avatar-optimization

[jagged dagger]

And render textures

I don't know anything blender unfortunately

Find the UI very confusing

Though my mat swaps mostly include different shader settings

I reuse a lot otherwise in terms of textures

[radiant shadow]

made a vid thats 2.4 min long to remind me how to bake stuff , always forget something especially the alpha part, seen some drawn out ones thats 30+ min

figured out why vram calc broke , one animation it didnt like

that makes it 0

this fixes it

newer one uses uv swap

[jagged dagger]

Oh you got all in the same animation?

[radiant shadow]

just radial

[jagged dagger]

I have like one animation for each swap and toggle with an int toggle through them

Well with 17 different int toggles

[radiant shadow]

yeh done both just radial is 1 anim 1 float , way less setup

[jagged dagger]

Which results in 2 pages in radial menu

With one thing having also it's own submenu

[onyx harness]

ig the difference would be if you wanted to have a menu icon to show what it is you're changing into. Unless you memorise the wheel and know 56% is x look

[jagged dagger]

Though most things are only on my pc version

Quest version is rather barebones

Since almost none of everything works on Quest lol

[jagged dagger]

Yeah for my avatars all being public it's probably easier that way for other people

[radiant shadow]

slightly newer ones uses int when entering a menu to change into that outfit, then every one of those have 4 toggleable stuff on them, only need 1 int 4 bools (toggles) for all 5 outfit - not one id wear much its not optimized and was mostly 'how do i do this some years ago'

4 layers of these pretty much for toggles

[onyx harness]

opening the submenu applied the outfit?

[radiant shadow]

yep

[onyx harness]

when you exit that menu, wouldn't the int be set back to 0? and if so, how does it sync for those that join later?

[radiant shadow]

thats default look so 0

synch fine with it

pretty old now was made with PoiyomiPro7.2.29 (2021~) - have since updated to 8.2.030 , but setup is ancient

if id redo there would be much more uv discards

[onyx harness]

not my updating an avatar on 6.1.15

[radiant shadow]

would been -18 meshes (currently 25) if i did use uv discard - but eeh not an av i use

[jagged dagger]

I always update my poi pretty fast

Currently i use poi 9

[onyx harness]

I'm going through the process of updating all the old avatars still being sold. I've been sticking to 8.2.027, havn't tried v9 yet

[radiant shadow]

030 is the last of the 8.2's - alpha would be annoying to update for all my av / friend ones

6 to 7 was .. such fun, then 7 to 8.2 changed shade/uv name

[onyx harness]

ye, but there's some... features, that suffer from a bug in 029 and 030. With 028 being down I went with 027.
The toggles are all being converted to uv discard from object and blendshapes

plus the texture memory is all being adjusted so the 600-700mb avatars will be Poor or better as default

yeah it was bad

I am the one who knocks

[marble rain]

there are quite a few nice things on the newest poi

[jagged dagger]

I gotta sub to Patreon again to get new poi 9 updates

[wild fern]

I have a booth avatar that has a bunch of blendshapes to shrink parts of the body mesh into a singularity (best way I can describe it). I assume these are for when you have clothes that fully cover those areas, you don't need to have the mesh there, but does that actually lead to better performance? Are all those points/edges/vertices all collapsed and calculated as one? Because VRChat still counts them as polygons, and as such my avatar is "Very Poor", after adding only a few clothes and accessories.

[mint topaz]

no

blendshapes = worse performance actually

[heavy knot]

if you want those verts not rendered, you'd use something like UV tile discard

[wild fern]

I'm already getting rid of the blendshapes/baking them in while uploading

[merry swift]

blendshapes can only move vertices, not destroy/create them. every vertice needs to be calculated every frame regardless of what the blendshapes do

more specifically, there is a set performance cost incurred with each blendshape added to the mesh, and further still for blendshapes that are active

so those blendshapes that collapse your limbs down actually make your avatar ever so slightly less performant

[verbal spruce]

I've used a component to reduce the polygon count of an avatar's model but it doesn't like those components existing on the model. Is there any way to fix this while keeping the the new simplified meshes without redoing the model itself in Blender?

