avatar-optimization

[rain matrix]

We only just now got blits for shaders

[marble rain]

ye i did read that

finally data containers to.

[rain matrix]

Took forever

And string loading for Udon

[left valley]

for worlds* ^^

[rain matrix]

Yes

My bad

[left valley]

now if they make a blit component for avatars like we asked in canny for years, that would be great ^^

[pale pollen]

🙏

[heady smelt]

Hi! So, I have multiple knifes on my avatar, and Id like to use the same equip sound for all of them for optimization reasons. But with my current setup, the knife with higher priority in the FX menu keeps the audio source disabled. Is there a way to fix this? Thank you in advance!

There's already enough audio sources on the avatar, and I don't want to add any more if not needed

[cold yarrow]

You can't really trigger the same thing from multiple animation layers reliably. I'd probably put all those into one layer which branches based on a "which knife?" check rather than all separate.

if I'm understanding your current setup

[heady smelt]

Damn, I never thought about doing it that way, no clue why I decided to put them on separate layers haha. Give me a minute, I'll try to jam them into a single layer.

[cold yarrow]

yeah if you'll only ever use one at a time, it makes the most sense

[heady smelt]

Yeah no, no need for multiple knifes at the same time.

So know I made it so
**Knife1 **is Whichknife = 1
and
**Knife2 ** Whichknife = 2
But how can I reset Whichknife to 0?
@cold yarrow

[cold yarrow]

I'm assuming you're just toggling that to 1 or 2 via in-game menus? It should revert to the default in the VRC Avatar Parameters list

[heady smelt]

Currently it looks like this, but it isn't reverting to the default value

[cold yarrow]

Well yeah, you'd need a transition to Exit

or back to All off if you prefer that.

[heady smelt]

I'm not stupid, I swear haha.

[cold yarrow]

haha

I get you 🙂

[heady smelt]

Yeah, I didn't realise that if you use the Toggle function, it reverts it the default, without having to specify.

Theeeeeere I go.

@cold yarrow I appreciate the help, more than you can imagine.

[snow knot]

Dude, the amount of times where I stare at a thing that should be working and it isn't, then I realized I forgot something is practically infinite at this point. We've all been there.

[heady smelt]

Usually just saying the problem to someone, lets me figure out the issue haha.

[cold yarrow]

Pretty sure I can imagine it 🙂

[heady smelt]

https://tenor.com/view/sazzybarb-empty-head-idiot-gif-26250295

Live footage of me rn.

[snow knot]

Rubber duck debugging ftw

[heady smelt]

Best way to troubleshoot anything, I've proven this to myself so many times haha.

Know I just need to figure out how to disable knife1 when enabling knife2 .

[cold yarrow]

In that diagram you have ^ it'll be automatic if you're using Write Defaults = on

[heady smelt]

But I heard that using Write Defaults is like a major sin when it comes to VRChat avatars.

[cold yarrow]

Yeah there's lots of things said about both sides. Pick one and stick with it. So if you have it off, you'll want a "disable knife" animation before you get back to the "wait for trigger" state at the beginning.

I just leave WD on and don't worry about what people say 🙂

[heady smelt]

I've built this already around WD off .

But where in the diagram would I add the disable knife animation?

Since this already disables everything.

[cold yarrow]

hmm I'd think that would work then, if that disables all of them

[heady smelt]

It's suppose to ye, but when I have Knife1 enabled and I enable Knife2, it kind of breaks.

[cold yarrow]

Seems like the only path from 1 to 2 is via the "all off" state

[heady smelt]

So all is good when I enable the first knife.

Pressing the second, just changed the grip.

[cold yarrow]

Is your condition for 1 -> all off "if WhichKnife != 1" ?

[heady smelt]

Think so.

[cold yarrow]

no, the other one, the one that goes back

[heady smelt]

Oh, that's WhichKnife = 0

[cold yarrow]

it should be "not equal 1"

[heady smelt]

https://tenor.com/view/shocked-face-palm-seriously-gif-13428303

You're right.

I forgot NotEqual was even a condition...

Aaaaaand it works now, you're a lifesaver.

[cold yarrow]

wooo

lunch, back in a bit, glad you got that working 🙂

[heady smelt]

Thank you so much again, enjoy your lunch! 👏

[tawdry drift]

nothing outside of mobile shaders :^)

[robust anchor]

I think the question was more along the way of if there is a quest shader that can do metallics decently

[mint topaz]

@robust anchor answer is no, because mobile shaders is the only option @umbral echo

[robust anchor]

And that was my question: which of the shaders that can be used on quest handle metallics best

[mint topaz]

i dont know if i understand this correctly

there is only 1 shader for quest

the mobile one

you cant use any other shader

so that is technically the best as there is no other option

[robust anchor]

There are multiple shaders in the VRChat/Mobile folder, that VRChat permits for quest avatars last I checked

[dull sonnet]

how i make an plushie have physbones and move around like some avis have? kind ahard to explain but some have little cats on heads that jiggle or in their hand

[mint topaz]

ah, apologies - i misunderstood. i do not know the answer

[tired halo]

Does anyone recommend any means of decimation/poly reduction as to give myself more breathing room to add models to my avatar? I'm sitting at an uncomfortable 18k tris (with a base model for PC turned to quest). Any tips?

[tame summit]

the plushie would need to have bones in itself to attach a physbone to it. so if it was a bunny, you would need bones in the ears and tail and legs and stuff

[dull sonnet]

how would i add bones? @tame summit

[tame summit]

in blender

[dull sonnet]

is there a turtorial?

[tame summit]

probably not for the specific situation you’re in, but you’d have to learn weight painting and stuff too if you’re not familiar with blender

i would recommend just looking for a plushy asset that already has bones

[dull sonnet]

i ahve no idea where to loom for them

[tame summit]

you can check booth or gumroad maybe sketchfab has assets for that idk

[covert needle]

Can I see the model so I know how much wiggle room you have in terms of how to reduce the poly count?

[tired halo]

So far it's a base blended together by the CATS blender plugin
Even if I try to decimate it in blender, it begins to look unrecognizable and unpreferable

[covert needle]

a base what, human?

[west laurel]

Does anyone know the easiest way to make this get down to 10.00MB? It's at like 10.41MB and I'm pretty new to Unity so idk what I could delete or take off that won't break the avatar-

[mint topaz]

reduce texture resolution

texture = those png’s in ur assets

click them and reduce resolution on the right

aka inspector

[west laurel]

Oh ok thank you! I'll try that out

[jagged lark]

is material count or polygon count more important for optimising avvies, specifically for Quest? The only part tagged as orange for my avvie is materials, which it uses 2 of, and I really want to make it usable as a fallback if its possible but I feel like I need at least 2 materials for an effect I really like on it. Its polygon count is just barely over 8,400

[proper grail]

Hard to answer cuz quest is a weird one, with less load on the gpu (polys), its thermally allowed to be in a higher power stage on the cpu (mats+vrc)

And vice versa

[jagged lark]

not smart enough to really know what that means tbh... x.x

[proper grail]

Its got 1 cookie jar instead of the 2 a pc has

[jagged lark]

ohhh ok :P

[proper grail]

Just try your best to keep both as low as possible cuz they both come from the same cookie jar

(up to a hard limit)

[jagged lark]

so, if I could manage to reduce polycount enough, can still have "good" ranked performance even with 2 materials in use?

Right now Im at Medium performance on Quest btw

[proper grail]

Itll be in spirit, the vrc avatar rating is very... Stiff

[jagged lark]

Oh, is it hardcoded to read is as Medium so long as have 2 materials? Even if its pretty optimized otrherwise in reality?

[proper grail]

Unless maybe we can come up with a 1 material solution for your effect

[jagged lark]

I have a glowy effect on some parts of my avie (the eyes and some attachments), which use a 2nd material with an emission.
All the non-glowy parts use the same material

like this

[proper grail]

Id have to check available mobile shaders, but does this one use a 2nd texture to define the glowy bits?

[jagged lark]

The glowy material does use a completely different texture, yes
I can open up my Unity, one sec

the 2 materials in use atm

[buoyant holly]

having anything medium is going to make the Avatar always medium even if the rest are good @jagged lark

and honestly it's not the end of the world being medium considering that's better than most Quest avatars

[jagged lark]

tbh its probably pretty unoptimized, its just a pretty simple model too :P

This was my 1st major 3D project so don't know a lot of optimisation techniques and the like

[proper grail]

yes so albedo by isself will make the effect of toon lit, and than a texture that is just the eyes and other glowy bits can go into emission

its possible to combine these materials

[jagged lark]

oh really?
Does the emission only apply to parts where the emission texture isn't, like, transparent or something?

[proper grail]

like itll mostly be the same texture, just with all the parts you do not want emissive painted black

[jagged lark]

ohhh ok I guess I can try that out then!

just, uughhh hope can merge materials easily this time around... last time tried to dew it with CATs all the textures broke, so had to semi-manually fix the atlas x.x

[proper grail]

its one solid color so if you wanna be lazy can just throw those two UVs into one tiny pixel and manually paint it those two colors

[jagged lark]

Atlasing caused this to happen, specifficaly

[proper grail]

or- just put the UVs where the yellow and green already exist, it kinda looks like the eyes are already on the atlas

[jagged lark]

yeh, they were originally, moved them to the other material caus wanted them to glow too ~

[proper grail]

mmhm, easy texture to make. in gimp or whatever select the glowy bits, select invert, paint bucket all black

boom, down to 1 material!

[jagged lark]

awesome! Will try it out as soon as eat 🍔 ~

[proper grail]

have fun optimizing!

[bronze lantern]

The way I see it, is if my avatar is medium, it's a hell of a lot more optimized than some if not most avatar people spend like $40 - $60 on

The main reason I try to optimize my avatar so much is because I can then cram in more props and other fun things 😂

[jagged lark]

@proper grail sorry for taking so long, but uh smol problem, is it possible to dew Emission with the Toon Lit shader, or otherwise get the Standard Lite shader to look a little more like the Toon Lit one? Ill post a couple images of what I mean, hold on

the Standard Lite shader has emission available, but it makes the polygons visible on the model which I dont really like. The Toon Lit shader stops the polgyons from being visible, but there's no emission option for it

Is there a way to, like, smooth out the surface with the standard lite? I don't think I mind the lighting change itself, but I do want the surface to be more "flat" like how the Toon Lit shader has it. Or, alternatively, add emission on Toon Lit somehow

[proper grail]

hmm toon lit ignores normals, will be a blender thing but just see if you can go to the fbx import settings and change smoothing from import to calculate, and set the angle to 180 for smoooth

just to not open blender again

[jagged lark]

I guess thats a little better? Still looks off to me though...
If this is the closest can get to re-emulating Toon Lit, might just want to stick with the 2 material system tbh, at least now that I know being "medium" optimised apparently isn't all that bad actually

Still, I'll build & test to see if it looks a bit better in-gaym

[proper grail]

yeah, itll look strange in unity as toon lit doesnt really use lighting or normals. Just a static color.

[jagged lark]

yeh, idk, still feel genuinely mixed on it
on one hand I dont mind it too much, on the other I hate it and really prefer Toon Lit for the main body

[proper grail]

2 materials it is!

[jagged lark]

yeh, jus tested in VR too and donut lime it at all lime tha :P
Well, thanks a lot anyways though! At least I learned that selective emission with 1 material is a thing, Im sure that can be useful in the future ~

[cold yarrow]

audiolink!

[marble rain]

Material > Polygon count until a point. but its all depended. as more materials means higher cpu,gpu,vram useage.

ideally keep material count at max 4 if its not possible to keep it at 1.

[grave hull]

anyway i can bring the MB size down without making it look like dog shit? (Uploading For Quest)

[buoyant holly]

try lowering the resolution of the metallic smoothness map and the color map

and have you tried the crunch compression setting @grave hull

[grave hull]

Yes

[grave hull]

I’ll try that

[buoyant holly]

mainly the reason I'm suggesting those as it mostly the normal map providing any details to your model whereas the color is Big Blocks of solid color

[grave hull]

So tried turning the down and somehow it made it go up wtf?

[buoyant holly]

weird

[proper grail]

high compression stands for high quality compression, yeah i know

quality as in keep more details and be bigger in size

[ripe patio]

I have an idea just don't have a pc or laptop can anyone help

[cold yarrow]

an idea? You could always commission someone.

