avatar-optimization

[low mural]

Probably just a few outfits

[waxen estuary]

Except that compression needs to happen before it is sent to GPU for storing the textures 💀

[errant flint]

Will optimization that avatar take more time?

[waxen estuary]

It depends honestly

[low mural]

Aren't the textures compressed before the package is uploaded to VRC?

[waxen estuary]

On how big each texture is and how long the tools take to atlas them.

[waxen estuary]

crunch yes but the video above explains what happens.

as in the vrchat client must decompress them first before sending to gpu

and they only have about 0.11ms per avatar

[errant flint]

Also i was thinking like i didn't want to use this avatar in public world bcz of "avatar rippers". So maybe with some friends and not many people...

[waxen estuary]

💀

[waxen estuary]

that does not prevent ripping lol

all they need is avatar id

[low mural]

So we're always running the full uncompressed version?

[errant flint]

Isn't like if i go to public world

Theh will rip it?

If i wear it there

[waxen estuary]

my textures are not big enough to even care to compress them lol.

also 12 MB total vram my avatar uses in textures

and that is with atlas

[errant flint]

Right?

[waxen estuary]

with face and eye textures separate for performance reasons.

[stray tangle]

the idea that "optimized = bad quality" and "non optimized = good quality" is flat out wrong

[waxen estuary]

(would not want each vismex cause redraw calls for entire avatar every frame lol)

[stray tangle]

some techniques (like detail textures) that can be used to reduce texture memory can also help increase detail

also, 115 sknined meshes? what do you even have on there?

[errant flint]

Guys if i go to a public world, but I don't wear my avatar there, can the avatar be ripped?

[waxen estuary]

Probably 15 avatars combined into one 💀

[waxen estuary]

yes, if they try hard enough anything can be done.

[errant flint]

I see. So i will just wear it anywhere and don't give shit

[waxen estuary]

Even if you do not go to public worlds or even if you are offline you can be ripped.

[low mural]

Chances are, they won't though, why would they want to rip an avatar they haven't even seen?

[stray tangle]

you should honestly not wear that avatar in any world besides your own home world with no one else in it, because you're playing a social game, where you also have to be mindful of other people. just like how other people in let's say, a bar, would not appreciate you walking in shouting profanities, smelling like you haven't taken a shower in two months, and blasting music on a speaker, it's not very nice to other people to walk into a VRChat world wearing an avatar that causes their framerate to be cut in half, and is heavier to run than entire worlds

[waxen estuary]

Some people just do it to prove that they can lol.

[low mural]

And usually it's the active avatar that they grab. Never ever heard of any instance of this happening

[stray tangle]

the only time in my opinion where it's acceptable to not optimize a model whatsover, is if it's being used for renders outside of the game. in offline rendering, it doesn't matter if something is poorly optimized, it'll just increase the render time. in a game, especially a VR game, where you have a limited amount of time to render each frame in order to render them fast enough, optimization will always matter

[ivory sluice]

It's not possible unless that avatar has been ripped previously

[errant flint]

Yeah i'm talking with the guy to optimize it

So I can have 2 versions

[stray tangle]

awesome, I'm glad that you're deciding to do that

[slate sinew]

There's really no reason to be THAT mean though, especially for someone new

[errant flint]

1 with few friends and other for joining big parties/populated worls

[errant flint]

Yes ofc i don't like to harm people

[stray tangle]

sorry, I've been around for a long time and my patience has gradually dwindled, and it manifests itself as being a bit more harsh than I probably should be

[slate sinew]

Well get it under control, no need to be that way. It's uncalled for. It's like slapping a baby in the face

[stray tangle]

used to be that I would be nice to basically everyone, but nowadays I'll be really nice to people actually doing good work and optimizing stuff, and harsher towards people who have little respect, patience, or don't care about optimizing

[low mural]

I mean, I'm using a very poor avatar when I play with a friend running a laptop 1060, and he's got no issue. It's most likely fine if there's really not many people

[errant flint]

Will that avatar even crash others quests/ pc.. if i'm with like 2-4 persons?

Or with low end gpu?

[stray tangle]

Quest absolutely, on PC it will likely cause very noticable frame drops

[waxen estuary]

yeah

[errant flint]

Yeah I see alot of poor avatars but never crashed

[waxen estuary]

At least I tried to get mine from 160k polys down to about 55k polys.

However bones is my issue now

[slate sinew]

What sacred failed to mention is that MOST avatars are very poor, like the vast majority. Poor is where you should aim and medium is a good goal. Green will be unattainable for new people

[errant flint]

160k poly😶

[errant flint]

Why unattianble?

[waxen estuary]

171 bones with about 75 on base and 75 on hair lol

[slate sinew]

Because simply put you won't know how

[stray tangle]

the problem with the Very Poor rating is that not all VP's are created equally. some stats that put you in VP will not cause much of a performance problem, but some others will. and some things, like very large animators, can cause even worse performance problems, and isn't reflected in the performance ranking system at all

[slate sinew]

I can't even hit green and I have a lot of help

[errant flint]

What if i'm dealing with an avatar creator

[slate sinew]

Skilled avatar creators have a hard time hitting green

[stray tangle]

the issue is that you're likely not willing to compromise on some things, or that the assets you're using are too poorly optimized from the start, and will likely need more work

[errant flint]

Quest comba is medium?

[stray tangle]

I'm assuming some things here, obviously

[stray tangle]

Quest has a completely different set of performance limitations

[slate sinew]

Unfortunately that's not the case for me they're booth bases it's a polygon issue

[stray tangle]

yea sounds about right

I make all of my assets ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[low mural]

If you want any option at all on your avatar you'll never hit green, even medium will be most likely impossible.

[errant flint]

Guys

[waxen estuary]

base hair, outfit and head contributed so I switched to 21k “low poly” base (zin fit), cut out the ears on head as I hide them with the hair, and decimated the rest that is higher than 4k polys.

[slate sinew]

I haven't figured it out yet.

[errant flint]

What is the first one?

[stray tangle]

so optimization is what I'm thinking about from the very start

[waxen estuary]

hair was 38.8k polys originally lol

[slate sinew]

So uh.. first off the legs don't look like they're going to work

[stray tangle]

looks like you got your model in a VRM format, which is not what VRChat uses. you or the creator likely used a VRM converter for unity, and didn't remove the components that you're not allowed to use for VRChat

[low mural]

You want to see some poly?

[errant flint]

Yeah creator used vrm

I used vrm converter

So will that affect anything?

[waxen estuary]

oh?

[stray tangle]

I see. did you not tell the creator it was intended for VRChat?

[low mural]

Here's some polys

[errant flint]

Yeah she know

What will autofix button do? There

[waxen estuary]

💀 imagine most of that being fur that can be from shader.

[waxen estuary]

delet them

[low mural]

I could try that

[errant flint]

And if i don't do that, the quality will be bad? Or how?

Or the opposite?

[stray tangle]

it will remove all of those components from the avatar. it should be fine to do, but the only thing is that the Springbones, used to add physics to hair and such, will also be removed. those will need to be redone with VRC Physbones

[stray tangle]

you cannot upload at all if you don't remove them

[waxen estuary]

if you don’t do it you cant upload lol.

[errant flint]

Ah i'm thinking about leaving them like this then?

I did upload

[waxen estuary]

👀

[errant flint]

It worked fine

[slate sinew]

What even is this avatar

[errant flint]

Eyes were funny...lol

This

See the eyes lol

[waxen estuary]

that can totally be optimized to be like @sudden jewel’s (sorry for ping) being in good state.

Like I said no need for 115 skin meshes with a lot of 8k textures.

[errant flint]

Are the eyes bcz of the componets?

[stray tangle]

out of curiosity, can you screenshot the rest of the avatar stats?