[hardy hound]

Import into blender>edit mode>mesh>decimate>export to unity again….. done

Blender is soo much easier than trying to optimise stuff in unity

[hardy hound]

Arguably worse performance since blendshapes also take up vram just like textures do. They just arent calculated into the vram on the avatar stats

[merry swift]

the vram consideration isn't really what makes us care about blendshape performance, I'd strongly urge anyone to look at optimizing textures first unless something is seriously wrong. We care about blendshapes because they have a significant impact on how long it takes your avatar to shuffle through the render pipeline. https://gist.github.com/d4rkc0d3r/f77c1e96d4aeefd0d1eaf13fb096a2de

In unity 2019 the GPU wastes a bunch of time shuffling data for unused blendshapes around the blendshape buffer, this (and some other blendshape related stuff) getting fixed for 2021 contributes to that modest framerate boost

Take that .86ms (merged mesh, 10 active blendshapes), multiply by 40 and you'll quickly find we are not getting 60 fps from blendshape performance cost alone

That. Is why we care about blendshapes.

[marble rain]

we have the update already. for blendshape so its less problematic but still quite abit intensive. since the game is running on LTS 2022 and the sdk is still 2019.4f or whatever it was. that said be careful with them still and if possible use uv discards or other methods

[night inlet]

there is no perf cost for extra unused blendshapes that I know of besides that they take some space in vram. you only have extra perf cost per active blendshape

[merry swift]

I guess I need to do some more reading up, it's hard keeping all this stuff straight even when you're not in the middle of an engine upgrade

[night inlet]

thankfully we are now on 2022 and it deosn't really matter anymore as long as you don't have a ridiculous amount of blendshapes active

no more cursed skinning performance anymore. funnily the base skinning is also faster, so for my test avatar on new unity its about as fast as old unity with no blendshapes when using 3 blendshapes in new unity!

[merry swift]

not a moment too soon

[tulip rose]

Ah, interesting knowledge. Will have to poke at the profiler and see how things have changed.

[drowsy venture]

hello everyone, i'd like to know what is the most optimized way to do toggles currently? as i understand it if i split my one material outfit into 5 separate objects in unity, it will result in 5 materials, and that's a big no-no for performance... so what should i do instead?

[radiant shadow]

5 isnt much for pc - quest insta bad

uv discard (pconly) > mesh toggle > shrinking bones > blendshapes .. something like that from good to terrible

[low mural]

Performance wise, is there any difference deleting a bone from Unity compared to deleting it in Blender?

[spring sun]

Besides it being a no no to do it in unity

Not really

[tulip rose]

Only difference that really matters is that you can't remove bones in unity without unpacking prefab.
Which is often a bad idea if you ever wanna edit the mesh again lol.

[low mural]

Understood, thank you!

[short badge]

How bad is it to have 3 audio sources on an asset? I could in theory have 1 big one that covers the general use area but if audio sources aren't too unoptimized then ideally I'll add 3 different ones for different areas.

[low mural]

Why not using one but with 3 parent constraints that you disable/enable depending on where you want it?

[pulsar lichen]

does anyone have the avatar sdk file

[buoyant holly]

install it via the vrchat Creator companion

[pulsar lichen]

i did, thanks

[arctic comet]

anyone know what the cause of these errors are when i try to convert to quest

im using the VRC quest tool

[short badge]

Good idea, ty!!

[frank widget]

successfully make kokoa good from rank poor

[tulip rose]

Solid job.

[sterile bramble]

Change the shader of your materials I think

[oblique patio]

So this avatar I'm trying to upload has 86 materials. The SDK shows 6 material slots. It seems like they are toggling the materials with the menu. isn't that a bad idea? I'm thinking about using only one material with the textures that I like to use..

[onyx harness]

it'll build up on texture memory assuming they have different textures within the materials but if there's only 6 slots then the avatar won't ever render more than 6 materials at any given time

[oblique patio]

ok the texture memory seems to be acceptable

[onyx harness]

the sdk currently doesn't take animations into account

you'll need to check the texture memory with tools like Thry's Avatar Performance Tools

[oblique patio]

ok, thank you

[jagged dagger]

Me finding Murder Drones models online to download:

Guess i gotta throw money for a commission eventually again

If i continue with them that is

[marble rain]

that is quite easy and fast to fix

[fierce furnace]

so i was modelling a lil knife and wanted to ass a couple animations for it being open, close and half. i was wondering in terms of optimisation, would shape keys for each state be better or should i use an armature and do it in unity?