[ivory sluice]

Enable read/write

[jagged lark]

yeah I know, just always think its kinda funny lol

[ivory sluice]

Ah yee it was shocking to me when i first saw it too lul

[jagged lark]

what's the reason behind that dough? Why does having read/write off make the polygon count skyrocket? Is that number just the max integer value Gluenity can count to?

[ivory sluice]

ngl i expected it

but yes it deafults to all 1s except the last byte to avoid NaNs (not gonna write the bytechain again)

[marble rain]

because it cannot read the mesh. so it just defaults to max int value. since there is no way to determine how many polygons without being able to read it

[west laurel]

Idk what I needa do to opti it also now I can't even click the publish button (making it quest) so help pls pls

[near elk]

Optimization:

I'm about to put a 39k Polygons thing onto my avatar.

Ignoring the material, roughly how much size will it add to my avatar (MB)?

[near elk]

size is 10.23, just more than 10mb. it must be 10mb or less to upload for quest.

[near elk]

https://youtu.be/BATG3b1ZFG4

Does this method work? or is decimation better?

[stark crypt]

how do i lower the physbone transform count?

[marble rain]

have less bones affected by either removing bones or reference the root bone further down the hierarchy

[mild junco]

Does anyone know if there are any decent Unity based tools that will automatically convert PC avatars for quest?
I have VRC Quest tools, but I still feel it's a little limited.

The model i want to convert is using Poiyomi shader, (which quest tools doesnt support), and has quite a lof of shader related animations (like skin/hair colour radial puppet).

The biggest frustration is with VROID avatars, and invisible textures... which become uninvisible when converted... Meaning i have to dig into blender to carve them out.

[marble rain]

Quest is just that limited. you wont be able to do alot. let alone animations.

[mild junco]

I have a quest avatar with animations. A little rusk that spawns a car and a few other bits. So defo possible.

[bold wharf]

Yes but no. Shader based animations (such as hue shifting) is not really possible. There are ways to kinda get around it (matswapping to predetermined colour combinations, or having flat coloured textures and using UV offsetting) but you won't be able to 1-1 recreate it in the same way. Same thing goes for anything to do with transparency, you simply won't be able to recreate that.

Additionally no constraints so any props you have will also be more limited in their functionality and then theres the hardcapped physbone limits etc...

The point being. You won't find automated tools to do this for you. You will need to learn and do it yourself because often times the solutions are too novel for them to be automated, or simply not realistic to be automated. (For example if you want to fix your transparent eyebrows issue, you will need to get the knife tool out in blender and start cutting)

[snow knot]

iirc I've seen people do some hueshifting via emissions on quest

[radiant shadow]

quest shader

[bold wharf]

Guess I was wrong.

[limpid narwhal]

so realtime fluid dynamics are out of the QUESTion, huh?

[ivory sluice]

yea

[obsidian lake]

I have hue shift on a lot of my quest avis using standard lite shader and emissions. Change the albedo color and emissions color.

[craggy knot]

I have a question mostly because I'm new to creating avatars. How come I was making an avatar and it was a normal model in blender and unity, but as soon as I uploaded it, it turned into an image that filled up my entire screen?

[crisp oak]

What lol? can you take a screenshot

[craggy knot]

I'm ready to get crashed lol

For some reason I can't ss

So I'll send a pic through my phone

I don't know why it's doing this

good save

Anyway, I don't know what to do

[craggy knot]

nvm, I just realized everything was in the wrong place and it was the model creators fault

[crisp oak]

lol that happens sorry I'm working on a project

[noble tree]

fun fact, i used to never optimize my models because i didnt know it was the easiest thing ever in blender, im talking 20+ materials and 70k polys and always verypoor with errors

so this is the most satisfying thing ive ever seen

[somber raven]

Go to the Control Panel Settings and enable the option to Show All Stats. I’m curious to see what else you did.

Showing All Stats will expand the list exposing all other Stats that are also ranked Good or Excellent.

[noble tree]

apparently i did pretty dang good

was just a vroid model that i optimized in blender

[somber raven]

Damn! That’s a lot of Excellent stats.

Well done.

[zinc marsh]

can someone help me plz to opti my skin idk who to do it its my first dl ^^ dm me

[cold yarrow]

Do you need all 21 skinned mesh renderers? I'm betting it's a lot of props. I'd consider starting there.

[trail berry]

So I got a avatar I made just recently, I optimised the heck out of it but I believe I messed up the material somehow for the eyebrows? When in blender, I joined the two meshes and I made the same material for the face that applies to the eyebrows. Can someone tell me what I have done wrong here?

[graceful condor]

looks like the eyebrows and lashes are transparent, very common issue. delete some verts and use edge slide to line them up with the texture in blender

that or make the rendering preset cutout instead of opaque but then it won't be quest compat

[trail berry]

Thanks for letting me know!

Anybody know why the texture memory would report a different size in the SDK vs a Thry VRAM tool manager?

[graceful condor]

looks like shit but at least the questies will see my avatar lmfao

[trail berry]

lol

[crimson topaz]

It's an issue that happens sometimes, once you Build and Publish the avatar it'll follow Thry's number. Not sure why it does it, gave me quite a bit of confusion myself when I first noticed

[trail berry]

When I build and publish it didn't change ;-;

SDK reports 76mb ot texture memory but i am only using 49mb in thry

make a big difference in textures if I can actually use 70 mb 😢

[bronze lantern]

I'm thinking about adding twist bones to my avatar, does the use of constraints cause significant performance decrease for myself or others?

[cold yarrow]

not significantly unless you're adding like 300 constraints or something

[bronze lantern]

Oh okay then that probably won't happen I'm just looking to make it so my avatars base with move and rotate naturally I doubt I'd even reach triple digits for constraints

atleast not on my optimize version

[cold yarrow]

Yeah that would be pretty weird.

[empty river]

I've come to a grinding impass with Unity and making things quest compatible. I have a bunch of props that I've used Parent Constraint to attach to the avatar, and it works in PC. However, apparently Quest doesn't use Parent Constraint. Is there an easy solution for this or am I going to have to try to jerryrig all of these props onto the armature one by one, and then re-do the toggles that I've made?

[crisp oak]

Depends on what you're trying to accomplish

[empty river]

Two things:

• I want to have props that are in my hand that I can toggle between (Staff, Baseball bat, glowsticks)
• I want to have a prop that I have attached to the brim of my hat

[crisp oak]

The hand props can just be added to your armature in the hand and same for the hat prop just add it to the head

[empty river]

which is a massive massive pain, but I guess it's literally the only way. Thanks.

[crisp oak]

I mean it takes about the same amount of effort as a constraint lol

And is less performance heavy

[empty river]

Toggles are the issue, unless I can drag from the hierarchy into the animation

...I haven't tried that yet. hm.

[crisp oak]

You can just click on the hierarchy in record mode an just hide it in the inspector

[empty river]

...record mode?

I've only known how to do it manually

[crisp oak]

Just the record button on the animation tab

[empty river]

I guess I'll figure this out, thanks

I have to do further cuts on the avatar anyways, apprently one of my props was way too heavy for quest to deal with :sadge:

[crisp oak]

Lol yeah I have an Avatar like that

[empty river]

and yeah, I don't think I can mess with objects in the hierarchy and move them to the animator with ease, I have to navigate to each of them manually which is just... ugh

the one thing I hoped I didn't have to do.

well apparently having prefabs with parent constraints is... okay now?

Before it was pitching a fit whenever I tried

(nevermind, it was in the scene but not on the avatar 🤦‍♂️)

[nova jetty]

Any tips on how to get an avatar down to the 10MB requirement for quest? I typically start deleting clothing, change the quality of textures but idk if there is more I can do

[snow knot]

If you know how to use blender there's always seperating the head and body into seperate meshes. Can also remove unused blendshapes in blender or use something like VrcFury which has a way to do it non-destructively

[lyric dock]

Most optimized Avatar

[velvet crow]

When combining UVs to atlas manually, some of my materials are screwed up and only show one color. When the UVs are separate, they are fine.

Is this a Blender bug? Is there anyway to fix this? I want to be able to combine this avi into only two objects and two materials.

I guess I could recombine them again, but I don't even know if I can make a new UV map that includes all parts of the mesh without manually combining them

[pallid drum]

Make sure your UV maps are named the same before combining

[velvet crow]

I did

[oak plover]

i have 8 physbones, how do i fix this..

[simple ledge]

Sorry to ask this as I feel this would have been asked before but I can't find the answer in the search box. I have a model that I need for Quest, so I've neared the vertices to 10k in Blender but in Unity that 10k becomes nearly 20k, is there a setting I can turn off on export/import so it doesn't double in Unity?

[rose minnow]

The screenshot on the left from blender is showing vertices while the one on the right in the sdk has polys.

[simple ledge]

That explains why the keep quads helped with reducing the number in Unity! It did although spilt the mesh into 2 material slots for some reason

[proper grail]

if you have tris or ngons, the model is split between quads and others

button really only works if your model is 100% quads

[wet hill]

I am just unlucky today

[lyric dock]

Dissolve like, 3 random back vertices

[waxen axle]

I've been cutting corners whenever i could and this is where i'm at now, is this good for quest?

[onyx harness]

This will give you the Poor rating which will be hidden by default.
With that being said it's still better than like 90% of quest uploads

[waxen axle]

I see, i guess it's fine then?

[crisp oak]

Should be

[crisp oak]

Should be

[crisp oak]

Should be

[waxen axle]

I'm trying to switch the target to android but it's not changing, is it processing it on the background or is it just not able?

[dense parrot]

hey can i have some help

i wonder on how to put a shaders on my avatar

[waxen axle]

I'm pretty sure you need to play with the materials of the avatar

I tend to paitoon's toon shader

Poyomi*

[waxen axle]

I'm trying to port this to "android", but clicking on the button does nohting

what should i do here?

[trail berry]

I figured I might ask this again since there might be more eyes to look at this... But it seems SDK is reading a higher number for texture memory than is being actually used... What should I do to fix it?

[zealous wigeon]

How do you know it is incorrect?
Generally it is showing a lower amount than other tools (like https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools) because it only counts textures, which excludes all the other stuff taking up VRAM.

[trail berry]

Reason why is because my texture memory is REALLY low and I have run other avis with as much assets and didn't have to lower the textures this low

[cursive wasp]

im crying

elp

[halcyon canyon]

How many textures do you have and and what resolution?

[lyric dock]

I swear if you're using a 4k texture for anything other than text

[west laurel]

What are the easiest ways to make an avatar 10MB? I got an avatar for VR models and it says it's at 11. Something. Could I have like a lil list of things that I can do that'll keep the avatar still looking alright? I don't wanna go into this without knowing anything and break it

[languid quartz]

A common and easy way is to reduce the texture resolution of your textures in Unity. This can be easily reversed if the quality is too bad so you can just experiment with lowering it safely.

[west laurel]

How would I do that? I have the MAT opened up and whenever I click on one I'm not sure what I do from there

If that's even the right area-

[rancid basin]

question: how does the animator layer controller work?

[languid quartz]

If you have the material open there'll be a texture icon in the shape of a box or something similar you can just click on and it'll take you to the location of the texture.

[west laurel]

Oh ok I got it! Thank you

[west laurel]

How do I fix this? I don't know what this means

[lyric dock]

Most optimized avatar to exist

[proper grail]

Bone hierarchys are in alphabetical order, its just saying to have the first bone parented to upperleg to be more towards A than towards Z

Its for ik reasons

[hoary sphinx]

Hi, I’m new to VRChat and I’m now trying to create my own avatar but I have a few issues and I really don’t know how to fix it. It’s my all time first avatar and I’m trying to learn things. I only use VRoid and Unity until now. Would be nice if someone could give me some advice to fix issues like that.

[tranquil crater]

if you are uploading for quest, theres limits to how many materials you can have. i think the limit is 4, so you'll have to combine materials/textures in blender with the cats plugin, or material combiner. you also have to reduse the amount of physbones on your avatar as well i think max for quest is like 8 or something like that? and mesh's i believe is upto 4? but usually you want to keep it at 1 mesh. if its for PC everything should be ok as long as youre using shaders that are VRC supported. you rmodel will just be Medium level of optimization. for more info i'd recommend looking at the preformance ranking system in the VRC Docs: https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-performance-ranking-system#section-avatar-performance-ranks-value-maximums-per-rank

also, you only want one avatar descripter on your avatar, i can see you have 2, one on the body and one on the face. from what your sdk is showing

[hoary sphinx]

Aaahh thank you, I think this will help a lot! I make it for PC 🙂
I don’t know why, but when I don’t add the avatar descriptor to the body too, the the builder tab won’t show anything, it’s just blank then. I will try again tomorrow 🙂

[tranquil crater]

usually you should add the SDK to the top most part of your avatar, its usually the object everything is parented to/ falls under when collapsed so that it knows where everything in the avatar is

[west laurel]

Is this crazy important? If I say yes will the avatar still be good?