I'll try to refrain from immediately trashing the avatar and instead try to give suggestions lol

[slate sinew]

That's a better idea that's why I haven't asked for help optimizing yet

[stray tangle]

I don't have a problem with people who are actively looking for ways to optimize avatars, and are making efforts to do so. what I have more of a problem with is people who give 0 shits about optimization, or are trying to add/do things that will actively make the problem worse

I'll gladly help with optimization

just ask @ripe shore lol

[ripe shore]

hahaha yeah learned a lot :p

my avatar basically looks no different than when I started but its so close to being medium rated

finished picksheeting my avatar today and started over from high poly mesh as part of that

entire outfit is in a 1k texture

and the lines look mint

[slate sinew]

If you promise not to yell at me I'll consider

🧍🏻

I fear many things

[stray tangle]

to give you some context for this convo, someone asked for help uploading an avatar they stated was purposely not optimized whatsoever, stating them owning a 4090 as the reason, and I was quite harsh at them at first, then I explained it's due to my patience having gone down over the years

[slate sinew]

Ask @still perch

[stray tangle]

"used to be that I would be nice to basically everyone, but nowadays I'll be really nice to people actually doing good work and optimizing stuff, and harsher towards people who have little respect, patience, or don't care about optimizing"

[stray tangle]

I can promise not to yell but I can't promise I won't cringe at things like super bad topo and poly count lol

but I can promise to give you pointers on how to do better

[slate sinew]

That's fair

[stray tangle]

https://youtu.be/uuJ3YktGVJs?si=pFm5HHgPuf5qOcrV

||two things in there are actually my doing 😂 ||

||the ork in the thumbnail is the high res sculpt of a body I made for a friend, and the giant booty is what happens when I overdrove the booty blendshape on a quest fallback avatar I made for Red lol||

[ripe shore]

I wish I could define a set of rules for some form of automatic loop deletion in blender

[stray tangle]

I know someone was working on doing an auto loop dissolver

[ripe shore]

or at very minimum get a reliable mirror select

I'm completely redoing the loop deletion and back at 170k polys D:

[slate sinew]

@stray tangle when can I harass u about this model

[stray tangle]

feel free to ask for help whenever you want in this channel or one of the other ones I'm active in (Sippbox's discord, Poiyomi discord). I'll probably see it

[slate sinew]

I am real bad at written instruction unless you can type it out explicitly ... unfortunately for me I'm very new to blender

[ripe shore]

take frequent breaks

speaking from experience

[stray tangle]

it will be frustrating at first, taking breaks and coming back is important

the coming back part is important, giving up is not the answer lol

[ripe shore]

I've kinda been hyperfixating on it for a while now and I've had 2 days now after many hours of working I've been unable to figure out what people are saying when talking to me

[slate sinew]

I feel like I should give you money or something if you're gonna help because I'm dead ass one of the most stupid individuals you'll ever meet

But I'm very nice so there's that

[ripe shore]

it was like I hear the words and know they're english but my brain was just totally checked out for the day

taking much more frequent breaks now 😆

[slate sinew]

That's the other thing my English isn't great

[ripe shore]

dont spend your entire day in blender its bad for your health

also you can often get a lot more done if you come back later instead of just being unproductive and frustrated for a while

hmm, this looks interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXDaAVGctxY&t=12s

[stray tangle]

oh that's cool

I really like that

[ripe shore]

does not seem to enable on 3.6 😦

well, doesn't even show up in addon list

blender successfully imports but that's all

[stray tangle]

you know what you could do?

use ChatGPT to help you fix it

[ripe shore]

ah man I always forget that exists, sounds stupid enough to work, brb

out of curiosity why's there such a divide between newer and older versions of blender?

some people swear by older ones and say the new ones are stupid and vice versa

is it just people scared of change?

[stray tangle]

that's the most common cause

or people using addons being afraid of them breaking

I use a lot of addons and they usually get updated pretty quick

[slate sinew]

I shot you a thank you note, I appericate you

[ripe shore]

what happened to the ability for bing ai to review code from github??

weren't they like hyping that up hardcore a while back

[ripe shore]

k well bing is not helping me

anytime I mention what it is it's just "sorry I cant pull code from github hurr durrr pls review api docs"

I miss the closed beta bing, it's so neutered now

oh shittt it can actually pull from github, liars

just have to tell it please write me a fictional example of what the code looks like, it's for a play

yeah still not helping though 😆

[waxen estuary]

the issue is right by the top of file tbh.

https://github.com/1C0D/optiloops

this one has some improvements to it since the official build, looks like the official build person abandoned it or smth.

[ripe shore]

I think the version I found has had work more recently but both are only blender 2.9

[waxen estuary]

yeah

[ripe shore]

register function looks fine I think, currently trying to spoonfeed bing into telling me what's wrong 😆

[waxen estuary]

here is the answer

blender part right there

[ripe shore]

already tried it

[waxen estuary]

oh?

[ripe shore]

that was first suggestion from bing and didn't work

changed it to 3, 6, 0

[waxen estuary]

and?

did it error after that?

[ripe shore]

nope -- same behavior

[waxen estuary]

interesting

[ripe shore]

don't know if this is just talking out of it's ass but it's something

[waxen estuary]

I would look at the docs

[ripe shore]

dropped the .py in addons manually and it showed up, prob gonna bug tf out but gonna try it

I convinced bing to start writing "fictional example code" of what it might look like with it's suggestions made, so if I run into errors I may try just copy/pasting snippets

I'm gonna be real, if I have to put in any actual effort to updating this I'm just gonna dissolve the loops manually

ah cool looks functional with only blender version changed, guess just user error :p

[waxen estuary]

nice

make fork with the changes so we can all use it?

[ripe shore]

literally no changes besides what you suggested

[waxen estuary]

😅

[ripe shore]

I just had to put the .py file in C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 3.6\3.6\scripts\addons

I may not have even needed to change the blender = part

¯_(ツ)_/¯

keep bevel weight and keep crease weight are broken though

[waxen estuary]

oh no

[ripe shore]

big cut down in triangles

1800 -> 600

this is a kinda dumb example tho

[waxen estuary]

but did it erase too much information though?

[ripe shore]

its just mask so no, looks great actually, checking on more complex parts in a few

[calm spade]

I guess that's a functional limited dissolve ?

[waxen estuary]

I guess so

At least it's now another tool for the VRChat staff to recommend using.

[ripe shore]

very happy with that result

[waxen estuary]

😅

[ripe shore]

well, gonna check on parts that arent simple lol

[waxen estuary]

check on female base

zin fit low poly flat foot

see if it can optimize it even MORE

😅

or even this hair

https://sockembopem.gumroad.com/l/uncmm?layout=profile

free hair and best of all complex too

47 strands

and ~38.8k poly

I would really flip if that extension can do better than my decimation on it where I could only get it to 8k but with some quality loss.

😅

[ripe shore]

sec

[slate sinew]

Ideally I would like to fix this, Unfortunately I am not entirely sure how

( I just got back to home)

[ripe shore]

this is made out of triangles btw, gonna see if I can convert it to quads and then run optiloops

[waxen estuary]

you might have to split each strand though for it.

[waxen estuary]

hmm I see

[ripe shore]

there's a button in here to do it somewhere, just can't find it

[waxen estuary]

wait there is a tool in blender to convert to quads without quality loss on the mesh at all?

[stray tangle]

you can do alt + J to convert tris to quads, but it may not work properly in all cases

[ripe shore]

I mean, it's getting the right idea, I think the tris to quads conversion is really messing with it more than anything

areas like this it obviously can't do nothing about

let me see if I can find some hair that's native quads, I guess I could try it on my avi's hair too

[calm spade]

To note that this is great for static meshes, but for skinned ones, that'll fuck up the deformation quite a lot

[waxen estuary]

oh my

[ripe shore]

for a one click tool I am quite satisfied

[waxen estuary]

yep

[ripe shore]

99k -> 88k tris (doesn't include just hair but only hair was optimized)

[waxen estuary]

not too bad.

how much did it reduce the tris on that other hair I provided before decimating?

[calm spade]

That's the kinda stuff that unsubdivide would work well for, given that most are are made out of curve that the creators were a bit overzealous about when it comes to loop count

[waxen estuary]

true

[ripe shore]

hard to say because it was missing a good chunk of them due to the conversion, gimme a few lemme run it again

not a fan of unsubdivide much for stuff like this, doesn't take angle into account angles at all and if your iterations are odd instead of even it can result in weird stuff

[waxen estuary]

yep

[ripe shore]

I tried unsubdivide on my facemask before and got poor results

sometimes it's too much, sometimes it's too little, there's just not enough control over it

@waxen estuary do you have a pic of your hair with wireframe on?

just want an idea of what I'm going for quality loss

[waxen estuary]

ok you mean the one where I decimated it only?

[ripe shore]

yes

[waxen estuary]

if you want I could dm you file blend file to it.

since it is a free hair lol

[ripe shore]

sure

stuff like this gonna mess it up I think

tri to quad conversion is not perfect

[waxen estuary]

sent

[waxen estuary]

yeah lol

[ripe shore]

I think I got some paid long hair that's native quads too, sec

[waxen estuary]

oh cool

and is it subdivided like that one too?