[ivory sluice]

if there's going to be any rotation you'll have to use bones, shape keys can only be interpolated linearly

[fierce furnace]

shite, i completely forgot about that lol

brain hasn't kicked in lol

cheers though

[hardy hound]

You can do rotations with blendshapes aslong as its only max 20 degrees people can usualy not tell.

[proven dock]

sin(x) = x if x is small enough

...I think that's relevant at least

[ivory sluice]

to do rotations via blendshapes using sine and cosine the rotation should be exactly 90º
you'd need to have two blendshapes where all vertices are shifted to the Y and X axis gradually where on the center of rotation is not shifted and the further from the radius it is, the more it shifts (relative to the rotation, for example if it rotates on the Z axis, the axis are X and Y, if it rotates along Y, it's X and Z, and if it's X, then Y and Z)
Then on the animator you need to do a perfect sine and cosine curve, the sine curve influences the Y shift and the cosine the X
to make a full rotation, since you can't invert blendshapes, you'll have to also make two more blenshapes which are the inverse of the other two, then blend them as follows
(X = shifted on X, Y= shifted on Y, -X = inverse shift of X, -Y = inverse shift of Y)
X -> cos(rotation) Y -> sin(rotation)
-X -> -cos(rotation) -Y -> -sin(rotation)

[atomic badger]

would it be possible to use one float for all your avatar adjustments? :3
Just use a integer to select what you wanna set, and then adjust the float.
then have those animations be write defaults enabled

this would be amazing if it actually would work

[cold yarrow]

you could do that with direct blend trees

[atomic badger]

right, but you want the animations to "stick"

after u set them

[cold yarrow]

hmm

[proper grail]

i think the way youre trying to do it will not be network synced, all the changes you make will just be for who can see you

[atomic badger]

right

pain

[urban shoal]

Sorry if it's a common question, but is there a way to stop the SDK counting inactive objects towards the mesh and material count?

In this case, toggleable items in the character's handles.

[cold yarrow]

no, those always count

[urban shoal]

Aw, shucks

[nova hornet]

I vaguely presume that's what this does
https://fuuujin.gumroad.com/l/OSCParameterSync

[stuck ingot]

I have this message not letting me upload my avatar but my textures are the vrchat mobile shaders.

[heavy knot]

Put t:renderer in your hierarchy search bar and make sure all renderers are using a vrchat mobile supported shader

[stuck ingot]

ok thanks i will do that now.

thanks for the help it worked

[vital cloud]

I'm using a vroid model to make my first vrchat model & I've been told there are many phys bones i can delete to better optimize the model but I'm not sure which ones. Anyone have any input on this?

[buoyant holly]

you would be able to adjust the bone settings in vroid Studio https://vroid.pixiv.help/hc/en-us/articles/900006910023-I-want-to-edit-hair-bounce

[vital cloud]

Ah I mustve skimmed over it too fast. Thanks.

[hardy torrent]

was optimising this avi (removing transparent textures) and this is how the blendshapes now look

anyone know a quick fix or will i simply have to redo all the blendshapes

[radiant shadow]

redo or weightpaint em, if you accidentally create new verticies using knife tool that happen

[hardy torrent]

Ive fixed the weight paint alr

ig redoing it is

xd

[tulip rose]

Are you trying to build a demultiplexer?
||late reply||

[granite crystal]

is there a way to show some avatar's object thru other avatar's objects (even if it's behind them) with shaders not loaded?

(like "please turn on shaders to see avatar properly" banner inside crypted mess of polygons)

[ivory sluice]

Do you mean to replace the avatar with a polygon mess to make people unlock it?

[sick relic]

Would be impossible to render an object behind on top with fallback shader. Instead, have the object in front with zero alpha transparency, then choose fallback shader to render in opaque mode.