[grizzled shard]

It is not crazy important. Short version is: its safe to say yes.

Long version is, it's not a base Unity or VRChat thing, that's from the Thry shader inspector that you probably have because its bundled with Poiyomi's. In some lighting setups, a mesh will sample a specific position's light then use that for the whole mesh. If you have multiple separate meshes, like for add-on props, these points might be in different places and so these add-ons could be sampling different lighting conditions and look wildly different. Saying "yes" sets them all to the same place, so lighting is consistent for all the meshes.

[west laurel]

Ah ok thank you

[west laurel]

I know I'm asking a lot today I kinda feel bad aha hah but um I uploaded an avatar little while ago to PC/Quest, in game it says it's compatible for both but when I try play as that avatar it's just my fallback. It's like the avatars I have before the update saying the 10MB thing but it shouldnt of lemme upload it quest if it wasn't right? I'm so confuseddddd pls help 🙏🙏

[vivid crescent]

Yuno moment

Surprised someones making a modern yuno too

Need to get my hands on a workable yuno model and see if she has bones in the hair for pysbones

Gonna give her a chainsword with kill particles

[proven briar]

If I have a toggle on an avatar as a skinned mesh, can I convert it to just a regular mesh object and still have it parented to a bone?

[snow knot]

Yeah should be doable in blender. Just make sure the new seperated mesh is a child of the bone it needs to be parented to.

[hoary sphinx]

It‘s me again I just fixed some of my issues but now I have a few now issues especially with the physical bones. I reduced them and now it seems like I crashed my avatar
I also can’t give it a test run because if I try this error (Second picture) shows up in Unity

[hoary sphinx]

Aaaah i got it fixed and tested her, she works well for PC :3 i just have a lot of work to do in blender for her physics and i want custom animations like sitting. But for now i'm happy that i can finally use her

[fleet stirrup]

is this the expiremental branch?

or are you using the old / discontinued cats plugin

[worldly hull]

The basics model from deviant art are rigged and gave bones in their hairs.
I recomend to edit the bones from the hairs because its not 1:1 on the mesh and weightpainted areas.
( this is only optional...)

[vivid crescent]

Can you pass me the model

[tawdry drift]

deviant art models usually cant be used for vrchat

[crisp oak]

Unless you know how to fix mmd bones

[tawdry drift]

i do but i say that bc legalities

a new person isnt gonna know how to fix mmd bones

plus i also dont help with ripped/leaked/tda models

[crisp oak]

fair

not all models with mmd bones are tda models some people but random gmod models into mmd

there are sooo many mmd models that aren't TDA

[proven dock]

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yw8NZA37C71Z6YVvmMzZUhteXIj5vOqcFLKr1Ypoyvg Tupper's (great) intro to optimization. Haven't watched the pres yet (only read the slides so far), but you can see it at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1836679848, about 7:20:50 into the video

[buoyant holly]

yeah that was a great panel

https://vxtwitter.com/BlizzyFoxo/status/1655354885926264834?s=20

an example of the vram savings of detail Maps

[proven dock]

(For those who want Ekkosangen's panel referenced in the pres, it's at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1835895594, 1:47:30 in... haven't seen the material so I'm unsure if I can personally give it a stamp of approval per se, but I generally trust Tupper's judgment regarding things about technical optmization details enough to link it here)

[buoyant holly]

like even just the slides from Tupper's panel was quite helpful

[proven dock]

yeah... "material slots and texture memory are the perf-stats-visible things that matter most" is something more people should know by heart

[buoyant holly]

and considering how many people use Poiyomi there's a lot of vram savings people are leaving on the table

[snow knot]

The amount of avatars I've seen w/ poor/very poor texture memory and material slots when every other stat is medium or better breaks my heart

[tawdry drift]

pure laziness

ive taken almost 1mil poly down to 60k with only 5 materials, i only see reasons to not optimize as excuses or laziness (every use case is different though inb4 "uhh acshully 🤓")*

[crisp oak]

I mean you can say that or people just want overly complex models I have 6 fallback compatible avatars but i also like epic particles and jiggly avis with smooth edges

[buoyant holly]

basically don't design models with staring 2 inches away from it in mind if you want to be optimized

[proven briar]

Is the only way to have toggles on a combined mesh from blender to have a shape key that scales it down to near 0?

[tawdry drift]

that sounds more like a willing choice with awareness rather than a frankensteind avatar with no optimizing done

aka a lot of avatars

but if the boot im talking about doesnt fit you then dont worry

[crisp oak]

Most of vrchat is unoptimized monstrosities lol

[onyx harness]

shapekeys, bone scaling or shader based

[marble rain]

you can use UV discard. it allows up to 16 different clothes or other things to be used without the need of more materials. etc and or blendshapes

[toxic needle]

can confirm, uv discard is magic

although because its shader based it only works if others have shaders enabled in safety settings, so organise outfits around that

[marble rain]

yep yep

[proven briar]

Would this have to be done with a special shader like poiyomi or would this work with standard. What about quest?

[marble rain]

Poiyomi is the only one that can do it as far as i remember atm

[crisp oak]

Definitely not quest compatible

[onyx harness]

Before Poiyomi had it I remember everyone recommending Silent Cel Shading Shader (SCSS)

I never used it though so I don't know how many it can do

[cold yarrow]

Silent's does, yes. Something else I saw did too but I forget which. Apparently it's quite easy to implement, so I'm not sure why more don't.

totally thought Mochie's did but I don't see it in the source

[lone tiger]

Silent's SCSS was the first one to do it, long before Poiyomi implemented a similar solution in his shader. Another shader that has pretty much same inventory system as SCSS is ACLS.

[cold yarrow]

Oh cool, I didn't know that

I did actually go to look at the code, it's really simple

[halcyon canyon]

What is the common VR chat modelling workflow that seems to result in over 200,000 polygons? When I make models in blender, they're usually about 3,000 to 4,000. Same with extreme material counts. I usually just uv unwrap characters onto just one map, so I only need one material and one of each type of texture (albedo, normal, emmission, etc). It seems like you'd have to activley go out of your way to make very poor avatars?

[buoyant holly]

a lot of folks using the subdivide modifier at too high a setting and like trying to model every single belt loophole in Geometry instead of letting normal Maps take care of it

[halcyon canyon]

Hmm makes sense. Another thing I hear is some models are made from bases on the internet. Are these bases rendering bases instead of game-ready bases?

[marble rain]

alot of base models are ripped from other games. which is not exactly a good thing obviously. however for example. nearly all if not all base model creators in the furry community are only 20-30k polygons. leaving a decent amount for others to add their own clothes,accessory etc

[worldly hull]

If VRchat does not like the performance of the current cloth physics of Unity...
Why they don't use this optimized cloth physic asset, that uses Unity DOTS?
(I made a few screenshots how well it even performs, if you run it on a android phone:

[ivory sluice]

Ig it's because it's not easy to implement things on vrc

[worldly hull]

If VRChat doesn't like that players use Unity's Cloth Physic for their avatars, why don't they make their own more optimized Cloth Physic system that runs on the latest technology standards?
Or they just add support for this asset, like they did back then with dynamic bones?
Only with the difference that this asset is multi-threaded and use Unity DOTS, so that it even runs fast on mobile...

[ivory sluice]

Tea but the thing is, as i said, that implementing stuff on vrc is hard

And cloth physics are not that necessary from a general pov

[cold yarrow]

I vote for Magica Cloth 🙂

[worldly hull]

that is magica cloth, but I even would recomend the new magica cloth 2 because its the latest and best version of it.

[cold yarrow]

Definitely!

[worldly hull]

I mean they don't need to remake it from scratch like with phys bones, just adding support for it. you are not forced to buy it, only the onces that really want to have cloth physics because physbones would work and be enough for the most peoples.
and if you are really willing in using cloth physics, you normally should also have the 24$ to buy the asset.

[cold yarrow]

yeah I kinda hope they don't make their own, it's a pretty large effort to build from scratch when it's already been done well, especially when canny is full of really stupid bugs and missing features

[marble rain]

most likely because they have something they are making them self i would guess? and also they are kinda doing alot of in house things now rather then relying on 3rd party apps. that also would halt upgrading the engine when necessory. like we are getting a update to the next LTS i believe it was soon. that has massive performance increases to Blendshapes and such.

also it's most likely also a priority that they focus on things that are more commonly used. such again as blendshapes. cloth physics are rarely used in vrc because its not really required. you can get away with really good weight painting instead.

[worldly hull]

but if you want something better, you have to deal with the unity cloth physic, even if it is unoptimized as hell.

and there are many peoples that are using them already.
Its like with the dynamic bones before physbones existed.

[marble rain]

barely anyone uses cloth physics. its to expensive.

[worldly hull]

of the performance, or what?
I mean 90% of all peoples have very poor avatars already, so if they are a bit over the limit of poor, they can directly give a F about it and screw their performance down the highway to hell.

but if we would have support for the magica cloth asset, it would not be that much work for VRChat and only the peoples that really want to have it, have to buy for the asset.

[worldly hull]

how hard was it for vrchat to add support for dynamic bones back then?
It would be mostly the same until they have something better in the future, but for now, would it not be nice to support this magica cloth asset for those where want to use optimized cloth physics?

[marble rain]

dynamic bones is just one part of the problem they had to solve. they also had to make sure it would work in vrc.

dont really see the need for cloth physics at all

[marble rain]

thats not really the point of it. and i can gurantee you if your avatar takes up 50% of a persons fps or outright crashes a few people you wont be popular. and in most cases just get kicked out of a instance

[worldly hull]

did you not saw how extreme optimized this asset is compared to the default unity cloth?

multi threaded and Unity DOTS.

I think it would be even fast enough to be supported for quest users.

@marble rain

[marble rain]

no i dont think it would work well. due to the quest not having enough procession power.

a quest 2 can only handle about a 1 million polygons with light physics simulation

https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-perf/?intern_source=devblog&intern_content=boost-app-performance-525-mhz-gpu-frequency-meta-quest-2 here it was. and sorry it was Draw calls amount.

[snow knot]

I'm assuming even just hooking in magicaCloth would likely be a non-trivial task. If VRC is mostly still running on monobehaviors it may be a bit difficult to figure out how exactly to slot ECS/DOTS into the workflow.

[cold yarrow]

Probably yeah. And there's so much todo with the features they already have 🙂

[untold shoal]

does anyone know how to fix this?

[snow knot]

Either remove some of your physbone components or add some of the physbone affected bones to the exclusion list in the physbone component. Excluding a bone will also exclude all the children of the bone.

[buoyant holly]

mostly because they have other things on their to-do list they want to do first before making their own cloth system

[proven dock]

I've seen a lot less cloth than dynamic bones, it's a lot lower down the priority list

[olive flint]

I use cloth physics on skirts, dresses and long coats. I’m going low poly so it uses at most 500 ish verts. It’s still gonna rate it poor but personally it give me a more solid result compared to using physbone. Don’t get me wrong the physbones have made optimization massively better, but compared to the cloth physics especially for what I described it has been more straightforward to work with. I wish the limit was at least 1K verts. I hope in the future they do end up making there own optimized version it will help so much

An example of me using the sim; One with dresses and one with a long coat

The second model I’m currently working on so I still need to adjust the colliders

I will say learning uv discard has cut my mats from 6-5 to 2 at the lowest. I can’t go down to 1 since I use the second mat for IOR on glass or front of the eye to give a distortion effect

[celest sentinel]

Im new to avatar uploading and one of my problems is that I have 10 physbones on my avatar but the maximum is 8 for quest. how do I delete them ?