[ripe shore]

can't get anywhere close with the tris -> quads as I can with just a collapse decimate at like 0.23 ratio with the free hair

[ripe shore]

checking

[waxen estuary]

interesting.

[waxen estuary]

how much tris was the result on that one though?

[ripe shore]

like 20k I think

helped but didn't make much of a dent like collapsing did

[waxen estuary]

nice

and after collapsing after doing that about 8k or less?

[ripe shore]

yup

well, even just collapsing without doing that was basically the same as your result

[waxen estuary]

nice

issue on my end is fixing the painting on it so it looks the same as before though.

😅

[ripe shore]

28k -> 12k, 20 deg min angle

[ripe shore]

need to mark your seams when dissolving loops, or use planar decimate and delimit by UV

[waxen estuary]

o cool

[ripe shore]

for a one click tool I'm extremely happy

makes manual cleanup so much faster, basically all I was doing is checking UV seams and angles anyways when manually loop dissolving

[stray tangle]

if your mesh is already UV'd, but there are no seams, go to the UV editor, select everything, and do UV > Seams from islands

[ripe shore]

gonna optiloop my whole avatar

should be a major speedup and get me 90% of the way there, plus no human error deleting high angle loops without looking close enough

I need to find a new shirt and pants, these are disgusting

these r gettin decimated probably

[stray tangle]

could just retopo it

or if you're really lazy, use something like quad remesher on it

but then you don't get as much control in terms of how much geometry you have and the loop direction

[ripe shore]

quad remesher as in alt J or something else?

idk, even the bumps in general are just kind've a disaster on this shirt tbh

looks like simulated cloth from some program

[calm spade]

Triangulate and then tris to quads ?

[calm spade]

Oh sorry Discord did not scroll down lmao, that was in response to this

[ripe shore]

ahh lol

[stray tangle]

Quad remesher is a paid tool to automatically generate a new, quad mesh following the geometry of the chosen mesh

[ripe shore]

ahh

[calm spade]

QuadRemesher my beloved

[stray tangle]

I just do retopology myself

[ripe shore]

if I was making a bunch of avatars I'd probably look into it lol

not interested in dumping money into this one especially since I can't even redistribute it

[stray tangle]

I don't even recommend it much for avatar work, I'd mostly recommend it for like cleaning up sculpts

but you can use it for avatar stuff

I just don't like the control I give away

[ripe shore]

just gonna stick with collapsing for now

need to find another shirt/pants model eventually

not happy with these

ah man yeah this addon is so nice

[stray tangle]

could you send me your modified version of it?

[ripe shore]

plop in C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 3.6\3.6\scripts\addons

all I did was change blender = (2, 9, x) to (3, 6, x)

I don't even know if it needs changed tbh

didnt try putting it in addons stock

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vilemduha/optiloops/master/optiloops_v1_3_2.py

if you want to try it stock unmodified

[ripe shore]

there's still stuff like this where it's missing the human factor of "this makes it look a lot worse for not that many saved triangles" but man it does a great job, can also just deselect those parts before running it too

23k -> 16k

[waxen estuary]

nice

[ripe shore]

something that does bother me slightly is the runs are not repeatable

which loops it selects do vary just a smidge between runs, just unclicking and clicking it again changes the outcome slightly & running it twice with same settings does delete more

[waxen estuary]

so it could use a recursive loop?

[ripe shore]

possibly -- or just changed to help alleviate floating point errors (I assume that's what it is)

[waxen estuary]

most likely yes

[waxen estuary]

on that plugin where exactly did you go to use it?

[ripe shore]

mesh -> clean up -> optimize loops

[waxen estuary]

ok

[ripe shore]

it's nice that you can just have it select only too instead of dissolve for you, if everything looks good but something not quite right you can just deselect and dissolve manually

well, I think at least, need to actually try it, might be broken 😆

[waxen estuary]

rip it changes nothing for the base I use.

[ripe shore]

make sure dissolve is checked in the options

and you have to set a min angle > 0

min angle is controlling how much effect

also gotta be in edit mode

[waxen estuary]

o

so I could get away with things like min angle of like 5?

I love this in blender now.

[ripe shore]

wait how do you get that

[ripe shore]

depends highly on the part you're running it on and your personal tolerances, some of mine are looking fine with like 30 and some are like 5

I've also been selecting certain parts with L and running it only on those with more aggressive settings

if you want it to not mess up textures make sure to go to UV editing, UV -> Seams from islands

[stray tangle]

right click the bar at the bottom of the blender window and enable everything

[ripe shore]

yeah keep bevel weight and crease weight are broken

[waxen estuary]

lol 30 was the magic number for the tail

[ripe shore]

sweet 🙂

[waxen estuary]

lol dissolve turns it into this

[ripe shore]

well, dissolve also has a lot less triangles there :p

need to change the ratio on dissolve

[waxen estuary]

ye

prob something like 40 or 45

yep 50 is the number actually.

[ripe shore]

168k -> 106k

farther than I got with manual loop slicing which took like 8 hours + no UV seams messed up in the process or accidential deletions that cause issues hours later

guess its kinda hard from previews to see much diff

[ripe shore]

trying to do manual loop cleanup too but pretty much every loop that it didn't get is a UV seam or alters the geometry too much, very happy with results
I have many UV seams because I picksheeted my textures

[waxen estuary]

Welp

looks like I went from 55k -> 70,435 😅.

Just by adding shoes

😅

[ripe shore]

oh god shoes are awful for polys

[waxen estuary]

ye

[ripe shore]

mine are 12k even after loop cleanup 😖

[waxen estuary]

darn even worse the shoes are is all triangles too.

[ripe shore]

still haven't gotten an answer if it's cheating or not but when importing your FBX you can click "keep quads" and it'll count a quad as 1 polygon instead of triangulate them

on vs off

75k vs 109k

I mean, a quad is a polygon, so I don't think it's really cheating, but also could just be an oversight since the docs use polygons and triangles interchangably

unfortunately it pushes my material slots to poor rated and I'm aiming to medium, so I've gotta fix it the normal way

you can have up to 32 material slots in a poor rated avi, 16 in a medium rated

[stray tangle]

doing so will internally split your mesh into two, one containing only quads and one containing only tris. you should only do that if you're going to be using tessellation shaders

you're basicalling doubling draw calls

lol

rip super reaction

[ripe shore]

lmao I dont even know how it gets clicked sometimes

clumsy ig

wish it was possible to mirror a polygon and only have it count as one, can't imagine it'd be any more friendly on the gpu though

[waxen estuary]

it's not.

[ripe shore]

yeah 😦

argh, painting abs on this avatar would save me so many triangles over having them modeled

body + hair is 64k tris

I think getting it from 106k to 75k is going to be exponentially harder

[stray tangle]

just bake it to a normal map ez

[ripe shore]

hmph yeah I guess I have oodles of free vram at this point

9.6MB of texture use for entire avi 😆

[ripe shore]

ooh I can even use the higher poly model to bake

[stray tangle]

there you go

[ripe shore]

gonna bake it for jacket too

[waxen estuary]

o my

[ripe shore]

ok well thats stpid I think it just baked everything except abs

[stray tangle]

if you're doing this in blender, you only want to do this for one mesh at a time lol.

[ripe shore]

only got body selected, rest turned off in render

[stray tangle]

aight

[ripe shore]

there be no abs, unless just cant see them 😦

[ripe shore]

welp, might just call that a stopping point, not getting anywhere

no idea why it's not baking that unless it's just not detailed enough to be a normal

[waxen estuary]

decimated hair a little more just to remain out of Very Poor performance 😅.

[ripe shore]

sweet 🙂

[waxen estuary]

at least it remains in good state after that 😅.

now time to save as my atlas backup blend file overwriting the old one so I can atlas this stuffs.

(again lol)

then merge the mesh's

[ripe shore]

if you have anything that doesn't deform as well you can take off the armature modifier and parent it to a bone to make it a meshrenderer instead of a skinnedmeshrenderer, learned that the other day

[waxen estuary]

👌 all the UV maps have same name, now to atlas it.

the plugin only works when all of the UV maps have the same name lol otherwise it screws up one of the mesh UVs.

[waxen estuary]

oh?