[atomic badger]

Yup

[tulip rose]

Well, as long as you iterate over all indexes every once and a while for late sync.
You could use state behaviours to set a local copy of the value.
That way the network sync is only using those 16 bits.

[ruby vortex]

What techniques can I use to manually reduce my avatar's polygon count in blender without destroying blendshapes? CATS' decimation tool is decent but I'm willing to research and put in effort for a better result, just not sure where to start. (should I ask in 3d-modeling?)

[cold yarrow]

I first go for deleting edge loops where they won't be noticed

[buoyant holly]

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

[thick condor]

https://vxtwitter.com/VIANVOLAEUS/status/1728810912851820651?s=19

Because a part of the avatar creator community needs to be reminded that the word "optimization" exists, here.

To that part of the community:

Rather than presume all of us have buckets of VRAM that can be used to load your massive avatar, let me make you aware of the Steam Hardware Survey's October 2023 results.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

That's me done here.

[jade wedge]

i'm trying to make an atlas for selected textures but some of them have this issue where they are not accurate size and it breaks the atlas

all of them use the same shader on the same settings

nvm setting it to a different shader and setting it back fixed it

[brazen sage]

Hello!

Bit of a repost but it says everything that needs to be said-

I am currently drowning in the sea of my own ignorance and being battered by the currents of things I do not understand. The basic situation is as follows-

I have a custom avatar, custom model, I believe built from the ground up. it's horribly unoptimized. (see the screenshot below.) I see a lot of errors, but I have absolutely no idea how screwed I am. Provided I have all of the files and everything, how hard of a job would it be to optimize? If there's any specific screenshots or examples you want me to pull I'm happy to do so, though please bear with me because once again, I am so out of my depth

[buoyant holly]

honestly that's pretty easy to fix as the main thing that's red is the material count

[brazen sage]

I see! And- I genuinely apologize for my ignorance, in this context what is considered a "material"?

[heady smelt]

The thing that adds textures to ur avatar

so basically you want to use and few as you can by combining ur textures with uv editing

[buoyant holly]

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

[brazen sage]

Ah! I get it!

So rather than having a seperate texture for say- a hat, and a coat, and another coat, and the skin, etc, you're basically blending it all into one continuous texture?

[buoyant holly]

yes

[brazen sage]

This is both illuminating and a bit uh- Perilous.

Hang on- let me show y'all.

[buoyant holly]

basically multiple textures bad because the way the GPU/cpu works it would basically have to fetch each texture separately whereas combining them together it only has to do the get texture process once

[brazen sage]

How does it handle that with toggles?

Showing the model for my point.

The Red Coat, the blue coat underneath and the hat can be turned off.

[buoyant holly]

you would have to toggle the objects using like bones scaling/blend shapes if you want to keep the material count low

as being separate meshes would also increase the material slot

[brazen sage]

I think I get ya...so other than poly-count, a lot of these optimizations could be done with a few simple tweaks with how the model is rendered

[buoyant holly]

yeah it wouldn't take that long to fix

have you ever used blender before

[brazen sage]

Never, not really anyway.

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6oTdFbpBpI

[brazen sage]

I'm a hardware/server/networking guy, I build the machines all this runs on, I have never actually delved into the art at all

[buoyant holly]

then you'd probably want to use the material combiner add-on workflow

the video I just linked will show you what you need to do in 2 minutes

[brazen sage]

Aces

[buoyant holly]

setting up the toggles so you can turn the clothing on and off would take a little more explaining

but first let's get the materials combined

[brazen sage]

Stand by, I uh...hm.

I appear to only have a Unity project file to work with, but I'm sure I have the raw model somewhere around here

AHA! Found it!

(ANd may I say this is fun! I love tinkering!)

[buoyant holly]

glad you're having fun

and question do you primarily play on Quest Standalone or PC

mostly just asking to know if doing mesh toggles on PC and you always wear all of the pieces on Quest might be easier?

[brazen sage]

I primarily play on PC, but my plan was to have the avatar optimized for Quest too so Questies can see me

Alrighty! The materials have been combined, I think!