[cold yarrow]

find bones which have a VRC PhysBone (Script) on them and delete that component

you can search for Physbone in the box in the upper left of the hierarchy

[celest sentinel]

got it, thanks !

actually I got one more problem, I have to change the shader of this but its not letting me

[cold yarrow]

it's an embedded material in your FBX file, you'll need to export it. Just find it under the FBX file, select it, and ctrl-d to duplicate. Then edit that, and drag it into the avatar's mesh wherever it should be

ah it may not show up there

you can export them in the rig import though

oh no, now that I look at something that actually has an embedded material, that should work

[crystal bone]

Anyone got Honkai Star Rail's Kafka swimsuit model from aplaybox? I have it but there are insane amount of pointless bones and it's a pain to optimize so wondering if anyone out there worked on it

Hell

[velvet crow]

Hope it's alright, I just wanted to share this video because I think it is woefully underviewed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnmYM3vkYBk

[silent slate]

is texture memory usage counter buged?

is because i have a texture toggle maybe

[crisp oak]

Shouldn't be bugged, lol let me see the rest of your performance parameters in the build window

[silent slate]

ok

[silent slate]

i believe in game is not counting the switch material since is used only with the animation

[crisp oak]

Weird

[lone tiger]

Yup, that's a known bug.

[timid elm]

any optimisation tips

[marble rain]

Keep material count as low as possible. ideally around 1-4, keep polygon count at 72.000 max, dont use more then i would say 4-8 phys bone transform components, and not more then 32 affected bones. no lights or cloth physics etc. gotta think in terms of how your avatar performance is when there are 40 people.

[buoyant holly]

https://twitter.com/FaraVR/status/1668674960712146946?s=20

Fara \\ Furality \\ AC (@FaraVR)

Wanted to show off another practical example using detail normals!

This one is more pertinent to furry characters where we want the flesh parts of our characters (nose, beans) to have a bumpy texture. Simply using a Detail Normal instead of a 4K normal, we save 20mb!

▶ Play video

Twitter · Jun 13, 2023, 5:41 PM

[timid elm]

is there a quick fix for most of these (not the shader tho)

[grizzled shard]

None of those are blocking issues, can still upload and use the avatar.

The LowerLeg one is just a warning about how the SDK thinks your armature should look, it could very well be fine. Can check this by going to the import settings of your avatar's FBX file, Rig tab, and clicking "Configure" on the rig. Take a look and see if there are any issues.

The angle one isn't a concern at all unless you're using full-body, besides that its like the LowerLeg one where it might not be a problem at all.

Material Slots, there's no quick fix beyond deleting meshes from your avatar. You probably don't want to do this.

Texture Memory Usage can be reduced by lowering the resolution of your textures, using fewer textures, using fewer materials (thus needing fewer textures).

[marble rain]

Go into blender. use Cats plugin and create a Texture atlas or two. for the materials that is

[upper veldt]

Question how to I make the material size smaller in blender? A friend said you can compress each material to a certain mb but I can't figure it out. My avatar currently comes in at 400mb in materials, this includes particles and swaps, I made a newer version in blender with less materials required but I still have a high file size at 350mb. I would like to at least get the main model materials down to 200mb materials so it's not a 120mb avatar for people to load in.

[cold yarrow]

No need for blender - click on the texture in the inspector in Unity, and near the bottom set Max Size lower and apply. Or if you want, literally scale the texture down with an image editing program.

[timid elm]

i made this model on vroid so idfk what a phys bone is? do they have like a diff apearence on unity orrrr

i know basic optimisation but i still dk what a phys bone is

[cold yarrow]

https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-dynamics/physbones/

[timid elm]

thxxxx

[cold yarrow]

I encourage everyone to actually read all of the docs there 🙂

[timid elm]

o ok

the most ive learned is how to port stuff lol

[novel snow]

I think I know the answer, but want to confirm something

Which is better for performance: one mesh with 2 material slots each containing a 2k texture, or one mesh with 1 material slot and a 4096x2048 texture?

[onyx harness]

I’d guess 1 mat slot is better than 2. Less draw calls

[novel snow]

Right but it’s a technical 4k texture instead of 2 2k textures

[buoyant holly]

so that would increase vram usage using the 4K texture honestly wondering if there's some techniques you could use as far as how your materials are constructed that could help not needing a 4K texture https://twitter.com/FaraVR/status/1668674960712146946?s=20

Fara \\ AC (@FaraVR)

Wanted to show off another practical example using detail normals!

This one is more pertinent to furry characters where we want the flesh parts of our characters (nose, beans) to have a bumpy texture. Simply using a Detail Normal instead of a 4K normal, we save 20mb!

Likes

321

▶ Play video

Twitter · Jun 13, 2023, 5:41 PM

[cold yarrow]

one material slot will render quicker than two, but use more VRAM - interesting compromise

[snow knot]

Really depends on what features of shaders you're using. Like I'm 90% sure you can get away w/ a 1024x2048 texture if you're merging two materials which should be the same vram cost as 2 - 1024x1024 textures. Ofc if one of your mats had a normal map and the other one didn't then the new merged texture will need to have that deadspace included. Situations like that where you effectively have unused space in the merged texture is where your Vram increases will likely come from

Like I know people keep saying you need a square texture, but iirc you just need the texture to be on powers of 2. There's probably some caveats where square textures are needed though

[marble rain]

1 material. the difference between using 2x 2k and 1 4k is just about 8 mb of vram. unless you have mip map the its about 11 mb difference.

[marble rain]

pretty sure it would create more require more draw calls using details. and having a single 4k atlas is not going to hurt anyone. its only 16 mb or 21.8 mb if mip map is on

[heady smelt]

That's not what I would consider unoptimized as is

One mesh with 2 materials not atlased is like getting an A- on your optimization homework

I am curious at which point it becomes less optimial to atlas things together if for instance only some portions of a texture have roughness/metallic maps and some portions have normals, vs having separate smaller textures for the pieces that have more maps.

[marble rain]

a Atlas will never be less optimal then having more materials. its a given fact. that more draw calls = more resources for your gpu/cpu used.

[snow knot]

I think the only time where I could maybe see atlasing being an issue would be optimizing for quest where vram is kinda the main metric you want to worry about as maxing out the vram will cause the quest to crash. Though you really shouldn't be using super high res textures on quest in the first place.

[snow knot]

You're missing that they're effectively trying to use a 1x2 texture rather than 2 1x1 textures. Usually people will atlas into a 2x2 texture which is where the vram increase comes from. But a 2x1 texture shouldn't be any more expensive vram wise as two 1x1 textures.

[novel snow]

That’s what I figured

My model normally has 2 materials that are 2k and I just atlased them by putting them side by side and condensing the UV map essentially

So I just didn’t know if it was treated as heavily as a 4096x4096 texture

With ASTC compression and no mip maps it is well within the excellent standards for vram usage on Quest

[buoyant holly]

that would still be one draw call using detail Maps initiating a new draw call would be swapping materials not an extra texture sample

[snow knot]

The unity docs mention one format that needs to be square but I'm not seeing anything else mentioning other formats needing to be square
(see non-power of 2 - To Nearest)
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-TextureImporter.html

(this one mentions textures do not need to be square)
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/ImportingTextures.html#TextureSizes

[buoyant holly]

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to see what the the texture memory stat looks like using 2k x 4k

[buoyant holly]

if the Avatar is using PBR that number would be three times higher as a normal map & a metallic smoothness map would also be needed

[snow knot]

You can usually get away w/ lowering the resolution on some of those maps as well. Like I usually have maps/masks at half or a quarter the resolution of the diffuse.

[buoyant holly]

yeah that's pretty much what switch games do when doing PBR textures

[marble rain]

no pretty sure it has to since it has to draw it again. but there should be a easy way to see it in unity

[buoyant holly]

there's a difference between draw calls and texture samples

[marble rain]

i know

[buoyant holly]

tupper also recently gave a optimization panel and was recommending detail Maps which I doubt Tupper would be recommending if they were somehow requiring another draw call

[buoyant holly]

and why would detail Maps require a draw call but normal Maps don't

[marble rain]

from unity them self Normal mapped. This is a bit more expensive than Diffuse: it adds one more texture (normal map), and a couple of shader instructions.

[buoyant holly]

which is a separate concern from draw calls how much texture samples

[marble rain]

all through many people do say normap maps does not really affect performance. had to search it up abit..

cause i forgot most lol

[marble rain]

no i read that.

[marble rain]

i would suppose its about 50% less size. seeing its 4096x2048. which is half of a 4096x4096. in terms of pixels that is.

so instead of 16 it would be 8.

[buoyant holly]

picture showing how many draw calls the diffuse Shader uses versus a fully detailed map standard Shader

[buoyant holly]

and if it's a PBR texture set
increase the savings by about three times

so that's a lot of vram shaved off compared to a half blank 4K texture

[snow knot]

The vram for one 2048x4096 texture will be the same as two 2048x2048 textures. So in the usecase of the person you were replying to there is no difference in vram usage so using only one material is probably the better option out of the two they posited

[buoyant holly]

and probably good to see if any detail mapping would help the original poster with increase perceived fidelity

https://twitter.com/FaraVR/status/1612185972766130189?s=20

Fara \\ AC (@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

[marble rain]

who even uses 4k normal maps lol.

[buoyant holly]

a lot of people

[marble rain]

i hope not. but i guess

[buoyant holly]

I've seen screenshots of avatars with 1 gigabyte of texture memory

[marble rain]

yea but thats prob also due to insane amount of materials.

[buoyant holly]

also technically if you Atlas an entire up Avatar that could easily end up 4K

[marble rain]

which would just reduce it to 16 mb

if 1 material that is

[buoyant holly]

https://twitter.com/BlizzyFoxo/status/1655354885926264834?s=20

Blizzy (@BlizzyFoxo)

@poiyomi shaders have the ability to use a color mask for detail normals. I really wish more people would use this. You can use absolutely tiny maps and still have the detail you want. 10 times less VRAM usage for the normal map on this sweater INCLUDING the mask!

Likes

106

Twitter · May 7, 2023, 11:32 PM

[snow knot]

Most people are using PBR style shaders with normals, metallic s, roughness, etc. on top of the Diffuse. Not to mention emission maps, masks, AO maps, and more. That all adds up.

[marble rain]

i dont actually see that many use PBR.

[snow knot]

Yeah. It really depends on the person. I've heard a lot of people use poiyomi but then just use flat shading which doesn't really benefit much from the extra maps

Technically most people are using a pbr shader they just don't take advantage of the pbr part of it. Just using the diffuse

[marble rain]

well realistic lighting is also more expensive to use. so.

[snow knot]

It pains me every time I see a 4k texture on things that don't need them. Like eyes.

[marble rain]

but then again as long as the total vram use for textures is below or at 40 your all good. lol

no need to really reduce below it

[snow knot]

That's the issue, a single 4kx4k texture is already like >50mb uncompressed

[marble rain]

you dont really do uncompressed.

[snow knot]

It's uncompressed in vram

[marble rain]

no

its very much compressed.

[buoyant holly]

crunch compression does nothing to be VRAM usage

[marble rain]

not talking about that lol

everyone knows that one has no affect on vram

[buoyant holly]

I tend to see lots of PBR myself but I don't tend to hang around with anime people

[marble rain]

i dont hang around anime people either lol?

[buoyant holly]

then again I also tend to hang around a lot more robots

[marble rain]

oo

[buoyant holly]

and also like PBR stuff is very common for maps on vrchat

so the whole a 4K PBR material is kind of expensive vram wise would definitely be applicable there

[marble rain]

well for maps its a different story really

[buoyant holly]

https://twitter.com/FaraVR/status/1668674960712146946?s=20 and here's a example of some PBR on furry stuff

Fara \\ AC (@FaraVR)

Wanted to show off another practical example using detail normals!

This one is more pertinent to furry characters where we want the flesh parts of our characters (nose, beans) to have a bumpy texture. Simply using a Detail Normal instead of a 4K normal, we save 20mb!

Likes

346

▶ Play video

Twitter · Jun 13, 2023, 5:41 PM

[snow knot]

Hmm a quick Google does confirm that textures do usually remain compressed in vram if they're in a compressed format. So I'll accept that I'm wrong on that front

[marble rain]

its a common techique in games Rune. that compression saves alot of memory but also does hurt quality abit in terms of how the texture looks.

but at 4k textures the compression barely even affects quality

[buoyant holly]

it certainly not using toon shading the nose

[marble rain]

its prob using realistic setting

i imagine

[buoyant holly]

which would functionally just be the standard Shader pbr

[marble rain]

i really do dislike running out of vram in majority of instances. 8 gigs but only about 6 available in vr.

