animator to check dozens (or god forbid, hundreds) of conditions every frame the animator runs. its ok to check that many once when params change, not EVERY UPDATE.

tia

pulls out popcorn

Likes

748

Retweets

326

Twitter · Feb 22, 2022, 8:11 PM

[median wharf]

thanks

no honestly thanks, i was doing some stuff wrong tho I don't think it was as bad as what i see here

[proud mango]

Ah yes, then there’s myself a newbie never touching the animator in Unity trying to figure out making how to make massive direct blend tree for all my avatar toggles. Well, hopefully someone comes up with documation or a tutorial how to do it cause I’m tearing hairs out at this point, but I guess time will tell, I really hope someone does to help everyone with making a good animator to help with cpu times.

[frozen hazel]

what video does this refer to?

i think i need it bad

[ivory sluice]

that is indeed an amalgamation

[frozen hazel]

guide me to the right direction

[buoyant holly]

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/40311/how-do-you-merge-two-bones-into-one

[frozen hazel]

u gotta do it in blender? but i have the bones in the unity scene

[buoyant holly]

Unity is not modeling software you'll have to merge the bones in blender

[frozen hazel]

how do i take it from unity though i would need to make it a fbx

wouldnt that get rid of all the components too

[buoyant holly]

there would be a fbx already for the Avatar somewhere in the assets folder

[frozen hazel]

so i have to put everything together on blender ?

all the hairs and clothing and everything

[buoyant holly]

yes basically most operations related to modifying avatars happens in blender

[frozen hazel]

welp that sounds like an immense hassle lol

[buoyant holly]

well you're wanting to optimize your avatars so going to have to put in the work

[frozen hazel]

i guess so ill have to try one day thx

[frozen hazel]

wait till u see my friends avatar though

this is for each bone lol

[buoyant holly]

why do you have like 10 copies of each bone

[frozen hazel]

cause each clothing has their armature

[rose sequoia]

🙁

[buoyant holly]

That is terrible for performance

[modest blade]

thats the most common and likely the default way the cloths sell on booth uses to intergrate

performance heavy thought

talking about bones, if I disable the bone object, will it reduce performance cost ? and in terms of Physbone, if I disable the object with the physbone script but not the script, will it reduce the performance cost?

[modest blade]

I mean.. let me explain

Local avatar has its head chopped off. If not, your view will be clipped inside the avatar head.

however, in mirror and shadow(nearby a realtime light source) will show the head.

so I suspect that for local player, here will be a shadow clone and mirror clone thats not directly visible, but can interact with light source and mirror.

I suppose these clones are not available for remote avatar instances

[onyx harness]

Booth models, dressing scripts for modular clothing. Hips goes to hips, spine to spine and so on but nothing is merged so it’s just hips, hips, hips, hips, hips, hips, hips, hips, spine, spine…

Blender scary
But it’s more like they want to sell clothing/accessory addons without expecting experience with blender so it’s more widely available.

[ivory sluice]

It doesn't clone the avatar, what it does is use a script that tells the renderer to shrink the head bone to 0 if it's rendering from the main camera. The beat saber avatar mod also has a script that does that

[ivory sluice]

Ppl need to learn blender if they are going to edit avatars. It's like makinv a mod for minecraft, you need to know java ( you also won't get support from the forums as i've seen the "bgolus" of the forum is really mean). And using automated tools will have you very very limited as i saw.

So you need to know blender to put clothing on your avatar, ppl cannot go adding 100 separate skinned meshes with 1000 bones, 300 material slots and 200k polygons

[hushed pasture]

Is there a way to animate a texture change without needing a duplicate material? 🤔 Example; Changing a gold chain to silver via animating the swapping of the main texture.

[lone tiger]

You can't swap textures in materials, you need to do a material swap. In your example though what is possible is to change the albedo tint, which is available in pretty much all commonly used shaders.

[hushed pasture]

Yeah was just using that as an example wasn't quite the goal. Thank you for the answer regardless. Saves me a lot of time trying the impossible lol

[undone cradle]

Hm, I bet you could get the same issues with normal states if you have too many transitions from one state.

That's not guaranteed to run at all times though, AnyState is even worse in that regard.

I just pretend every transition is like an if statement in code that has to run every frame. xD

[lone tiger]

I'm gonna quote someone here who actually did some tests: https://twitter.com/jellejurre/status/1623025880623640579
Worth to read an entire thread too.

Jellejurre (@jellejurre)

@dtupper Anystates don't actually matter that much

One extra layer adds as about much frametime as being in a layer with 200 anystate transitions

The rest I agree with though, animators can absolutely lag you the hell out. Less layer more better

Twitter · Feb 7, 2023, 6:28 PM

[undone cradle]

Yea reducing layer count is a thing as well.
Optimizing layer count is hard with WD On though, gotta drive all relevant things with all animations, otherwise they reset to default.

Benefit of WD Off there, you can just have it pass through a state to do setup for a particular feature.

I made a gun you can pick up 2-handed both left and right-handed, it just passes through different setup states for constraints and the rest of the states are shared between them, no need to make a huge splitting tree like WD On would require, and tbh I'd just put it in a separate layer instead with WD On, too much work to do it the other way.

[lone tiger]

Syncing that though is another problem.

[undone cradle]

Yeah, gotta pass through the correct states on load. Not very useful for clothing toggles, but pickup states and such? Very useful.