[buoyant holly]

and then you would export the fbx back out to the place your avatar is located in your Unity project

[brazen sage]

Alrighty, and then-

...Oh no.

I have become a Manta-ray

I've gone from TecTim to FishTim

[buoyant holly]

oh dear

what happens if you just drag the fbx into the unity scene

[onyx harness]

yeah them some incorrect blender export settings

[brazen sage]

Very much untextured me

[buoyant holly]

but at least it didn't explode

[brazen sage]

I have the distinct feeling that I misunderstood the instruction. 😛

[onyx harness]

If it stretches you need to reexport with Apply Scalings as FBX All
If it crumples it needs to be reexported as All Local
i think it was

[buoyant holly]

yeah it would be worth giving it a try to see if it doesn't Manta-ray?

and you should be able to just drag the new combined texture onto the gray version of your avatar?

[onyx harness]

would save the Pumkins step

[brazen sage]

Drag it on in Blender or in the SDK?

[buoyant holly]

in unity sorry for the lack of clarity

[brazen sage]

Nah you're good!

[buoyant holly]

as you would be needing to make a new material as your old ones would no longer be in use as you made the new combined material

[brazen sage]

Oh I get it!

[buoyant holly]

cool

[brazen sage]

Okay so!

Bit of good news and a bit of bad news. Good news is that worked. Bad news is I think the process might've broken the scene in a way I don't quite understand

[buoyant holly]

what kind of braking?

[brazen sage]

So the clipping through the hat and the clipping at the armpits there, there is technically some model that would push through as you can see.

Also, lighting is quite different, not sure what that means yet

[buoyant holly]

that's because you have a new material that's on default settings

[brazen sage]

Ah! That makes sense, yeah

[buoyant holly]

the clipping you would have to fix in blender as now it's all one mesh

[brazen sage]

Alrighty, so that'd be more of a case of "Squish things back where they should be"

[buoyant holly]

yes

[brazen sage]

Great!

...ACtually wait this Does help with the other problem too!

I could reduce polies this way!

[buoyant holly]

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

dissolving Edge Loops makes less of a mess than the decimate modifier

but I would point out your triangle account is only yellow so everyone will see your avatar

so pretty much just get your material where you like it and fix the clipping and your avatar is good to go

[heady smelt]

can someone give me a good baking tutorial

im making my avi a fallback

[buoyant holly]

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

[heady smelt]

nvm ima just use the vid u already sent

but thank u again

[heady smelt]

I did it yall

[buoyant holly]

Cool

[brazen sage]

Ahhh so I've learned some valuable lessons over the past amount of itme I've been working on this. 😛

Namely-

Yes, we fixed the materials, but all the animations and toggles on the model appear to be busted now. Sooo trying to figure out how to get around this problem now. xD

[buoyant holly]

not surprised as you combined all the objects together so if your animation is looking for object B it no longer exists

[brazen sage]

Makes sense, yeah.

[buoyant holly]

is the Avatar no longer very poor

[brazen sage]

Difficult to say, I've not been able to get it into a buildable state since.

[buoyant holly]

oh dear sorry for making a bit of a mess

[brazen sage]

Nah you're okay!

❤️ I had a really lucky and good day at work, my tech karma had to go somewhere. LOL

(Besides, I'm having fun.)

I am wondering if it'd be a good idea to see if anyone wants to take a look at the project file to see where I might be going wrong though.

When I had the original comission done, the fella built a project file that was just ready for upload and ready to go, so I suspect I'm just doing it very wrong. 😛

[buoyant holly]

I suppose you could look at the working version and your version to see what's different

[brazen sage]

Good point

Ah yeah, uh...that's a lot.

[long gust]

I'm working on a video that can help people for optimizing their avatars on PC if anyone's looking forward to that

[austere wave]

@long gust Yes!