[buoyant holly]

and considering how popular pioymi is on avatars detail normal and color textures would definitely be handy for reducing vrm

[snow knot]

This is why I have the download size limit in vrc set to like 50mb. Cause I know most avis that are over that limit tend to be very vram intensive. Like >250mb texture memory expensive

Though it's mostly just a holdover from when vrc didn't have download prioritization so it would just load all the avis at once ad I'd need to wait for the large avis to load first

[buoyant holly]

Glad the download prioritization system is here now

[novel snow]

It’s specifically a Quest avatar so no detail mapping available :P

The diffuse and normal maps are 2048x4096, emission is 1024x2048, and metallic roughness is 256x512

The avatar is about as unoptimized as you can get with a Quest avatar without dipping into Very Poor because of sheer features alone

Main body mesh is about 19k tris and 1 material, then it has a smartphone as an additional prop just under 500 tris. The screen and body of the phone are separate meshes so that I can swap between screens using UV offsets instead of constant material swapping draw calls. Then I have one more mesh that’s a pin on the body.

It ends up being like this:

19.9k/20k tris
4/4 material slots
2/2 skinned meshes
2/2 basic meshes
14/16 contacts
5/8 PhysBone components

VRAM usage is in the excellent category but I don’t remember the exact number

Most of my Quest avatars fall under Medium but this is my personal character that I wanted to be full of features

[buoyant holly]

that's a helpful clarification

[buoyant holly]

still better than most Quest avatars

[novel snow]

I’m aware lol

I usually go for a balance of optimization and features

For this one it was heavily skewed towards features

I only have a single very poor quest avatar and the only stat in the red is tri count

[crimson pasture]

I'm trying to make my Avatar compatible for Quest but It's showing red on most parts of the model

[heady smelt]

I dont Know where to ask this ( Given Im looking for somewhere to post this), but does anyone have a good bullet particle effect? Something Like what the musketeers have?

[near elk]

if I am animating for toggle PB off along with the object it belongs to,

should I?

is it really better for performance to leave the PB there even when I am not using the object?

[supple girder]

I’m unsure what you mean by that, I’d it the textures turning red or your stats for the avatar?

I know texture will change if you use custom ones that have slight edits

[lapis hamlet]

The material combiner that used to go with CATS doesn't seem to be downloadable anymore. Anyone have it?

[tawdry drift]

https://github.com/Grim-es/material-combiner-addon

[lapis hamlet]

Oh is this the new one? Thanks!

[tawdry drift]

not sure if its "new" but it works fine lols

[lapis hamlet]

Oh this is literally it! Hahaaa thank youu!

[buoyant holly]

how did curiosity are you doing a color only Atlas or stuff with PBR textures @lapis hamlet

[lapis hamlet]

Just color, but out of curiosity is there something for PBR textures?

[buoyant holly]

basically you would be doing texture baking if you were dealing with PBR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73REcZVWMhA

[heady smelt]

I wouldn't recommend this tutorial as it contains information that may cause your avatar to perform and look even worse.

[snow knot]

Haven't watched the video but I'll ask what info in there do you believe would cause the avi to perform worse? Each material slot on an avi is an additional draw call. atlasing/baking your textures down into less materials should usually be more performant

[eternal garnet]

Now i wonder, is it even possible to have your avatar fall back to itself... I mean theoretically it should be impossible because your avatar (which is also a fallback and selected as your fallback) should never be able to be automatically performance blocked since it will never cross any limits, but if it did it would just fall back to... itself right? Too bad i'll never see people's faces when they realise my avatar falls back to itself

[eternal garnet]

I didn't see anything either that would make it perform worse, just look worse. I think the key here was "may cause your avatar to perform and look even worse". The may here is key and the combination of perform and look may just be poor wording, OR would have been better. It seemed mainly targeted at the objectively worse look.

[snow knot]

yeah, was just curious on what their reasoning was. Optimization and Quality are usually inversely related to each other and you usually have to make compromises in order to optimize. Though w/ some knowhow you can get pretty optimized with little to no noticeable impact to quality.

[eternal garnet]

Well yea, it depends on what you attempt to optimize. Material slots, Texture Memory usage, Skinned Mesh Renderer and Mesh Renderer Count for instance can all be optimized in varying degrees without ever even touching visual fidelity.

[pallid drum]

Not the channel for that

[lapis hamlet]

Ah I see thank you. I actually have a paid texture baker for Blender that takes out a lot of the steps required for this tutorial. I thought maybe there was something CATS adjacent I didn't know about (I'm a bit too reliant on CATS for avatar stuff, ha). I appreciate it though!

[buoyant holly]

yeah there are more Tools in your toolbox than just cats and mainly suggesting you learn about texture
baking because it's useful for PBR setups and even just color only you could potentially get more efficient texture packing then just arranging the texture squares together

[buoyant holly]

how would it perform worse using less material slots which would cut down on draw calls

[heady smelt]

Because the impact of merged blendshapes on the overall weight of an avatar might be heavier than the impact of draw calls.

[buoyant holly]

ah good point but you could still have a separated face mesh while having everything be one or two textures for the vram savings of a more efficient texture packing

[tawdry drift]

whenever vrc updates its unity version, arent blendshapes gonna be less of a performance issue?

i vaguely recall a conversation about it because someone had asked about splitting up the head/body, but it counted against skinned mesh render

[ivory sluice]

yee, skinning calls and blendshapes will be more performant

[snow knot]

Fair point. Along w/ what Rainwolf said people really should also be baking in the blendshapes that they aren't animating in vrc anyways. Like in a perfect world you've got a body+clothes mesh w/ no blendshapes and a head mesh w/ the relevant visemes blendshapes and that's it.
But we all love our customization so it's usually never that simple.

[tawdry drift]

auto fix should make that error go away lol

its unity just crying like a baby because it cant read the file

[marble rain]

depends on the baker. it isnt worth paying for a plugin.

[heady smelt]

lawd spare me

agh wait is this the wrong channel

my bad

[lapis hamlet]

I bought this one many moons ago. Was inexpensive and gets updated very regularly for each version. https://blendermarket.com/products/simplebake---simple-pbr-and-other-baking-in-blender-2

[cold yarrow]

ooh, passing that to a friend who seems to keep doing that the hard way

[sick relic]

That's actual life changing plugin for blender.

[cold yarrow]

totally is

[tawdry drift]

not an optimizing plugin for blender but another set of tools thats nice is "gret"
https://github.com/greisane/gret

[cold yarrow]

yeah! There's a few things in there which are really cool

[worldly hull]

I wonder if AI is getting so big how it is today. when will VRChat have a option to auto optimize your PC avatar to quest?
but with a high quality algorithm how avatars have to look like and fuction...

not that it looks like this after the optimisation.
(just an idea)

[ivory sluice]

They are working on impostors, which is not 100% what you mean but it does its job and it's very good imo

And an algorithm for these things would be extremely complicated from what i know.
A neural network won't be very reliable either imo.

[buoyant holly]

wonder if I would have looked better if you baked the clothing onto the body mesh for your quest build and the chains so you're not eating your polygon budget trying to do metal chains in geometry

[worldly hull]

that is not my avatar. Its a random that told me he gived a F about the hard work and just reduced the poligons until it fits the limitation of quest.
The question here was, to make an AI that will create a (good looking) quest version of your avatar... maybe with something like ChatGPT...

An AI that sees and understands your avatar and priority the parts that needs many polygons and the parts the can be reduzed without having a mess like on the screenshot.

I hear that Windows 12 will get something like ChatGPT build-in, so why not thinking about the VRCSDK?

[cold yarrow]

"AI" is often suggested for things that it doesn't make a lot of sense for, I'm not sure why it'd be needed here.

[ivory sluice]

windows 12? 💀

[ivory sluice]

ye i agree, before ai was used as an excuse to make things sound advanced, neural networks were used mostly to do repetitive tasks that needed recognition or any other action that relied on human tought, i worked with some in the past.

Even if ai has advanced a lot (ironically advanced where it shouldn't have mostly), doing algorithms traditionally is still more effective and clean than training an ai for something such as optimizing an avatar.
An ai couldn't effectively optimize an avatar unless you trained it with a lot of variations of optimization methods.

TL:DR not everything needs to have or be an ai, normal algorithms can be better in case of processing 3D models

[cold yarrow]

Exactly this, yep.

[worldly hull]

If ChatGPT is capable to reprogram minecraft from scratch or make you some programms just by telling what you need... why would it not be possible to have something what will create or optimize you a VRChat Avatar?
make a avatar from scratch or upload your avatar to the AI and let it improve it.

I saw already ChatGPT features that is connected to the Unity engine and you can spawn objects in different types of behaviors just by saying what you want to the AI.

@buoyant holly @cold yarrow@ivory sluice

[ivory sluice]

you can try it if you want, but a chatbot won't help if there isn't code or algorithms publicly that do this specifically.

[cold yarrow]

I wasn't saying it isn't possible, just that it makes little sense to use AI for this.

[buoyant holly]

Avatar optimizing is a lot more of an abstract problem that you can't steal code from to do

[worldly hull]

AI is getting bigger and bigger today, very soon, we will get ChatGPT 5 and Microsoft want to build-in AI into their next Windows...
I just wonder how long it will take until it also affects VRChat and it's SDK?

• Intel is making now AI cores in their next CPUs

[ivory sluice]

You need human engineering to create something that a chatbot barely knows.
and also gpt is a clear example of why ai is not reliable for 3d model manipulation, it might be more dynamic and easy to make but the results won't be exactly what you want (i lost interest on gpt helping with unity issues when i saw that most solutions were made up)

[cold yarrow]

I'm starting to think you have only a very superficial idea of what AI is actually all about. It's not magic that you can say "I'll add AI!" and suddenly your problem is solved.

(also the ChatGPT company never responded to me applying for a job there, hmmph.)

[worldly hull]

"1 meter neko anime cat with red eyes, black dress, white sneakers"

[cold yarrow]

haha

after you've spent most of the year training it to understand all that, sure

[worldly hull]

and the will generate it for you. just like with the AI arts and the newer AI 3d models and enviroments.

[cold yarrow]

it's an ambitious goal, do let us know when you've got that working.

[worldly hull]

Not me... but maybe the VRC Team?... far in the future?........

with a bit hope and fantasy?......................

[ivory sluice]

yeah, you need to train it, and with a lot, and i mean a lot of samples

These trendy AIs can be easilty trained by just sending them images / descriptions or browser results.
Training an ai with something as sequence of inputs and decisions would require very advanced algorithms and an absurd amount of samples

Blender modifiers could use ai but they use algorithms because it does its job correctly and it's efficient

[cold yarrow]

dude, they can't actually get around to working on most of the stuff in canny, you think they'll put time into this?

[worldly hull]

"far in the future" ?

[cold yarrow]

"far" yeah

[worldly hull]

I just saw that AI is trending as hell and I can not even hear Radio in my car without a hearing a moderator talking about ChatGPT....

even the boomers did noticed it.

[buoyant holly]

Vrchat is not going to spend time making it's content creators obsolete

[cold yarrow]

okay.... doesn't mean it'll actually do this though

hah, and that

[ivory sluice]

my local radio just plays reaggeton and house all day

[cold yarrow]

I have no idea what mine play

[buoyant holly]

optimized Avatar is not something you can quantify into a math problem

[worldly hull]

I do it myself but 99% of the game doesen't know how to optimize or just don't care about it.

[ivory sluice]

and most times an avatar is optimized by not going bollocks by adding random models and complements, base avatars are rarely unoptimized

[buoyant holly]

Doesn't have anything to do with my statement of the feasibility of it

[worldly hull]

https://youtu.be/1WnYAYbytVU?t=28

[tawdry drift]

is this a troll

[buoyant holly]

Programming code is a different thing from 3D modeling

[worldly hull]

It's a bit scarzy how advanced AI is today... and this is still the beginning.