[ripe shore]

yeah, so like my avatar has glasses and a facemask

[waxen estuary]

for me I do it differently

[ripe shore]

I just took armature modifier off both in blender, and then clicked them both and parented to head bone in the armature

now I have more skinnedmeshrenderers to play with and it's more efficient

[waxen estuary]

I atlas by ensure all UV's have same name and that all mesh has 1 UV (if not I look to see if empty UV's and then delet the empty ones)

And then after it is atlas'd I join the mesh's

so then only 1 skinned mesh in the end 😅.

[ripe shore]

sweet

I would if I didn't have so many dang toggles

[waxen estuary]

toggles are a pain yes

but for me a basic one is ok.

[ripe shore]

legs, chest, head, arms, hair and stuff are all one skinnedmeshrender

but I have outfit toggles and jacket toggle 😦

merged shirt and pants to one mesh and jacket to a seperate mesh, shoes toggle as well

[waxen estuary]

delet outfit toggles and jacket

[ripe shore]

like em tho + its only polygons I have to get down at this point

[waxen estuary]

but at which point are they becoming a pain in the butt though?

[ripe shore]

a week ago 😄

texture memory use only 9.6 MB too

[stray tangle]

can you show me your baking settings, and what the two meshes look like?

also, be mindful of multiple materials

the baking targets all materials of a mesh, and it will write to whatever texture node is selected for each material

[ripe shore]

only have 3 total for the blender project, it's just that I have many skinnedmeshes

couple more in unity for neon hue shift and quest

[stray tangle]

oh yea make sure you have the correct UV selected

on the body

[ripe shore]

it is 😦

[stray tangle]

can you show me your baking settings

[waxen estuary]

Welp

[stray tangle]

make sure to enable Selected to active

then select the high poly mesh first, then the low poly one

[waxen estuary]

I might have to use a custom size for those 4 4k textures on the atlas?

[ripe shore]

be careful with the huge atlases if they're like 4k or bigger, I seem to crash questies with those

[waxen estuary]

oh sad

[ripe shore]

or wait, was my atlas 8k, cant remember now D:

either way I think 2k is recommended max 😦

[waxen estuary]

that is like an oblong 10k x 8k atlas 😅.

[ripe shore]

yknow, most of your atlas could probably be turned into a pick sheet really easy

[waxen estuary]

oh?

the ones on the top is to a leather choker on model 😅.

[waxen estuary]

o

[ripe shore]

this is a 1k texture and the details are crisp af because I just selected faces from the UV and mapped them to parts of texture file by hand

its not hard just tedious

[stray tangle]

also, the body should likely be the biggest image in your atlas. everything else you have on there looks to have little to no detail, and could be a lot smaller

[waxen estuary]

ah true

[stray tangle]

it might be better to make the atlas manually

you can do rectangular atlases, but be sure to use power of two dimensions

for example, 4096x2048

so basically two 2k textures side by side

you could have half of that be the entire body texture at 1k, and then the other square could be everything else

that other square is basically four 1k textures

[ripe shore]

can I do this even if the high poly and low poly are in different scenes? should I move them to one scene?

[waxen estuary]

I might make the other 3 4k textures 2k with the atlas plugin.

[stray tangle]

can probably just ctrl + C/V from one to the other

[waxen estuary]

it does allow config custom size on them.

[stray tangle]

you can put them in different collections within the same scene

[waxen estuary]

this is the one for shoes right next to body, looks ok size?

[ripe shore]

try like 512x512 see what happens

[stray tangle]

1k is definitely the highest I would go for the shoes yea

but 512 is what I'd recommend trying

[waxen estuary]

ok

so do that for shoes and the choker textures at 512?

[ripe shore]

getting even weirder results, have both in the same scene now and enabled with nothing else but the 2 meshes enabled for rendering

[stray tangle]

are both meshes perfectly overlapping?

[ripe shore]

exactly the same place yes, perfectly overlapping no because one's missing polygons

[stray tangle]

can you set your max ray distance to 0.5 and extrusion to 01.?

[waxen estuary]

I probably could size down these other 2 as well:

[ripe shore]

same result

[waxen estuary]

the black with white and the lighter black with a goldish color.

[stray tangle]

are transforms applied for both meshes and the armatures?

[waxen estuary]

due to that yeah lol.

size down body to 2k?

[stray tangle]

you could make that image a bit wider, like I said you really want power of 2 dimensions

the right half should have the same dimensions as the body texture

with every other texture in it

[waxen estuary]

I see

[ripe shore]

this looks like the normal for just the hair or something?

after applying all transforms to both armatures and meshes

[stray tangle]

lol could be

[stray tangle]

for the bake, make sure the body material is sepated to its own mesh

[waxen estuary]

probably could size that down a little bit as well.

[ripe shore]

this is so stupid, should've called it a stopping point

can't figure out what's wrong

[stray tangle]

send me the blend file and I'll have a look at it

[ripe shore]

internet's 1 mbps up, might do an overnight upload lol

[stray tangle]

you could copy paste just the meshes into a new project

and just send that

[ripe shore]

kinda over it for tonight

[stray tangle]

alright, no worries

[waxen estuary]

so much wasted space though.

might be good to size it down to at max 4k on the atlas?

[ripe shore]

you could manually cram some of those textures in the blank spots

and then just go to uv editor in edit mode, select the maps and drag them with G

[stray tangle]

baking speedrun

[ripe shore]

dont know why I used the plugin for so long

[stray tangle]

no planning I just rushed it lol

[ripe shore]

there was a 1 minute youtube video I've watched like 6 times on how to do it 😆

it just doesn't work for me and I don't know why

[stray tangle]

can you screenshot your shader settings on your low poly mesh?

nvm you can do it tomorrow

[ripe shore]

512-normal was just screwing around

shaders are identical for the low poly and high poly mesh, they use the same material

[stray tangle]

can you disconnect every connection going into the shader, and select the Body Normal node before baking?

oh wait

remove the mat on the high poly mesh

or if the high poly mesh already had a normal map, you can plug it in to also bake that detail, but make sure it's a different material

[ripe shore]

alright, made different material on the high poly with these nodes and kept the old material as-is on the low poly -- now just have this mess

its gotta be something with my UV maps, hold on

[stray tangle]

if the meshes have multiple UVs, make sure the camera icon is set on the correct UV map

[ripe shore]

map looks like garbage but got something I guess, somehow wrong UV got selected again 😭

[stray tangle]

getting somewhere, what is that 512 normal exactly?

[ripe shore]

just a light skin looking texture

sec

[stray tangle]

are you sure that should actually be added here?

[ripe shore]

nope

lemme take that off

[waxen estuary]

when I plan it out just right only for this to happen 😅

instead of 2048 x 4096

😅

[stray tangle]

lmao

[ripe shore]

oh gosh 😭

ok im going to bed

goodnight

[stray tangle]

lmfao

night .o/

[velvet crow]

If I can make a suggestion: buy simple bake.

It's $18 and will save you a lot of headache.

I can't remember the countless issues I've had trying to bake normal maps before.

[ripe shore]

starting to think they just aren't defined enough to be baked by blender

I tried installing bakelab which got me a good normal map but again it's missing the abs

even in an AO map they don't show up

maybe I should be looking at a displacement map instead of normal?

[velvet crow]

Usually those types of issues are caused by your bake settings. Often it's related to caging, max ray length, or other settings.

If you're going for extra detail on a simple mesh, then it is normal maps, yes.

You can double check against this video:

https://youtu.be/vzBu5mLBNBs?si=cDlzith-hJltL_OO

Although if you're using the multi-res modifier, I again highly suggest simple bake since it can automatically make from multi-res.

[ripe shore]

watched that video so many times now 😦

[velvet crow]

I'm not one to shill paid assets, but it's ridiculous how good simple bake is at removing so many variables and issues from the baking process

[ripe shore]

wouldn't care buying it but I'm not convinced I'd get different results

I'm getting what appears to be a good normal out of bakelab (also recreates materials and removes variables) but abs aren't there

[stray tangle]

what shading mode are you using in Poiyomi?

Flat shading will not show any normal detail properly

[ripe shore]

not even to that part yet, still in blender

[stray tangle]

I see

yea likely baking settings not being proper

you could also add a Subdivision modifier to your high poly body to make the details even smoother and more defined lol

[velvet crow]

I would just reconfirm all of the objects that you're using and any modifiers you have

[ripe shore]

I am getting results, it's just only for higher detailed & small areas (the corrupted looking chunk is hair tex)

[velvet crow]

All I can say is that I do remember having a lot of issues similar to this one, and it's related to how long the ray length is or if you're using cages or not. Never figured it out and it was too frustrating to solve.