Oh god help me, I really want to get this to at least Poor, Most of the VRC clubs want Poor or better and I have no clue how to Optimize

[buoyant holly]

looks like optimizing the triangle count would be all you need to do to get to poor

[austere wave]

@buoyant holly I dont know how I did yous VRAM Calculator to reduce Texture sizes but thats all I know how to do as far as optimizing is there a plugin that I can use

[buoyant holly]

unfortunately reducing triangle count is generally done in blender

[austere wave]

oh no my Blender skills are even worse

[buoyant holly]

but something you might could try as far as Unity see how much of a triangle reduction you get removing the collars

but yeah it would be good to learn enough blender to at least use decimate

[austere wave]

I know there is a way to Combine Mats in blender too, ugh, I guess I have to spend 100 hours learning blender too.😅

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MkgXcidxg4

[final osprey]

can anyone help? i can't modify these shaders

[rigid wolf]

Select the material in the folder

[rigid wolf]

Are you using alpha maps to hide some parts of the model? For example some people don't delete parts of their model like clothes, but instead just hide them.

[chilly fox]

Does anyone have a guide for putting facial expressions into a blendtree and onto a radial?
I tried this kinda thing, but it only goes up to 49% and does actually apply the anims. 🤔

I could just set toggles in the usual off/on way, but figured a blendtree would be better.

[proper grail]

in the toggle menu, the when radial menu open = 1 box should be blank

[chilly fox]

I don't want a toggle. Do you mean the Parameter box? That's blank, yes.

This setup works in Gesture Manager, but not in in game. 🤔

[proper grail]

49% usually means something else is taking over the parameter

[chilly fox]

Pretty sure nothing else is using it... the FacialExpressions float was created just for this radial.

Nothing is using the anims either... I duplicated those from the usual hand gestures, so they're unique files.

[spring sun]

click on fbx and extract the materials

[river heath]

can anyone help me with this it's my second time making an avatar and I didn't have this problem the first time?

[proper grail]

log out and log back in, might need to enable 2fa

[river heath]

okay I will try that ty^^

[spring sun]

Detach id from pipeline manager

Same place the avatar descriptor component is

[rigid wolf]

What type did you use for the parameter? It should be float not integer or boolean

Both in the parameter menu and in the animator controller "parameters" tab

[chilly fox]

It's a float in both, yeah.

[final osprey]

help

it has the default locomotion in base

[final osprey]

help

[bold wharf]

Its talking about your fx layer. Not your base layer

[spring sun]

if it was talking about the locomotion layer it would say Base > Base

which for that it needs an fx layer put there

[frigid badger]

trying to reach 15k polygons, but i am really struggling now
most of my polygons are in the face, but i dont wanna risk screwing up vismes. ive already decimated the hair as much as i could, so whats left is the face itself over 15k tris

anything i could do to try and get the tri count on the face down, without screwing up shape keys and vismes

[buoyant holly]

Dissolving edge loops can be safely done on faces affected by blend shapes

[frigid badger]

thanks for the tip

[frigid badger]

almost there...

[buoyant holly]

At the very least you have hit the poor ranking on quest so that's still an improvement compared to most folks

Any mesh hiding under the clothing

[frigid badger]

yeah, i dissolved the middle section of the body down to an insanely low poly count, im just trying to get a few more tris in stuff like the feet or paws

aaand, its done

[buoyant holly]

Cool

[frigid badger]

i may have accidentally deleted a loop too close to the face, since some of it looks a bit wonk, but its not noticable enough where its an issue. thanks so much for the help

[buoyant holly]

Glad to be of help

[final osprey]

but now where do i take a FX layer?, i can create it with a few clicks like animation menus or it's much more complex?

i'm sorry for the questions but i could not find anything so specific

[final osprey]

IDEA: try removing more poligons but under the hair parts where it's not visible, shouldn't be noticeable unless someone takes the hair and looks under

[frigid badger]

i have done so in the 2nd version of it ^^

[wind herald]

Right click > Create > Animator Controller

If you use vrcfury to create your toggles, you don't need an fx controller

[keen sable]

OTL
I understand VRChat's desire to protect the game, but without a proper guideline presented upon launch of the new system to know where the security draws the line before flagging models is really difficult to work with.

Anybody got any ideas of where that limit is?

[hardy hound]

limit on what? the avatar tags?

i think they all are pretty selfexplanitory what they mean

[keen sable]

Oh, no. I am referring to the new security check system for avatar uploading, the documents that have been released so far by VRChat do not cite what criteria their new system has so right now a lot of creators or people who own avis who are very poor are getting false flags for malicious avatars.