[cold yarrow]

maybe a little

and I'm not even pulling the "I'm a pro software engineer" card here haha

[tawdry drift]

genuinely having a difficult time telling lawl

[ivory sluice]

ngl i'm kinda getting tired of seeing youtubers using gpt or stable diffusion just for the sake of views. Because i'm sure most of them don't have a clue on what they are doing so they let the private message beep boop to do the work

[tawdry drift]

ai is never going to be superior in as niche things as Optimizing Avatars xd

gives me the same feeling as cryptobros thinking that the entire planet was going to go to 1 currency and use NFTs as the currency

[ivory sluice]

it can be, chances are low but never zero
but i'm sure most people are aware that using an ai for that would be a terrible waste of time when they could just code their tought process on an algorithm
which would be very hard to do but relatively easy compared to training an ai

[ivory sluice]

yee i call these people AIbros
because as cryptobros they just jumped on the trend wagon for their quick money while their previous one burned down to crisp

[tribal karma]

U can quantify everything I to a math problem. Avatar optimization for vrchat is just a series of steps. An ai would easily be able to optimize an avatar much like cats "fix avatar" feature only with more steps

Take decimation for example. that's already done by a simple specialized ai. Just set a series of targets and base steps and run an ai through a generational learning series till you get an ai that optimizes an avi to an acceptable level

[bold wharf]

Algorithm != AI. Decimating doesn't use AI.

[ivory sluice]

None of blender's native modifiers (nor CATS) use ai.

An ai is basically an algorithm that "programs itself" by learning, just how a human mind would do, that's why it's also called neural network.
An algorithm doesn't vary its programming on the runtime, it follows a series of steps that simulates how a human would process it, but the instructions always stay the same.

I think the only thing that blender has that relies on AI is the denoisers, because it's something that can be trained , it doesn't need exact results and it's faster than an algorithm

[hallow junco]

Hey I'm looking for avatar creator with reasonable price range to make an avatar quest for me as don't know how to it myself it's old avatar model so should be simple enough

[sick relic]

Search for commission in VRCTraders server. #community-servers-old message
Also try not to include the word "simple" or something similar. You really don't know if the task is simple or not.

[hallow junco]

Alright thanks

[marble rain]

its far more advanced then that lol. just reducing polygons is one step out of many. teaching a AI to do it properly would take month's and thats just the polygons. then you need to train it to optimize Textures to get the best result on the lowest possible resolution and highest. and then there is the almost endless amount of combinations of how much something impacts X Persons pc. since there are so many combinations of hardware it would take far to long to train an AI to auto optimize it to each selective hardware combination.

doing it all yourself is much eaiser and simpler. since majority of the performance loss comes from to many materials typically in Vrc atleast. or to high vram costs.

[tribal karma]

i never said it wouldnt take a while. ofc it would take a bit. but alot of the tools that are used to optimize avatars already use a basic form of speicalized ai. but as with any machine learning once its made its made. the only part of the process that would require human input is the inital set up and then seeing if its good enough. theres already a few tools in unity that you can use to optimize textures down to 1% of what there current file size is. most of the steps to optimize an avatar are a few clicks away for someone optimizing an avatar. would be as simple as the ai exicuting a chain of clicks/commands. tbh with the stuff thats already available you could probably even set up a basic optimization on a macro to get the bulk of the work done. no ai needed.

ive optimized a couple avatars for vrchat and didnt think it was that complicated. took me like 2 hours and i didnt even know what i was doing. all my unity and blender knowladge is self taught via guess and check for 95% of it. then theres that 5% of stuff i got stuck at then googled it. im working on my first from scratch avatar atm

you can calculate the entirety of a human body, its proportions and what makes it up with an equasion after all

[marble rain]

they really dont. use AI at all lol. they just use logic based on what people have found

[tribal karma]

there is several forms of ai most of the time when people talk about ai they are talking about generalized ai

but there is speicalized ai thats used in every day life

[marble rain]

there is none through

[tribal karma]

google search is a very advanced form of speicalized ai

[marble rain]

no

that has nothing todo with AI either

[tribal karma]

it is

[marble rain]

nope

[tribal karma]

https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence#:~:text=Weak AI%2C sometimes referred to as narrow AI,human speech or curating content on a website).

[marble rain]

Google Search is litterly just a Advanced Algorithme with alot of conditional logic.

[tribal karma]

you use speicalized ai multiple times daily

[marble rain]

i dont get why you think its AI lol.

your computer is not AI either.

[tribal karma]

your recomendations on youtube are the work of speicalized ai

[marble rain]

nor is a cpu.

[ivory sluice]

Internet browsers use algorithms, AI is for tasks that would require tought process and would not need exact results

[tribal karma]

theres different forms of ai

[marble rain]

not really.

[tribal karma]

the ai everyone thinks of when they think ai is generalized ai which doesnt not exist

[marble rain]

what no

[tribal karma]

but machine learning is ai

speicalized ai

[marble rain]

machine learning is a vastly different thing lol

has nothing todo with any of this either.

[tribal karma]

from generalized ai yes

im saying you could make a specialized ai to optimize an avatar.

[marble rain]

no you couldnt

[ivory sluice]

An ai is an algorithm made to learn and create its own "tought process", an algorithm just follows a set of instructions already created by a human, which is what's used on vrchat tools, blender addons, and internet browsers

[tribal karma]

specalized ai is an ai that is very good at one specific thing but cant realy do anything else and doesnt actualy understand the problem

[marble rain]

cause it would not be an AI

i dont know how you got to think that everything is AI.

but its not.

[tribal karma]

hostile your thinking of generalized ai

[marble rain]

nope

[tribal karma]

you should do your research stereo knows what im talking about

[marble rain]

i am sorry to burst your bubble but Google does not use AI for Google search

nor does youtube.

[tribal karma]

they both do https://searchengineland.com/how-google-uses-artificial-intelligence-in-google-search-379746

[marble rain]

its all purely algorithme based and information on what you search and such

yea no i am not gonna click that.

[ivory sluice]

this is getting chaotic

[tribal karma]

the algorithems your talking referencing are speicalized ai thats what your not understanding

[marble rain]

no they are not lol.

has nothing to do with AI.

a AI would be something like Google assistent etc.

[tribal karma]

ive provided you with 2 sources proving that you are missinformed on what speicalzied ai is. you have refused to remain reasonable

google assistant is a psudo form of generalzied ai

true generalized ai currently doesnt exist as it would have to be able to change its own code

[marble rain]

nah i just dont believe everything on the internet. when it comes from untrustful sources.

[tribal karma]

want me to get you a scientific paper?

[marble rain]

want me to define AI for you?

anyway its the wrong place to talk about that in here.

its for avatar optimizations

[languid quartz]

That's all well and good everyone. But Imma have to ask you to stop since this has nothing to do with avatar optimization at this point.

[tribal karma]

we were tlaking about how an speicalized ai could be used to optimize an avatar

[buoyant holly]

Such a thing doesn't exist at the moment so it is functionally irrelevant for Avatar optimization in here

[tribal karma]

thats the thing i was trying to explain tho rainwolf. alot of the tools used for avatar optimization already use a form of speicalized ai. you would just need to set one up to exacute the steps nessacary and check to see if its good enough.

[buoyant holly]

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yw8NZA37C71Z6YVvmMzZUhteXIj5vOqcFLKr1Ypoyvg/edit tupper recently gave a panel about Avatar optimization recently and hears the slides from it

[livid wolf]

Does anyone know how to fix the top one?

[tawdry drift]

not the ai optimizing conversation again lmfao. cats and blender are not ai plugins and do not use any ai besides denoising

stop relying on and thinking ai will be able to do every little niche thing ever

[tawdry drift]

it just means your bones arent parented correctly in blender

so open it back up, click on armature and go into edit mode

not able to get screenshots atm but i Think after you go into edit mode, the little green stick figure that looks like its running has the bone relation settings

[ivory sluice]

it was supposed to just be "ai != algorithm" and now i'm left with more questions than answers, wtf is specialized and generalized ai, and what does it have to do with traditional algorithms

[cold yarrow]

what

[tribal karma]

thought this was common knowledge and have seem to confused some people. speicalized ai = a chess bot/the ai you fight in a bot call of duty lobby. generalized ai would be iron mans voice in his suit.
true generalized ai currently does not exist. the ai in your phone is an advanced form of speicalized ai that can do many things but doesn't actually understand what your asking. it just knows how to reconize what you say and input that into a search engine to give you the result you want.

theres a third form of ai but thats called super ai. think the terminator. we are no where near that one

people make specialized ai all the time. im by no means an expert but there are people out there that could make a specialized ai for optimizing avatars. you could probably commission one much like people commission avatars.

[bold wharf]

Yeah man that's not artificial intelligence those are just algorithms lol.

[tawdry drift]

uh, anyways, how bad is it to leave the head+body conjoined

[bold wharf]

Depends on polycount of your body.

[tawdry drift]

yeahh thats what i was thinking?

something like blendshapes checking every poly every frame? finding it difficult to find anything Solid

[bold wharf]

Bear in mind, this becomes a nonissue as soon as the unity upgrade drops

[tawdry drift]

ahh cool beans

hmmm say a flat 50k?

[bold wharf]

VRC recommends at about 32k

https://gist.github.com/d4rkc0d3r/f77c1e96d4aeefd0d1eaf13fb096a2de

Here are some numbers

[tawdry drift]

oh shit

thank you

now to hide the separation line somehow hmmm

[buoyant holly]

wonder why there's so many folks in here recently that don't know the difference between neural networks and algorithms

[bold wharf]

They saw chatGPT and started using buzzwords.

[marble rain]

because the common mis conception about AI is that anything that seems smart is AI while its not. we really dont have any AI today at all. the closest we have is automated drive

[snow knot]

iirc it's just the cpu skinning cost that'll improve. The other reason I've seen people seperate the head for is file size. I've def decreases the filesize of an avi just by splitting the head and body. I think it has something to do with the bit length of the vertex index having to increase after a certain number of affected verts or something.

[ember tide]

who do i gotta pay to optimize my avatar for both pc and quest?

i dont have the brain cell anymore

lol

[tulip rose]

A lot of time or a good amount of money

[ember tide]

i have some money, but thats why im asking here : who is available so i can ask lol

[tulip rose]

Don't pay people here, all you'll get is scam bots use vrc traders: #community-servers-old message if you plan to spend money.
Other than that advice is free here lol

[ember tide]

thanks for the help <333

[granite moss]

Ariva Victoria check your DMS.

[cold yarrow]

This is likely to be a scam, of course 🙂

[ember tide]

slay

lol

[marble rain]

depends on how much work needs to be done. and who you ask. and how bad the current avatar you have is.

[marble rain]

lol i dont know how you get to that conclusion are you saying that we are all bots? or are you the bot scam?. plenty of people here would be able to do it and not scam.

[tawdry drift]

people are redirected because bots and scammers will zone in on conversations that could involve money

not everyone is a scammer, obviously, but theres been an influx of them trying to poach people using the #avatar-search-old channel

[little monolith]

Money avatar buy

[bold wharf]

Sorry Bossman but cats' material combiner reeks.

[tulip rose]

Not everyone is a scammer, obviously, it's just that this server here has no repercussions if you do get scammed. They can just keep doing it.
In contrast, at vrc traders, you must be verified to sell. Either person or can be removed from the server if they are a scammer.

So basically, the community here just sends everyone to traders to deal with money. And we just tell people here don't pay anyone here. It's for their own safety.

[frozen hazel]

is there a comfortable way to remove all bones that are not linked to any mesh

[snow knot]

Hm. I don't think there's an easy way. You'd probably only want to remove bones that have no children anyways since bones w/ zero weight but have children might still be useful for organization, constraints, components, etc. when brought into unity.

You can probably do a quick search for end bones (ones w/ the _end suffix) those are appended to the last bone in a chain if the setting is checked on export (it is on by default) and have zero weight. But again they may be useful for physbones if you don't want to add an endpoint distance on the component.

Though I've definitely seen some models that have _end_end_end bones cause they were exported and reimported into blender multiple times as an fbx.

[stuck echo]

I don't know you will saying that also is here everyone of here bee a scammer

[acoustic gyro]

honestly rather than a specialised ai an avatar creator with an asset store that automatically sets up triggers, radial menu, creators can upload outfits and body types for free or sell them in the app and apply outfits to specific body types and sort them by search

all it would take is one very open cutomizable avatar creation system with an asset store to transition the avatar community from whole avatars to selling assets for creating avatars

[tawdry drift]

pls no more ai stuff pls pls psl

[native jacinth]

How can I check what the custom shader keywords are?

[ivory sluice]

on the material's inspector, click the three dots and toggle debug, you'll see a text field containing all enabled keywords

[native jacinth]

@ivory sluice Which of these are custom?