[solid smelt]

For toggles I just have a long line of states that it iterates thru when I make a change. 1 layer for all toggles

[lone tiger]

I use a direct blendtree for toggles, radials and stuff like that.
A single FX layer with a single blend tree state does the same job as dozens of layers if I would have done them without utilizing a direct blendtree.

[undone cradle]

what do you mean by direct blend tree? 🤔
How would you enable all toggles with a blend?

I suppose if you have a gradual increase in something, like different hair styles, from small to large hair styles.

but no way to use all of them

[grizzled shard]

How do you do toggles with a direct blendtree? Thought they only accepted floats, while toggles typically use bools.

[lone tiger]

You can mismatch parameter types between parameters list and animator controller, so you can define a parameter as a float in animator controller and as a bool or integer in your synced parameter list. False bool will translate to float 0, while bool true will translate to float 1. Integers translate directly, so integer 120 for example will directly correspond to float value 120.

This can be done with built-in VRChat parameters too.

IsLocal or VRMode can be used as a float parameters that are either 0 or 1 for example.

[grizzled shard]

Ah! Didn't know about the automatic conversion. Handy.

[proper grail]

NEAT, huge tip. I was wonderin how people had those 18 direct state toggle layer

[cold yarrow]

thanks for confirming this works - I tried it and it wasn't, but now I need to go back and figure out what I did wrong because it should

also that hilarious duplicate bone armature, that's a bad way of doing things

[cold yarrow]

You can do sprite-sheet animations though, so you could have a double-width texture and scroll it around rather than swapping material, but there are definitely limits of how good this is to do 🙂

[modest blade]

understood, thanks for the explaination

[modest blade]

If I disable the object with grabpass shader, will it reduce the performance cost? or it will keep eating the resources even if it is disabled

[ivory sluice]

It will reduce perf cost yes

[modest blade]

ok, thanks

[onyx harness]

I did this for a while. If you’re cool with the delay this introduces then that’s fine but this also introduces a new issue that is constantly transitioning through states which I’ve been told, at a large scale, will too cause lag.

No idea at what scale but the example that was used was an rng layer that swapped back and forth between states each with Pdrivers to generate a random Int for other systems. This was used as an example of what not to do.

[neat karma]

My booth model does not have that many bones and I have like 10 different outfits and only have the extra bones that the outfit needs, like skirt bones or wings or that

Did not use blender

[onyx harness]

What dresser unity script did you use to merge the clothing to the model?

[neat karma]

Will dm if u want

Idk if i can link

[onyx harness]

Sure, dm. Would help a lot if everyone used it.

[lone tiger]

I know bd_ made one and apparently that one merges armatures and stuff, but I never used a tool like that.

[cold yarrow]

My friend made one she includes with her clothing assets, it's not too hard to do it. The bd_ one is really cool but kinda all-encompassing. I think VRCFury does this too though

[toxic needle]

I finally finished my optimised avatar using UDIM and now comes the animating. Previously I've just used separate layers for all the toggles (as pictured), what is the process for combining them into fewer ones?

[acoustic gyro]

thats alotta words....
to bad im not readin em

[onyx harness]

Damn bro, still better than 80% of other custom models

Though you could merge 2 meshes into others and be

[proven dock]

yeah plus reducing material slots is always good for actual performance reasons even though you're already fine there by the measurement

[cold yarrow]

Yay tile discard! There's no real reason to combine those - each "task" done having its own layer is the standard way of doing things. You could do it all in one with a direct blend tree though, if you wanted. There's not a lot of docs on this though.

[lone tiger]

Direct blend tree.
@undone cradle @grizzled shard
Basically you create a new layer, make a new blend treee state, regardless of your Write Defaults preference that state must be set to Write Defaults ON, because WD OFF direct blend trees are more annoying to work with and are very easy to break.
Direct blend trees are exempt from WD mixing and don't break if rest of your layers are WD off as long as you don't have other WD Off blend tree states anywhere else.
Under the root direct blend tree you can add more blend trees, where you basically blend/switch between two or more animations/blend trees based on float parameters.
You need to create a float parameter that will always be 1 and be used as sort of a layer weight.
Since blend trees only accept float parameters as input/outputs, you need to rely on parameter type mismatching, which I described earlier: #avatar-optimization message
At that point you can think of root direct blend tree as a simplified animator controller and blend trees coming out of it as animator layers.
You can easily put any radials and get some simpler logic done with this method. Stuff that requires changing animator tracking control, parameter drivers etc. can't be put in direct blend tree obviously.

This way of using direct blend trees is not documented anywhere yet and it might produce strange results if for example you will put long animations in there. Few people researched it and use it and so far it only sees use in very few prefabs, such as ThatFatKidsMom Avatar Prop.

[grizzled shard]

Sweet, thanks for this write-up! Gonna experiment with it later.

[cold yarrow]

Nice write-up, yeah.

[grizzled shard]

It works, managed to condense five animator layers down into one.

[buoyant holly]

Cool

[lone tiger]

You can condense wayyyy more than 5 layers.
Also I should have mentioned that Lyuma's emulator and possibly also Gesture Manager(?) don't support parameter type mismatching. Lyuma will just throw a lot of warnings in console about parameters not found.
So if you want to test if any stuff using that behaviour is working, you need to manipulate parameters directly in your animator instead in menus provided by these tools.