It's like YouTube's copyright-bot.

I always break down my models into very more reasonably sized avatars for when I am in public worlds or friends+ instances above 10, but because I am a curious lass, I do have a handful of my models where I am experimenting and learning more about min-maxing and optimizing for the best visual quality for the best performance, I also always benchmark / test these heftier avatars with my friends with potatos to make sure these mashups of my learning progress aren't actually straining people's rigs.
So far so good on that front!

I just hoped that in here some peeps had already been working with the new security system to figure out what exactly sets it off so I can understand where I need to break up my mashup avatars to follow the newer guidelines.
They (VRChat Developer) won't be telling us (the public) any time soon what these criteria are since they don't want malicious people to break the security system before they can perfect it more.

[wind herald]

I don‘t understand how people have such a hard time understanding this lol

Sure there are false flags occasionally, but the system is in its early stages and will get better as time goes on

[keen sable]

...? Um, "hard time understanding this"? No, I'm sorry, I understand the documents very well, I was coming in here wondering if people had already had reports on diferent specs of avatars to cross reference where the system flags it.
If the VRChat system detects 16 physic transforms then it will consider the model in question "good" in the physics component. If the texture memory exceeds 160 mbs then it will be considered very poor by the system. Now there is a secondary system that double checks that list with an even more specific criteria that as I said- we won't know for quite some time officially, so I wanted to see if some people went "hey, I got flagged as malicious for having 16 materials instead of having 4 materials" so I can start understanding the line in it's metaphorical sand so I can continue to optimize my models in adherence to what is needed and wanted while waiting for the official specs to be released.

I just wanted data so I can keep working Q^Q

[proper grail]

The second check is for crashers, avatars that thrash resources with incorrect animators, materials that have the game pause or take over ui, blendshapes that move a vert out of bounds. Stuff like that, dont gotta worry about it

[short badge]

i've noticed unity 2022 does a lot more (or at least takes longer) with the mesh and shader optimization on the build of the avatar, does anyone know if this means that unity 2022 avatars will be at least even slightly more optimized than ones built with 2019?

[keen sable]

I understand that, but as the developers said there will be false positives for a while until they can train the system, and I was trying to collect data from other creators / uploaders to see if various specs triggered it or if it's after an exact point where people commonly get false flagged.
I am in the process still of getting a model appealed due to this current bug.

[proper grail]

Oh well in that case ive had a few; one being people who add models together in unity and unpack than delete skinned mesh bones, another being people who have every animation ever made in their first fx layer not linked to anything, and another being a material swap animation that referenced a super broken material

[keen sable]

See?! Thank you!

[fickle oracle]

Is it bad to have faces that have more than 3-4 vertices in blender? Like should I always split a face into either a triangle or rectangle?

[keen sable]

Once again, this is just a mashup version of an avatar that I do optimize into individual models (That rests below the 150 mbs very poor mark for texture memory), but I keep a copy of them as 1 model to test animations and benchmark its actual performance (kinda super proud of how unlaggy it is when loaded by 1060 GPU laptop :D), but here is the specs of the model that got flagged, it hasn't had errors before, all I did since the security check update was update Poiyomi on the model to go from 8.2 to 9 alpha on the shaders.
So my only offered data is potentially texture memory, I've seen models with more than 60 materials before so I don't know if that'll toss it.
I will take alcohol shots for each person who doesn't fully read this and just yells at me about performance when they have very much missed what I have said-

[buoyant holly]

it's going to get triangulated into triangles when it gets into the game engine so not the end of the world but
probably less messy if you're the one picking up how it's going to get triangulated

[keen sable]

But you mentioned a potential material swap corruption, do you refer to in the animation itself that it's super broken or that the called on material to take the original material's place is the one corrupted?

[fickle oracle]

If this is the case, then that's kind of relieving, knowing that there won't be weird looking faces then.