_anisotropy_on _transparenthilight_on _vertexoffsetrule_on
_reflectionprobetransparent_on _rimtransparent_on _usereflectionprobe_on _usevertexposition_on __speculartransparent_on
_anisotropy_on _nonereflectionprobeusematcap_on _secondspecular_on _transparenthilight_on _transparent_on _usebacklightrim_on _usereflectionprobe_matcap _usereflectionprobe_on _vertexoffsetrule_on
_rimtransparent_on _usereflectionprobe_on _vertexoffsetrule_on __speculartransparent_on
_anisotropy_on _transparenthilight_on _transparent_on _vertexoffsetrule_on
_anisotropy_on _secondspecular_on _transparenthilight_on _transparent_on _vertexoffsetrule_on
_anisotropy_on _secondspecular_on _transparenthilight_on _vertexoffsetrule_on

and what would pressing Auto Fix do?

Is there a risk of it breaking anything?

[ivory sluice]

If these keywords are local, which i assume all of these are, then you don't need to autofix

And auto fix will open the keyword utility panel, removing the keywords won't error the shader but it will disable all functions that these keywords enabled

[native jacinth]

Ahh

So if something relies on a certain custom function, it'll no longer work?

[frail cedar]

im having trouble with my pc freezing when i turn my avi to a android model so i was wondering if i could find someone out there that could upload for free

[ivory sluice]

Kinda
Removing a keyword from this list is equal to manually turning it off on the material.

But i'm sure all keywords there are local, so you don't need to do anything about it.

[heady smelt]

Anyone know a good asset store product that'll combine meshes, materials, atlas texs etc? Tons on there but not sure if anyone's tried them.

[zealous wigeon]

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer
Can do the first 2 things.

But not aware of anything that can do good atlasing in Unity and not aware of one that does skinned meshes.

However there is polytool that does do all those things, but I am not sure how flexible it is, assuming you need something that doesn't just automatically optimize https://markcreator.gumroad.com/l/Polytool

[heady smelt]

Thank you for the quick reply and info, I will check all these out.

[heady smelt]

Working well, and does everything I'm after.

Polytool i mean

[chilly breach]

Is there any way to set the default compressor format for Android to be ASTC 12x12? It's set to 4x4 for every single texture I have, and I can't change multiple at once. Going through every single texture and changing it to 12x12 then waiting for it to finish uploading is tedious as hell

[snow knot]

If you have all your textures in one folder you can select them all and change the format, it'll do all of them at once

[chilly breach]

The format is the only setting it doesn't let me change when selecting multiple textures

Maybe it's the file formats

[carmine vigil]

heyo, lmk if you still need an avatar optimized. Been working as a 3D artist for 6 or so years. Not sure how to convince peeps I'm not a scam? I'm inbetween studio gigs. I'm new to freelancing, so idk how to market myself lol. Here's my portfolio if you wanna see my work, I specialize in optimization, low polycount/texture amount. If you want, DM me the model details and I can give a better quote

https://cramble.artstation.com/

[tulip rose]

Man if that's not the most sus thing lol.
50/50 a real person.

[tawdry drift]

yeah always feels sus but i think theyre real

had a more human conversation with them in the rig channel at least

about using mixamo and how they changed the naming conventions on the rig you export from it

[bold wharf]

They also have an avatar world #avatar-showcase message

[mint topaz]

its a nice website

looks 100% legit to me tbh

[bold wharf]

It's art station. That's like one of the go to place for portfolios

[mint topaz]

yea

[opal garden]

Is there Any Documentation in what way Hidden Objects/Assets can Draw Performance? I know that Having an Avatar with a lot of Stuff can draw Performance, but i have run tests and found out, that even without the Extra Animatorlayers, the same avatar with and without the Assets runs a good 2-7 FPS worse.

I got a Ryzen 9 5900x, RTX 3090, 32 GB 3200Mhz Ram, Rendering at 150% on Quest2 Wireless

In Desktop

~128 FPS Avatar without the Extra Assets in my Homeworld no Mirrors
~107 FPS All Assets and Animators (22 Layers in Total no Anystates used unless the Standard Additive has Anystates)
~118 FPS with the Animators Removed and just Standard Animators

I know that a Full VRam requires the system to use the RAM and slows down the Rendering, but i doubt that this is the Case here.
Collisions of Contacts and Rendering of Cameras on the Assets should be disabled as far as i know.
Are Audiosources in any ways processed even when disabled?

its probably a CPU thing, but which components would draw CPU even when disabled and why?

The Avatar has Quite Many Audiosources, Contact Recievers, Contact Senders, Static Meshes, Skinned Meshes, Particlesystems, Lights, 2 Cameras, Materialslots/Materials but all that stuff is not active on standard.

[pale pollen]

idk if this'll awnser your question, but here's some benchmarks:
https://notes.sleightly.dev/benchmarks/

might or might not contain what issues you're experiencing

def worth a read either way though

[somber raven]

Yeah, check out what @pale pollen linked.

Also, you should consider adding Thryrallo's VRC Avatar Performance Tools to your projects. It has an Avatar Evaluator that can tell you detailed information about how performance is affected based on what's on the model. https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools

[marble rain]

Disabled objects do not occur any performance loss. they only take up memory and no objects that are disabled can take any cpu resource. its not possible.

[opal garden]

i already checked that out, but my testav doesnt have custom animators

and as far as i know, vrram usage itself when not rendered shouldnt affect fps

[marble rain]

it still needs load in the memory. even if its disabled.

[opal garden]

but is that alone already drawing fps

constant*

On Standard:

[marble rain]

no. it doesnt matter how much vram you use. however as soon sa you go beyond your capacity then it will struggle since it moves overflow to regular memory and thats slow AF

[opal garden]

yeah but this is not happening with my AV

[marble rain]

you have alot of lights, bones

[opal garden]

yeah but most stuff hidden

[marble rain]

does not matter. all the materials still need to load into memory.

[opal garden]

i tested the Same AV with and without the Objects and even when disabled the one without performs better

how is that draining fps

[opal garden]

shouldnt this only matter when the capacity is full?

[marble rain]

eh it wouldn't affect it. but that many materials will cause anyone to complain when they load you in.

[opal garden]

but now we have a problem here, by your explaination i should gain same FPS on both my versions but i dont

[snow knot]

iirc theres also a slight performance cost to moving object or bones around. It's not much but can def start to be felt when there's multiple 500+ bone avis out.

[marble rain]

if its parented/child bones for sure lol

[opal garden]

about 300 of those bones are from Other Objects that are disabled

Reduced Version

[snow knot]

Googling some rather sus things at 9 am like 'can disabled children affect performance unity'

How many parent constraints? iirc that's not counted in the perf ranking yet. They are tracking them in the avi details in-game though

[opal garden]

35 in total

hmmm

dam

maybe it is my animator, ill do moretesting

[opal garden]

51/52 no objects
51/52 no animator
49/50 animator+ objects
udonbenchmarks

79/80 no objects
78/79 no animator
76/78 animator+ objects
tinyworld

49/62 no objects
60/62 no animator
59/60 animator+ objects
greatpug Populated

hmm, maybe my previous numbers where changed by something

[spring sun]

Looking through this entire thing
Everything hidden or not has data to even exist in the first place
All that data needs to be loaded whether or not its shown
Hidden objects have materiels and meshes that needs to be put in memory
Hidden bones need to still send position and rotation data even though you cant see them
The more components like lighta or constraints give the object even more data
Polygons on objects can also cause lag but hidden objects wont directly/visibly cause fps drops since its in memory vs needing to be rendered right now
Dynamic lights take up more resources than baked lights

[marble rain]

hmm. i wonder if there is a way to actually get decals to look not so blurry at 2k resolution or 1k even.

[spring sun]

turn off the filter

[bronze lantern]

When setting up toggles, should I have two seperate animations to turn something off and on? or is there a way to do it in one animation? does it affect performance?

[spring sun]

performance not really

and yes

cause otherwise it would toggle on and not toggle off

since nothing is telling it to

[snow knot]

Technically you can do it in one animation using motion time but honestly it shouldn't matter too much.

[somber raven]

The only thing to consider is the amount of Layers in your Animator Controllers. The more you have, the higher of a performance impact. Use Thryrallo’s VRC Avatar Performance Tools to evaluate how that looks like in technical detail: https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools
Add to VCC: https://vpm.thry.dev

[snow knot]

Honestly, if you have enough toggles as layers to have that much of a performance impact you're probably pretty far into the very poor rating anyways

Hmm, unless it's all blendshapes I guess.

[bronze lantern]

Currently I have 20 layers

I'm not sure how since I only have a few toggles

[mild junco]

Hey everyone. I've built an avatar that only uses 2 materials, but has a lot of toggles for weapons and stuff. Each weapon is a separate mesh. The builder screen shows I'm using 18 material slots. Of course its counting the amount of times a material is used as opposed to how many materials in total are used.

Is there any way to optimise my workflow so I can keep my weapons, but not have to use a separate material slot for each one?

I suspect the only option may be to use blendshapes to hide the weapons inside the body, but that sounds like a pretty unoptimised way of doing things.

[glacial lily]

could someone dm me and assist me with a question regarding blender and unity. ive tried everything I can think of

[snow knot]

If they're all using the same material you could merge them all into one skinned mesh with a bone for each weapon. To disable them with this you can scale them to 0 and bring them back to 1 scale when needed. It's not entirely optimal since you're technically still rendering them but it'll save on mats.

Could also look into uv tile discard for hiding merged weapons if the weapons are already pc only.

Honestly though. 18 materials isn't too bad especially if you are using all the weapons at once cause you're only incurring draw calls on meshes that are active.

[bronze lantern]

So with the current setup I have, I in total have 3 separate skinned mesh renderers. When I use Thry's Avatar Evaluator it says my blend shapes are medium ranking. my "Body" renderer incudes my avatars base which has blendshapes, and his face which also obviously has blendshapes, would it be better to separate the base and the face? If I understand correctly having more skinned mesh renderers would probably be less performant than the blendshapes. But I just want to check with people in here to see if my thought process is correct

[marble rain]

well. depends you may want to see if u can merge it all. and have one skinned mesh only. however if you really want to seperate face from the body then understand your going to have a fairly ugly cut off line from where ever you seperate the face from the body. the performance benefit from it is not really worth it and with unity 2022.xxx whatever version we are getting its less of a problem

and potential other issues with shaders and colors not being the same as well

[bronze lantern]

Merging it all into one would still have performance effect when it comes to blendshape but less so than seperate skin meshed renderers? I plan to keep the clothes and body separate because I do certain things that I think might break or I am not super confident about.

[marble rain]

skinned mesh renderes are fairly heavy. and honestly the face seperation is not going to massively improve your frames. infact i am pretty sure its not that big even.

i would just keep it merged. but you can obviously test it if you want

have two versions one with one skinned mesh and one with two

the face and body seperate

and check the frametime of each being the only object in the unity editor

and again once we get unity 2022 LTS blendshapes no longer really demands that much

[bronze lantern]

Oh that's smart! I'll try doing that! It wouldn't probably hurt anyways!

I'll make another version of him with just one skinned mesh renderer, I could probably just use separate materials like I am already currently doing but reduce the the draw calls because there one less mesh renderer

worth a shot!

[marble rain]

theres a whole ton of reasons to avoid skinned meshes as much as possible. like each skinned mesh also has to calculate light being bounced off etc and such

[bronze lantern]

Yeah that makes sense, I can still use separate materials which I need because different parts of the body require certain things from a shader that I can't do all in one material, but If I understand, it's better to have 7 materials on one mesh renderer than 7 materials spread across two mesh renderers

[marble rain]

yes its alot better to have it all on one

[bronze lantern]

however, merging these two together are going above the shape key polygon count which the wiki says not to do

[marble rain]

yeeea i know but its not that crazy

atleast not when we change unity version

so its not realllly worth doing ngl

[bronze lantern]

I'm going to make a separate one, and test the frametime of both in unity and thry's editor to see if it makes much more difference in my specific case

[marble rain]

how many polygons are we taking about in total?

[bronze lantern]

Should I combine all my skinned mesh renderer it'll be total of 63,314 polygons

Currently have my body, clothes, and hair as mesh renderers

[marble rain]

not to many

[bronze lantern]

hair is separate because I didn't want to go over the 32k polygon limit the wiki said, but I can always still merge it

[marble rain]

mhm

[snow knot]

If you transfer normals from around the cut area on the uncut version onto the cut version there shouldn't be any noticable seam. I've done it on one or two avatars.