[ripe shore]

should I be removing the abs on my low poly mesh and then baking selected to active?

instead of leaving them there before baking

[velvet crow]

You can also double check if it's using SRGB or non-color. It should be using non-color. 32-bit float also helps with some detail

[ripe shore]

it's non-color 😦

[stray tangle]

your low poly mesh shouldn't have the detailed abs, that's the point of baking

[velvet crow]

When baking normals, you generally only want to bake from selected to active, or using multi-res

[stray tangle]

it will help the sillouette if the mesh generally has the shape of the abs

you can also use a shrinkwrap modifier on the low poly mesh to make sure it's actually conforming to the shape to the abs on the high poly mesh. you can use a vertex group to make the shrinkwrap only affect the chest

[velvet crow]

The point of baking is to calculate the difference between your higher poly model and the low poly model (afaik). So if the detailed abs are part of your low poly model and are not part of a multi-res modifier, it won't bake to anything.

[stray tangle]

what I did here #avatar-optimization message

[velvet crow]

I would suggest testing in a new file, just to get to workflow down. I generally recommend the multi-res modifier rather than selected to active or caging.

Like take any shape, and then do some sculpting on it, then test the bake

[stray tangle]

in this case, they have a lower poly model they manually did optimizations on (dissolving loops, atlasing), and are trying to bake the finer details that got dissolved away from the original model

[velvet crow]

I understand

I got to be honest though, whatever you're suggesting sounds really complicated for what they need to be solved

[stray tangle]

but yes, I agree using multires to sculpt in finer details helps

[stray tangle]

which part exactly? all I'm suggesting is:

• shrinkwrap to high poly to conform to the shape properly
• bake from selected to active

[velvet crow]

Last time I will say it, but again, this is why I use simple bake. I can literally just use a multi-res, modify the original mesh topology if needed, and then select normal and press bake and it works. No other config necessary

[velvet crow]

Yeah I've never heard of using shrink wrap and it sounds like it would cause more problems than it would solve.

Not that the method is wrong, but when debugging things like this, it can cause more problems

[stray tangle]

you can always do it after first confirming that your bake works fine

[ripe shore]

what even is a multi-res?

[stray tangle]

allows a mesh to have "virtual" higher subdivision versions of it that you can do sculpting on

[velvet crow]

Multi-rez is like subdivision, except you can specifically select a level. Allows you to sculpt finer details on higher subdivisions without affecting the original mesh

[stray tangle]

"multi-res" as in, multiple "resolutions" on the same mesh

[ripe shore]

okay, that looks like the part I was missing D:

dumb

lol

[stray tangle]

ah there you go xD

can you screenshot what your low/high poly meshes look like? the wireframe

[velvet crow]

It's unfortunate that there's a lot of nuance of how blender works. Stuff that I've learned how to solve and have burned into my workflow, but it's hard to describe it to people sometimes, lol

[ripe shore]

I just made these edits to the low poly

[ripe shore]

oh this looks cool

[stray tangle]

uhhhh, that's too many loops dissolved on the low poly

[ripe shore]

probably

[stray tangle]

that is not going to look good when you lean over lol

[ripe shore]

just clicked a bunch of shit to test lol

I also suspect I need to learn proper weight painting, already running into oddities when bending arms

I feel like this is quickly becoming not worth it territory

I can't imagine being a game designer and doing this for all the assets in a game 😆

[stray tangle]

well this isn't how you'd usually go about it

you have two main workflows:

• do the high poly mesh first, by blocking out stuff, doing sculpting, etc. then, do a retopo of the mesh (either manually or with tools), which you'd then unwrap, rig, and bake details to from the sculpt
• do the low poly mesh first, then add a Multires modifier, and sculpt in extra details on the multires. then unwrap the low poly, and bake directly from the multires

if you already have a finished model, like in your case, it's also possible to decimate it (quick and dirty) and bake the all of the existing textures to the new mesh, including the normal detail lost from the decimation

that is often done for LODs of models, although in a lot of cases artists will just use the exact same textures for the LODs, rasther than baking entirely new sets of textures. depends if you make the LODs automatically or manually

[ripe shore]

god this is so dumb

should I have set up a multires modifier and then optilooped there instead of having 2 seperate models?

I hate having multiple clones of the same thing because it means any changes I make have to be mirrored between several different scenes

I feel like I'm spending more effort trying to make this avatar easy to maintain a year from now than would be just maintaining it in a crippled state

first avi I made is semi permanently messed up and requires redone completely and I'm trying to avoid that at all costs

yknow, I could also just modifier decimate on top of my optilooping...

that might get me down to 70k

I wish the limit was more like 100k, although not like it matters much when everyone running a verypoor avatar with 300k and 120 MB download size

I was helping someone the other day that had a bunch of paid avi assets and it boggles my mind how many of them are just garbage

so many of them were unpacked prefabs with major items added on in unity, huge cluttered messes of animation files and super weird decal mapping in places that make no sense, excessively large textures for no reason at all and literally zero effort put into optimizing them at all

it wasn't just like one either, we were trying to find a good one to learn on and it was so many from so many different creators

and then like some were made with wrong armature scales and require cats to auto fix it on every export or its just fucked

we only ended up finding like 1/10 of them that was a properly packed prefab linked to an fbx that didn't immediately break when re-exporting from blender

if I could live without my sick jacket I spent hours texturing I'd be <70k right now

agh, I wish you could non destructively dissolve / decimate only certain areas of mesh

I think I've just been spoiled with regular cad programs where literally everything in the design process can be changed at any point in time

[stray tangle]

you sort of can do runtime decimation with unity tools, and Tuxedo in blender does have the Bake feature

[ripe shore]

tuxedo's bake is the closest thing I've found to perfect imo, I just don't have control over which areas need to be decimated and which don't

[stray tangle]

make a feature request

could use a vertex group for that

[ripe shore]

I don't even know how it would work in theory

I could use like say the decimate modifier with a vertex group, but it doesn't work well for reasons I haven't been able to figure out

it decimates stuff that's not in the vertex group even when factor is maxed out

there is no hard limit "don't touch this area"

like, back of my avatar is a good example, I really don't need polygons here at all, nobodys gonna be looking at it hardly ever and it's covered by jacket

so I can cut down on those a bunch

but selecting just the back by seam, creating a vertex group out of them and running decimate on the vertex group messes up shoulders and neck and other stuff around it

I also still have no real good way to smooth out this shirt/pants, they could be smoothed / decimated heavily since they're just a solid color with no real UV map

[stray tangle]

for decimating with a vertex group, make sure you have the vertex group selected in the main vertex groups list on the mesh, and then tick the Vertex group box in the context box

[ripe shore]

let me try it again, I'm convinced it was correct because I did notice a change in behavior between vertex group on and off and the factor, but it wasn't a hard limit

also, would baking a high to low normal map act as a sort've "smoothing" filter on the mesh? as in help hide sharp corners? is there anything I can do to have it be smoother with shading tricks?

not a big deal, just curious

would a tessellation shader do this? would that be a large performance hit? all I know about tesselation is nvidia did some shady stuff with it many years ago and it's a larger performance hit on amd because of that

[ripe shore]

ah fk, forgot about the whole shape keys limitation for body

might be better to split my face to a seperate skinnedmeshrenderer since I have extra slots to play with still (6/8)

tuxedo is just adding more polygons when trying to decimate

also, is adding props on shrinkable bones more efficient than just having a meshrenderer with the prop?

pretty sure it's not

pretty sure all of these avatar tools are aimed at avatars without any clothing toggles

[ripe shore]

so fucking close

[marsh bison]

Can you bake a material into a mesh in a way that it doesn't consume a Material Slot?

[stray tangle]

a mesh will always have a material slot

[marsh bison]

Yeah, I'm talking about reducing material slot count

[stray tangle]

you can bake stuff to vertex colors, which will mean you don't need textures

[marsh bison]

I have a mesh with rn 6 material slots, but I need to get to 5. One of my material slots is non-changing, and I want to somehow make that material be applied without needing the extra material slot

[stray tangle]

that's impossible unless you join the mesh to another mesh, and make them use the same material

you could atlas the textures and do that

[marsh bison]

idk how many textures I'd have to atlas for that....

plus I would be atlasing with the same textures all the time

which would hurt vram

since I am effectively unnessesarily duplicating information

[stray tangle]

you can have rectangular textures

you can basically glue two textures side by side into one

and end up with like a 2048x1024 texture

[marsh bison]

yeah. But all other material slots change, other than one

so I'd need to put the same texture into multiple other textures.