[marble rain]

kinda still is. which is a huge disadvantage

[snow knot]

Weird. I really haven't noticed it at all on the avis I've done it on.

[marble rain]

even in triple A games it still happens 😄

[proper grail]

can confirm, i have data transferred normals from a solid mesh to a separated mesh with just the seams selected via vertex group and i do not have the split edges problem

unless a shape key affects that edge, than i just disable shape key normals ez

[round pollen]

Hi Is it better to have a single atlas for the entire avatar or divide the textures between each materials, how does an atlas improve optimization, does it make the avatar size lower?

[limpid cargo]

less draw calls with an atlas, only combined resolution matters for performance (4x 2048 = 1x 4096)

[marble rain]

Atlas is far superior. as it results in being able to for instance if you have a 4k atlas it allows rendering of 4 2k textures as one texture only. which greatly saves on material cost. obviously you can do 16x 1k textures inside a single 4k atlas and so on. its basicly doubling every time you step down

however having a single 4k or two 4k textures does not really hurt anyone.

[limpid cargo]

also for people who don't know, having an alpha channel literally doubles the file size of any given texture, also if you pack 3 greyscale textures into a single RGB texture, they collectively take up 1/3 the size of what you had, using this, you can get away with several 4k textures instead of 1 or 2.

[heady smelt]

Hi! Do I have to delete some textures to convert avatars to quest?

[crisp oak]

maybe for optimization but you can have multiple materials on quest avis

[heady smelt]

It fails to upload because of size limit, it is 24mb and I should reduce it to 10mb

[zealous wigeon]

Or just reduce the resolution of the textures, you can set it separately for Windows and Android.

[rancid geyser]

I'm currently re-compressing a lot of textures for mobile, as I'm finding out the texture formats available for crunching textures expand to fill incredible amounts of VRAM on a quest. think like, 1 meg becomes up to 40 meg. fun! so now I'm recompressing to things like ASTC and PVRTC to be kind to the very limited VRAM of an oculus quest 2

[rancid geyser]

Now that I'm done on the mobile side, I find that the PC side of VRAM texture compression (not crunching. crunching is only on disk) is actually pretty hamstrung... I guess the only option I have is DXT1 as even BC7 is... bigger than expected for a texture that has large areas of completely flat color.

[buoyant holly]

textures that are just big islands of flat color probably could have the resolution decrease without much detail loss

[rancid geyser]

its the transitions that make that not an option...

[vagrant plover]

Question about UV tile dissolves and geometric dissolves. From what I understand, meshes aren’t rendered when using UV tile discards, but what about those 2? Are the meshes still being rendered when they are dissolved?

[somber raven]

If I’m not mistaken, they will still be rendered since the Mesh Renderer is still active. Even if you use Tile Discard instead of Dissolve, the original shape of the Mesh still exists even though it’s being hidden by the Shader.

[vagrant plover]

Thank you!

[zealous wigeon]

One huge benefit of using UV discard is that the material doesn't need to be cutout or transparent and can be opaque, meaning you won't dissappear behind transparent surfaces.

[somber raven]

Can confirm. This is true.

[snow knot]

iirc from a friend who uses uv discard he's had some issues where some shaders in worlds will still be affected by the discarded mesh. Like some water shaders will show an outline of the discarded mesh still. That's pretty much the only issue I've noticed aside from the normal issues you'd get if people don't show your shader.

[zealous wigeon]

That is caused by a projector, which applies a shader onto any mesh, no way to stop that except turn off the mesh.

[round pollen]

Lots of Polygons make the MB size of an avatar go up right

[lone tiger]

Just polygons on their own not that much, but if there is tens or hundreds of shapekeys affecting a lot of vertices, then their memory and download size can shoot up.

[random shadow]

can somone help me with quest optimizations

[terse gale]

Yes. The exact amount varies but its at least around 44 bytes per vertex. However that per vertex number goes up with the number of shapekeys since each shape key I believe adds 12 more bytes (3 4 byte floats) even if that particular vertex doesn't move. Also every UV map adds to that number as well with UV maps taking around 8 bytes per vertex.

Triangles/poly themselves don't add that much size, but you end up with more vertices as the number of triangles goes up.

[round pollen]

Thanks!

[vagrant dawn]

Yo, Im trying to make an avatar again after not playing vrc for 2 years, i frgt if I should do this or not, but should I delete all the faces of the diff objects that arent visible, like the back side of the eyes?

[mint topaz]

you wont see it so

[autumn phoenix]

Hi, guys
Is there any Unity addon to batch copy components from one avatar to another?
Let's say I have two similar avatars with a similar bone structure (the main bones are the same and have the same names) and I'd like to copy every component from every available bone from one to another, but without copypasting it manually

[zealous wigeon]

https://github.com/rurre/PumkinsAvatarTools

[autumn phoenix]

Thank you ❤️

[grim cedar]

Is it expected for a particle system to take a material slot if the render mode is set to "none"?

I guess according to https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-performance-ranking-system/#avatar-performance-ranking-stats particle systems with trails use two slots for VRC's ranking. Do the particles still actually have 2 slots if render is set to none or is that just how vrc is calculating it?

[grim cedar]

Ah, I see there's a topic for this on Canny already https://feedback.vrchat.com/bug-reports/p/particle-systems-with-no-materialdisabled-renderer-module-still-count-towards-ma

[snow knot]

I can't remember can you enable/disable components of the particle system via animation? I could see that being where an edge case might appear in that case but then you could just disable the trail renderer by default and enable it at runtime to 'save' a slot since iirc you can also swap materials into a slot via animation

Though yeah, it'd be nice if particle systems w/ no renderer could be made to not count against your material slot count. It'd save a couple of slots on some of my avis that use the persistent particle workaround.

[zenith apex]

How do you optimize an avatar for quest 2?

[heady smelt]

Change shaders to android optimized

[zenith apex]

How do you do what?

And in what program?

[heady smelt]

Unity

Some assets might need to be removed if they have custom shaders

[zenith apex]

Can you help me walk through it?

[heady smelt]

Yeah

[tawdry drift]

https://youtu.be/8MkgXcidxg4

edge loop dissolving, change shaders to mobile

theres a tool called easyquestswitch you can use too

[zenith apex]

I have easyquestswitch, but idk how to use it

[zenith apex]

I sent ya a friend request

[shrewd palm]

I'm trying to cut down on polygon count for my avatar, as it's the only thing still in the red. Would deleting polygons under clothing be a good way of doing it or would it screw up other parts of the avatar?

[tawdry drift]

if you dont toggle those clothes off then yeah its a good way to reduce polycount

dissolve edge loops too

[shrewd palm]

Great, most I'm planning with the clothing is pallete swaps so I should be good

[mint topaz]

yea, dissolving edge loops is a great way to go about it

and stuff that you straight up wont see ofc

[shrewd palm]

Yeah, the before is just under 100k so hoping I can cut enough

Sadly have to put it on pause cause work.

[snow knot]

One last hail mary I'll do if I'm still not down past 70k on an avi is start decimating some of the bits that are mostly weighted to one bone or don't have many blend shapes affecting them. Like nails, pawpad on furry avis, etc. Mostly cause that usually only removes a couple thousand at best.

[shrewd palm]

I'll keep that in mind

[ruby dirge]

im trying to add a couple of physbones to my model. But when i add the bones to the armature and weight paint them to the mesh in blender, it for some reason makes the file size jump from 18mb to 150mb? I'm just exporting the mesh and armature too, so i dont know what other export settings could be causing this

[kindred sedge]

i was in blender and used the quick desamtion on the cats plugin and it made my models mouth open and i was wondering how to change it back

[terse gale]

When you say "the file" do you mean the FBX you exported?

[ruby dirge]

yeah

[terse gale]

What were your export settings in blender? does the blender project have animations in it?

[ruby dirge]

it has a couple of limited animations, im exporting just the mesh and armature, but i dont know what other settings would effect it. im pretty new to blender and unity

[terse gale]

Trying exporting with "Bake Animations" unchecked. I think even the most recent version of blender that actually means don't export animations (blender can't export unbaked animations to FBX format)

[ruby dirge]

okay yeah, that cut the .fbx all the way down to 2.5mb, thank you

[kindred sedge]

i think i optimized too hard and now my clothes clip into the person

how do i add edgeloops

or somthing similar

[terse gale]

are the clothes going to be toggled off at any point?

[kindred sedge]

no

[terse gale]

then just remove the parts of the body mesh that are underneth the clothes. it will reduce the size and poly count and there won't be a cliping problem anymore

[kindred sedge]

like delete those edges? or

[terse gale]

faces, vertices, just any part of the body mesh that will never be seen. always keep a backup before starting. when deleting mesh along a seam it can mess up UV maps sometimes

[kindred sedge]

oh alr

[kindred sedge]

everytime i try to save the atlas it says error

this is whats poppin up

what do i do

[mortal ibex]

Hey

Can one of you guys hop in a call?

I’m having problems with performance along with too many polygons and materials slots

[kindred sedge]

i just use this one yt tut

the thing is im stuck

[zealous wigeon]

Pure guess, but 2.83 is old, newest, non-developer version of CATS support 2.93 (Developer version supports up to 3.5) https://github.com/absolute-quantum/cats-blender-plugin/releases/tag/0.19.0, possible that material combiner would only work on 2.93+.
Quite easy to have multiple blender installation at once so I suggest you give that a try.

[kindred sedge]

so my blender ver is just really old

[zealous wigeon]

Hm, apparently it is a LTS version (only 2 years old), but I don't see why anyone would stick to such an old Blender version nowdays.

[kindred sedge]

maybe they have a really old computer and cant afford a new one

hmmmm

(thats me)

[zealous wigeon]

Wasn't aware that newer Blender was that much more demanding.

Hopefully at least 2.93 works.

[kindred sedge]

yea i loaded up and kept crashing

so u want me to load a new ver?

[zealous wigeon]

Either that or you go back through the releases of material combiner and finds one for 2.83.

[kindred sedge]

ill do the latter

[zealous wigeon]

https://github.com/Grim-es/material-combiner-addon/releases

[kindred sedge]

when was 2.83

nvm

i found it

was givin this when i tried to enable

i remember it working one time

[kindred sedge]

i think thats what happend

[near elk]

Question:

Even if the total polygons of the avatar in Avatar Details page is high,

If most of the polygons are in the items(like outfit, props etc) that are toggled OFF at the time,

will it still affect performance?

[buoyant holly]

they would still be contributing to the avatars total vram cost and Avatar performance ranking but yeah they wouldn't be but yeah it wouldn't be incurring the cost from actually drawing the triangles if they're disabled?

[near elk]

i see, so even if i hve more polygons, as long as i keep textures small and toggle off stuff it wouldnt be so bad

What does "PhysBone Transform" mean?

[buoyant holly]

how many bones are being moved by the physics bone system

and I might suggest uploading a second variant of the Avatar that doesn't have all that extra props for when you're in club worlds that enforce no wearing very poor avatars

[near elk]

ah no problem, I have a fallback that looks the same as my very poor variant

[buoyant holly]

Cool

[heady smelt]

does disabling a physbone component make the avatar more "optimized" when the physboned object is disabled, its a question that ive had for a bit, but i was just wondering if not disabling the component changes the performance of an avatar

[sick relic]

Disabling it doesn't change the perf rating. But it certainly stops it from working which make it no longer taking fps.

[tulip rose]

Yeah the sdk will just sum up all comments in use for perf rank.
But, yeah disabling an object effectively nullifies the compute cost. Data will still be in vram though.

[heady smelt]

Ok that's perfect exactly what I want, thank you

[slim hill]

Is there a easy way to optimize an avatar after making it? Or if it's a bought one but isn't optimized

[buoyant holly]

you need access to the Avatar files to do the modifications to it to make it more optimized in blender or Unity

[buoyant holly]

so if you bought like an avatar off of Booth you could do modifications to it to make it more optimized but not a a publicly uploaded Avatar that you didn't upload

[slim hill]

What would I need in order to optimize it?

[buoyant holly]

probably blender to do modifications to the model

[near elk]

does enabling MipMaps (streaming and generating mipmaps) increase avatar download size?

will Crunch Compression make the avatar download size smaller? (trying to make it fit in 10MB for quest)