[stray tangle]

do those materials need to change?

can you achieve the same thing without swapping the whole material?

[marsh bison]

I want then to be able to change

No. But then again the question is, if that is relevant. (one that I need to answer for myself)

You cannot texture swap inside materials, right?

[stray tangle]

no, but you can use other means to achieve something similar. with Poiyomi, you can use decal slots to overlay a different texture over the main one, and you can have it replace

[marsh bison]

Yeah okay, that's not gonna work for me (I have way more textures than just 4). I will probably just end up dropping the static texture.

[stray tangle]

you could also atlas your textures together in a grid, and use UV offseting to move it around

[marsh bison]

ooh nice one. I'll keep that in mind.

[stray tangle]

this is why it's helpful to explain what you're actually trying to acomplish, and not focus on one specific little thing

you might be overlooking other potential solutions to your issue

[marsh bison]

I'm trying to get rid of one Material Slot to get good rated.

Simple

I know there are way more specifics to it than just that, but I think I have found my solution.

Thanks

[ripe shore]

hyped

like 10 MB texture usage, 5 MB download size

now just gotta do some weight painting to alleviate clipping on shirt and pants and hopefully I'm golden

[velvet crow]

based 😎

though I will say just incase: don't use crunch if you did

[ripe shore]

I can rest

[ripe shore]

nope 🙂
clothes are all picksheets, HQ 1k tex

[velvet crow]

ayoooo nice

[ripe shore]

I may be able to get skinned meshes down 1 more if I apply the decimation and then re-merge but I don't wanna do that

now it's just shader time to make it look great and weight painting

[ripe shore]

clipping gone 😄

probably one of the nicest looking medium rated avis you're gonna find

and can't even share it 😭

[waxen estuary]

you can make it good rated by using material combiner plugin and merging the meshes to one.

Just make sure that every material UVMaps on each material on them is named exactly the same.

[heady smelt]

what is the easiest way to optimise physbones? i have 30 on pc...and need to bring it down to 8 lol

[proper grail]

Root bones; for example instead of having a phys bone script on each strand of hair duplicate the head bone and parent it to the head, parent each strand of hair to that hair.root bone, and put the phys bone script there.
Dont use leaf bones, use phys bone setting Endpoint Position. Set Y to how long the last bone is.

[ripe shore]

won't happen because I need the toggles and don't really wanna turn them into bones because it's less optimized or whatever, plus wanted to add some more physbones

[heady smelt]

ill look into this! is there a youtube video abt it by chance? i can figure it out myself, but youtube is always a nice handycap

[waxen estuary]

could you help me optimize my 71 bone long hair then I do not care if some of the hair cannot move?

I guess could go as far as on the back having one set of bones be for the entire long part on the back right and center them?

issue is, how do I change the bone that some vertex groups could be referencing?

😅

[proper grail]

thats getting into weight painting

can make a new chain for the center and merge each side to each center, cats is useful for merging bones to other bones and automatically combining vertex groups

[waxen estuary]

oh

I would use cats but cats be like: "Nope Imma destroy your mesh."

I guess another option as well is shorten the long hair and then simply just remove all of it's bones except the ones that hold the hair onto the head.

issue is though making it not distort itself and have issues though when moving in vrc.

[proper grail]

just never press the funny auto fix button, most of the other buttons are safe

[waxen estuary]

ah

I will probably do it on the blender file that is for only the hair just to be safe.

[ripe shore]

is there any way to preview what the shaders will look like ingame without loading it ingame

having some issues with poi skin shader either looking way too flat or way too dark

[heavy knot]

you can use Hai's Lightbox Viewer to preview your avatar in different lighting scenarios https://github.com/hai-vr/lightbox-viewer

[proper grail]

might just be looking for anchor override, set them all the same object to get consistant lighting

[ripe shore]

awesome

am I bad for setting min brightness to 1

anchor override is set and added vrcfury anchor override fix just to double confirm and skin still looks darker than everything else

oops, I am in the wrong channel

[stray tangle]

yea don't do that

[ripe shore]

how would you fix the skin lighting? first pic is min brightness 0

[stray tangle]

the issue is everything else, not the skin

[ripe shore]

ah crap was just going to check for min brightness on other stuff lol

[stray tangle]

also set Grayscale lighting to 0.2 for both passes

[ripe shore]

I would like it to be visible in dark worlds at least a little bit ideally

[stray tangle]

ehh

do min brightness 0.005 then

[ripe shore]

trying with 0.05

[heady smelt]

Hey there, i have a Problem. I am trying to reduce the Polygons on my Modle to make it Quest-friendly, and after many Trials and Errors i finally got it to work but now when i try to reduce the Quality, it comes back with an Error that the Value cannot be 0 and it starts at 1 and can only be reduced, it wont even work when i leave it on 1

[calm spade]

Can you screenshot the problem specifically ?

[calm spade]

Remove that script

[heady smelt]

But how am i gonna reduce the Polygons tho?

This Model is supposed to be Questviable, which means i have to reduce them to a max of 15000, you wanna know how many i have? 43-something-thousand

Ill put this on Hold for now, see if i cant crack that Nut later

[waxen estuary]

o my

[calm spade]

In Blender, not really something that is done in Unity, since it's not a modelling program

[heady smelt]

When where how and what is blender?

[calm spade]

A modelling program

[calm stream]

Hello, so I got an avatar and am trying to optimize it so its at least a poor rank. The main thing are the polygons and I loaded the FBX file into Blender and decimated it to <70k poligons. I don't really know how I now get my optimised FBX back to a finished avatar in Unity. I do have stock prefabs that came with the avatar and there are a LOT of components in there especially in the armature and I just don't think I am able to redo everything without messing something up + it would take a lot of time. What is my best approach here? Best case would be if I could just replace the meshes in the stock prefab with my lower poly versions but I have not found a way to do that yet and I am not sure if that is even possible because of the weights or something. Sorry if this text is convoluted I am a little confused this the first time I am working on such a complex avatar.

[stray tangle]

replacing the FBX in the project is definitely doable, but dangerous if you were not the one who exported it before. the export settings may be different

your best option would be to export as a new FBX (with correct settings, make a preset), and use Pumkin's to copy everything from the existing model to the new one

[calm stream]

There are FBX folders in the project but I figured that the FBX files in there were not used by the stock prefabs. So do the stock prefabs use the FBX files in the FBX folder? I briefly tried replacing the FBX file in the FBX folder but it did not change anything.

[calm stream]

What export settings do you mean exactly? The ones I get when I want to export with CATS? If so like you said how do I know what settings were used?

I gotta look into pumpkin's I don't know that yet

[ripe shore]

out of curiosity is having a physbone component for each hair strand any less efficient than a root bone with a single hair component?

[stray tangle]

it is less efficient

[ripe shore]

interesting, alright cool

was wondering if it was just cheating the ranking or not -- may have to root bone my hair then 🙂

[ripe shore]

does root boning the hair not let it wiggle anymore??

like, still goes side to side but its not wavy

well, I guess I gotta test it in VR and not really on desktop lol

[calm stream]

Does anybody know what this means and how I can fix it?
If I auto fix the whole validations section goes blank and still does not let me upload.

[waxen estuary]

@sudden jewel sorry for the ping but please check your private messages (you do not have to respond though).

[calm stream]

Fixed this by checking "Legacy Blend Shapes Normals" box BEFORE importing the FBX into the scene

[proper grail]

if you use curves at all, gotta factor in the extra length to the graph. Usually moving the point at 0 to about 0.5 does the trick

[waxen estuary]

I feel like on my avatar I am forgetting to delete some parts of each mesh that eventually gets hidden when I combine other mesh’s into it permanently for uploading into vrchat.

So when someone walks inside of my avatar they may see the raw lewd base that I cover up with the clothing on it instead of stripping out what is being covered up.

[random finch]

Hello everyone! By any chance does anyone know where to find the tools to make a 2D fallback version of an avatar? I have seen some avatars that are like 2D (still 3d) waffles that look hilarious but are very useful as fallback. And I can't find it by googling so far.

[tulip rose]

Regardless of 2d or 3d, it still needs a humanoid skeleton. But you sure can stick a png on one bone and call it a day.
Afaik though, you can't animate fall backs. So it's just gonna be a png.

[random finch]

Good to know, thanks for the input!

[ivory sluice]

Wha

[heavy knot]

It’s a scammer, just ignore these people they have the same script

[ivory sluice]

i wanted a custom vrchat

[smoky trench]

Any reason my poly count would double from blender to unity?

[stray tangle]

you were likely looking at "Faces" in blender, not "Tris".

Poly count refers to the amount of (tri)angles making up a mesh. when working on models, you usually use quads, which are essentially two triangles

[smoky trench]

I am looking at tris, 49k in blender and jumps to 150k+ In unity

[stray tangle]

did you add extra assets in unity?

or do you maybe have a Subdivision modifier on your mesh in blender?

[smoky trench]

I can check that, actually. Ill look in a bit Thank you!

[smoky trench]

would that be if i decimated and left it on "collapse"? Should i set it to un-subdivide or planar?

[heady smelt]

if i want to edit a mesh in blender, to make it smaller, can i somehow bind it back with the unity prefab so i dont have to attach everything again? or is this not a option

smaller as in file size

[calm spade]

You can try editing the fbx file in the Unity project itself in Blender

[heady smelt]

hmm let me launch it and see if i can find them. im still kicking the learning curve

[ivory sluice]

Where are you looking the poly count? If you are watching it from the stats window it's likely because your shader is rendering an extra pass, it could be from a realtime light

[heavy bison]

Is it best to keep the head and body separate or should they both be one object? (the head ofc has blendshapes)

I've been seeing a lot of conflicting information on this so it'd be great if someone could clear it up for me, thanks!

[calm spade]

Best if you have a ton of blendshapes localized on the head specifically yes

[heavy bison]

Thank ya!

[tulip rose]

When you export from blender you need to make sure you apply scale and transform. If you don't do this, stuff will be ±100% in unity.

Here are some export settings to make sure you get the best output to unity. #avatar-help message

[obsidian path]

how does one fix this?

[heavy knot]

remove unneeded physbone colliders

[obsidian path]

that's it? thought it would've been more complicated

[heavy knot]

you can put t:vrcphysbonecollider in your hierarchy search to find them easily

[spring sun]

how the hell does me making the images smaller cause the file size to go up

[stray tangle]

elaborate

[spring sun]

so

4096 texture size

11.96 mb

I cut it down to 512

13.83 mb

[somber raven]

Your Texture Compression settings plays an influence on File Size.

Cubemaps are also expensive on size too.

[spring sun]

yes

but the more I compress and make smaller

the bigger the file size

also in other news as this is a seperate avatar from the one I am currently having troubles with and was made as more of a joke

hows my optimization

this is mostly a joke

[velvet crow]

Is there a bug with the texture memory calculation? The VRAM calculator is saying 175 MB but the SDK is saying nearly 1.2 GB

[velvet crow]

Did you accidentally make it RGB or something? Make sure you're only using DXT1 for non-alpha (RGB) and BC7 for alpha (RGBA) textures.

I also recommend using the manual override tabs for Windows and Android rather than the generic setting

[heady smelt]

Hmmm there is something to be had here... I can sense a kind of style emerging

But I can't quite place what is correct about it

The hair and the turquoise top

But it's mostly garbled decimated volume

The volume and direction of the hair almost looks decisive

[velvet crow]

ps1 perhaps?
https://vxtwitter.com/RolltheredDev/status/1705720561245073702?s=20

[heady smelt]

Hm I guess but even more abstract

[spring sun]

n64 perhaps

the lod model for n64 games

aka me cranking the decimate from 150k to 3k poly

[spring sun]

I ended up just duplicating the folder with my textures and it made the size smaller

it was unity being pretty stupid

[spring sun]

its half decisive I ended up going and taking my 150k poly avatar and cranking it to the minimum it allowed me which was 3k and then going and adjusting what ended up shooting off into the abyss and redoing the decimate till I got that

I will end up trying decimate properly at some point to have it be more intentional

rather than a funny test

[calm spade]

What kind of textures did you have? Format/resolution

[velvet crow]

2K or lower and most were DXT1, DXT5, BC7

[vapid elm]

I got a question, I've managed to get this pc avatar optimized for quest so I can upload it, but I'm having troubles making it more optimized without making it look to bad. I managed to get the texture memory down to 0.59, but the avatar download size its self is still 9.85 and it drops quest users' frames by a fair amount. How can I fix this?

[calm spade]

What's on the avatar? Can you show the stats panel?

[vapid elm]

ill try and take a pic, one sec sorry😅

the numbers on the polygons is a bit fuzzy but its just over 300k

would the best bet for me to lower the download size be just removing more toggles?

[ivory sluice]

The biggest performance drainer here is the polygons

You need to have at least 10 times less than that to not cause performance issues on quest

[vapid elm]

what would be some good ways to lower the polygons on the avi

[ivory sluice]

Removing non-important meshes and dissolving polygons in blender

[vapid elm]

ill try just removing meshes, its not my avi just a pc avatar I got and Iq'm trying to optimize it for quest

hopfully I don't need to take to much off lol

[ripe shore]

@drowsy fjord

oops, meant to type a msg first

I'm really proud of the textures on my model, spent forever changing a jacket to a picksheet to cut down on vram usage

[drowsy fjord]

Oh? What is the total use?

[ripe shore]

I think it's something stupid like 11MB, one sec

[drowsy fjord]

Impressive.

[drowsy fjord]

I personally try to keep my avatars at ~25 MB texture use.

whenever possible.

[ripe shore]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/730948141196509297/1155223467726209084/avi_pic.png

[drowsy fjord]

Didn't use to care, til I found out... About the new statistics xD

[ripe shore]

it's all UV mapped so that the lines are super sharp on the jacket

high quality compressed 1k texture for shoes, shirt, pants, hair and jacket

in fairness though the pants and shirt are solid color

[drowsy fjord]

Yeah it's definitely sharp, while I personally would prefer much more texture. Have you considered adding mipmap though I presume people call that depth map in Unity?

[ripe shore]

I have it normal mapped, it's kinda hard to see in that pic, one sec

I think that was also AI denoised by blender

[drowsy fjord]

Ahhh

[ripe shore]

much of the normal detail gets removed 😭

[drowsy fjord]

Honestly I didn't even know Blender had such feature, because I have not really used it that much outside just general avatar fixing.

[drowsy fjord]

Oh yeah that definitely has texture

pretty nice looking

[ripe shore]

still have space for extra stuff

all solid color UV maps get shrunken to the solid color areas and seamed so they have the super sharp lines

[drowsy fjord]

Yeah that's pretty good, I did zoom further, and it's just very crisp.

even my own handiwork isn't that good haha.

lotta effort right there.

[ripe shore]

there's some oddities every now and then because I ran a smooth modifier on it and it messed with UV maps slightly

[drowsy fjord]

Yeah that tends to mess stuff up but usually it's so minor it you can just open UV editing in blender

[ripe shore]

it took me several hours of just hand placing UV faces 😭

[drowsy fjord]

and essentially blend it with rest of the texture to make somewhat decent looking outcome

[drowsy fjord]

Damn

you actually do it by hand?

👀

[ripe shore]

had to for this

unwrapping was the easy part lol

all of like the stitching textures and stuff are repeats

[drowsy fjord]

Aaah

[ripe shore]

I wish there was some way for me to legally share my work

[drowsy fjord]

@ripe shore Btw, mind if I send you friend request?

[ripe shore]

go for it 🙂

[drowsy fjord]

Are the textures copyrighted/commercial?

[ripe shore]

the original is KC's Parka Coat

It had a massive 4k texture and the lines were blurrier than what I've got right now

[drowsy fjord]

Well, clearly it's huge improvement.

[ripe shore]

yeah, it's just a shame I can't even share it 😭

I mean, unless someone else already owns the coat

but then how do you distribute that or advertise it

[drowsy fjord]

Technically, you could sell it, if the license allows it.

Some may allow re-selling modified textures/parts.

[ripe shore]

the problem is it's a modified UV too, so mesh has to come with it

[drowsy fjord]

Oh right...

[ripe shore]

also heavily cut down on polygons from the original

so I really can't redistribute it without distributing the whole thing

[drowsy fjord]

Shame

[ripe shore]

if someone bought the jacket I don't see a problem sending it to them but it's such a shame just having weeks of learning experience and work be constrained to a single avatar that only I can use

[heady smelt]

Are people interested in it or are you just excited because you made something you think is cool

[ripe shore]

excited because I made something cool

made the lines sharper than they came with, halved the polygon count, vram usage is extremely minimal

[heady smelt]

Nice nice

Don't get too ahead of yourself though or else ya gonna spend too much time fantasizing about a storefront or making an avatar world etc

Make sure you spend time on making even better work and continue iterating

The recognition will come in time, definitely don't want to get distracted and waste time

[ripe shore]

I mean, already have, but my avi is a base that I can't redistribute anyways, just making it look nice for me :p

it's been a massive learning experience for me -- I've learned several new things every day going on weeks now

feels like about 3-4 different college courses crammed into weeks, but I have oodles of time at my disposal and motivation because I get to show it off ingame

that fantasy does kinda get broken though looking back at how much work I've put into just my avatar

if I didn't put this much effort into all of them I'd be releasing something low quality with my name on it

it irks the hell out of me how many avis for sale are low quality, unmaintainable and have zero optimization put into them, like literally zero

I know someone that's bought like 20-30 avatars and we were going through them trying to find one that they could change the hair in blender and add a toggle for practice

so many of them are unpacked prefabs, fbx files that don't load right in blender, 200k+ polys, just complete mess of animation folders and menus, poorly named textures, seperate materials for literally every object even if they're solid colors

[heady smelt]

goes to show optimization is not everything

[devout marten]

Hello I have a question.
How are certain stats like polygon count actually influencing performance? I am generally trying to make my avatars perform as good as they can while still looking nice. But I always found the VRChat performance rating questionable when it comes to actual performance changes.
A classic example would be an avatar with 69.999 polygons could have a good performance rating. Adding 2 polygons would make it 70.001 polygons. This would make VRChat consider it Very Poor. Even though it would not really effect people any worse than before.

So what I am wondering is how many polygons would still be considerd good by the standard of an average PC user. How many meshes and materials are still fine. How many bones. How much texture mermory usage and so on. Can people who understand this better than me explain?

[ivory sluice]

the poly count is as uncertain as guessing a shader's performance and what you are rendering at that moment

For a normal pc capable of vr (ex: 1060 6gb / i5 8400 / 16gb), 70k polygons per avatar would be enough, both for performance and detail, gpus can render a lot more very fast but keep in mind the world and other users are additional polygons

To say it briefly, poly count performance depends on your vertex shader, how many passes you have, and how many things are on the scene that will cause your polygons to be redrawn

Because in most cases you won't be rendering 70k polygons but maybe thrice than that or even more, if someone spawns a point light with shadows, all meshes on your view will have to be rendered 6 or 7 times more

well that was not brief

example: your avatar is 70k, there are 6 more users with 70k avatars -> 490k polygons

the map is 140k polygons -> 630k

now, the world has a realtime shadow sun and someone tought it would look cool to add a point light for their gun and "forgot" to turn their shadows off

now you have to render the shadow caster + 1 pass for the sun + 6 passes for the point light -> 5.040k

now your gpu is rendering 5 million polygons, at that point the framerate will be noticeably low

if you are on vr, you have to render one scene per eye

so your gpu will have to render 10 million polyons

this with no fur shaders nor outlines, and on a 6 person instance, with one sun and a single point light

Obviously the renderer has a smart way to exclude out of bounds polygons but the vertex shader will still have to be rendered for all the polygons, and there are less gpu cores dedicated to proces vertices than pixels so be careful

[heavy knot]

it mostly depends on what settings you're usually in, if you're in small friend instances with like 5 people it's honestly fine to go a little bit past the polygon ranking as stereo said the perf ranks are basically based off of mid tier hardware and an instance with like around 20 people

[devout marten]

Hmm. Very informative but I am still not sure what I should try to achieve when it comes to stats?

Let's say an avatar with everything medium/good, but a polygon count of 90.000. Would it still be a well optimized avatar when it uses a simple shader?

[heavy knot]

oh yeah, 20k higher is honestly not too big of a deal

modern GPUs are really good at displaying these things

you'll probably not budge GPU usage by too much honestly, unless the avatar is coated in blendshapes which you should probably look into using something like VRCFury to bake unused/static value blendshapes

[radiant shadow]

yet to see an av with good stats except over poly , its always a giant mess with lots of meshes/mats

[devout marten]

Are blendshapes problematic if they are unused?

[heavy knot]

yeah they'll still take up skinning calculations iirc and sit in VRAM

actually I don't think skinning calculations if they're at 0

but they'll still take up mesh VRAM

[devout marten]

So if I would remove the Blendshapes that I do not use in Blender, it would make the avatar peform a bit better?

[heavy knot]

it can, especially booth avatars

some booth avatars have like 500 blendshapes

that VRCFury blendshape optimizer costs nothing and really easy to put on any avatar

[devout marten]

I do not know VRCFury, Is it a Unity add-on or Blender add-on?

[heavy knot]

Unity

https://vrcfury.com/download

[devout marten]

It will decetct unused Blendshapes and and remove them for example?

[heavy knot]

yep and also bake blendshapes that don't move from their values

after installing it, add a VRCFury component on the root avatar object and then add a blendshape optimizer subcomponent inside of it. That's it, VRCFury only applies non destructively meaning it only applies on play mode or avatar upload so it doesn't have the ability to mess up your avatar/project

[devout marten]

Thank you a lot. I have heard that other big performance eaters are material slots, VRAM usage, and physbone transformers. Is that true?

[heavy knot]

yeah material slots and VRAM are pretty big as well

[devout marten]

What numbers would you go for each of them and be able to say it is decently optimized?

Assuming everything else is fine.

[heavy knot]

me currently I have like 30 material slots, and a lot of those objects are disabled unless toggled, though I'm usually just around a small group of people. for VRAM I would really be mindful of that in any cases as most cards only have 8gb of VRAM and personally follow 110mb of texture memory max

if I were to be in a lot of public spaces I usually try to get my material slot count down to like 10-18

[devout marten]

Ah so going for 80 MB VRAM and 16 material slots max each is decent?

[heavy knot]

those fit in the medium rank already so yeah

[devout marten]

That is great. One more question.
Does lowering the amount of physbones make the avatar perform better if the amount of transformers stay?
As an example a hair might have 8 physbones with 60 transformers. Putting them all under a rootbone would lower the number of physbones to 1, but the transfoerms would stay at 60.

[radiant shadow]

then it would do calc on one core instead of 8 , 1 component - 1 core *Because of the multi-threaded nature of PhysBones, it isn't always the most efficient to put all bones into a single chain

if any of my av go over 5 mats / 2 mesh / 50 vram ive done something wrong, rare i go over that

https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-dynamics/physbones/#optimal-component-usage

[devout marten]

Does this mean better or worse then?

[radiant shadow]

id just parrot what they wrote, use up to whatever amount of components rank you'd want to be, mines usually 8 max

[ripe shore]

this is irking me a lot right now 😭

I don't want to permanently cut chunks of my avatar out to hit a polygon limit but I'm probably gonna have to if I want to keep my clothing toggles and everything

[stray tangle]

like the docs explain, it's only really a good idea to break it into multiple components if you have a lot of transforms affected by a single component. multi-threading performance shouldn't really be that much of a concern, because the components of everyone else in the lobby can also be spread across multiple threads

[stray tangle]

you could always just make your main avatar VP and your fallback Good

[ripe shore]

currently just too low on geometry for my joints to look good and not clip, stuff needs to go

[stray tangle]

the only reason my main avatar is VP is because of the poly count (clothing toggles, disabled meshes) and Contacts (bHaptics support). everything else is perfectly fine

[ripe shore]

I'm so tempted to, it just feels like such a poor workaround + I'd have to maintain 2 seperate copies and 2 seperate blender scenes

[stray tangle]

well, that depends. if you can get your avatar with just the basic clothes to be Good, you can simply mark all of the other things as EditorOnly on your VP copy

[ripe shore]

I'd ideally like to cut out the skin mesh beneath the clothes

[stray tangle]

these are my stats

[ripe shore]

the problem is that's destructive since my body is 1 skinnedmeshrenderer

[stray tangle]

including hoodie and pants?

[ripe shore]

those are seperate because of material toggles and I'd like ability to take off the hoodie seperately and leave just t-shirt

[stray tangle]

alright cool

can you SS a wireframe view of your body?

[ripe shore]

yknow

I could join my hands to my face skinnedmesh

then just not export the body or feet

[stray tangle]

are the hands separate...?

[ripe shore]

can be

[stray tangle]

hmmm

[ripe shore]

they are joined with the main body mesh atm

[stray tangle]

I mean, that could work

[ripe shore]

the rest is covered up by clothing

I'd have to seperate the arms too

[spring sun]

why not just

combine the entire body