[keen sable]

Mhm! Usually if you sculpt the mesh just right then the triangles and topology even out! It's always good though to test the model in question in various light conditions with different shader setups to make sure there isn't any unwanted visual glitches. The most common one I fight is how culling is setup for meshes Q^Q

[fickle oracle]

Would I have to worry about things like face placement, for things like the elbows so they don't bend weird?

[keen sable]

A little bit, usually you'd want to create twist bones that rest between the arm and elbow's connecting spot to use rotation constraints.

The amount of verticles in those joints can help smooth out the weights to make it a smoother bend, but it will always look a little quirky due to how IK functions.

[proper grail]

More than 4 verts and you dont know how unity will triangulate it. If skinned, and all the verts in the n-gon have the exact same weights than its no issue but if it varies than there is no real telling how unity will rotate or triangulate the face. Sometimes itll end up backwards or some other undesired effect

[fickle oracle]

Ah, so it's less about the vertices and more about the bone setup later on

[fickle oracle]

Good thing I'm being cautious with it then

[keen sable]

It's hand in hand in my experience actually, if the mesh isn't sculpted and built to have human-like rotations and bends then it can look pretty bad.

[fickle oracle]

Would you say the way I'm doing this is efficient, and correct in terms of build for rotations?

Or am I using too many vertices

[keen sable]

So far so good actually!

You kinda want some verticles around the joints for smooth bending but after the joint is cleared then you can go back to normally scheduled optimized topology! (looks beautiful QvQ)

[fickle oracle]

I'm kind of just hoping that I'm not over doing it with the vertices lol

[buoyant holly]

you're still in low poly territory so you're fine

[wind herald]

anything under 10-20k is fine

[buoyant holly]

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Limb_Topology

some examples of low poly limb topology if it's helpful @fickle oracle

[fickle oracle]

Thank you

This part is very useful

I'll optimize it so I have a singular cut on the angles that rotate inwards so they're smoother like the third one

So far so good, only had to fix the back of the knees

[keen sable]

You got this!

[snow knot]

I'm inclined to agree w/ you on the texture memory for that avatar specifically. either that or your collision check count. Those are the only two that look out of range of what I would call 'extremely poor' and enter what I would call 'maliciously poor'

[wind herald]

"horrible" performance rank when

[keen sable]

I'll make the individual model upload and report back.

[keen sable]

1060 gpu laptops with 2.8 GHz cpus with vr can see it with no frame drop or difference in memory. so i wouldn't call it anything heavy outside of wi-fi speed dictating how long it takes to download the mashup version.

[wind herald]

the difference is one of your avatar vs 40 or even 80 of your avatar

and close to 1gb of texture memory usage will make a difference in memory

[keen sable]

The model in question is only one, this model will never and should never be distributed as it is my personal model. I'm not sure how much of a difference in memory you're talking, I do ask my low pc spec focus groups for any feedback regarding the performance and outside of download waiting times, still nothing like memory consumption. The model in question is also not used in public worlds or instances above 10 people, I have versions of the avatar that are far more optimized for social situations.
But that's beside the point.

[wind herald]

Yeah, and there is nothing wrong with that

I have avatars for personal use that have pretty bad performance

But if you take pictures or are just hanging out with more than 5-10 people, avatars with horrible performance are still absolutely fine

[polar wadi]

I don't know much about unity, is there an easy trick to decrease the size a tiny tiny bit ?

[spring sun]

not really no

there is several reasons for why its that file size

[polar wadi]

Alright, thanks anyway :3

[wind herald]

vrcfury blendshape optimizer

[polar wadi]

Noted, I'll try that :3

Almost! It was nice to try anyway :3

[wind herald]

switch to windows build target, build a test copy, and load that test copy in https://vsk.lox9973.com/abstat/

reduce texture resolution and adjust format/compression settings

remove or lower the poly count of meshes

[polar wadi]

Alright, imma try that, thanks

I succeed by changing some 4k textures to 2k!

[snow knot]

imo its easier to use the vram calculator in this to see what's taking up most of your download size.

https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools

It won't give you your actual dl size but larger textures will ofc usually take up more space.

Most of the time I just lower the resolution of textures on things, especially smaller bits of clothing/accessories

[vapid elm]

Anyone know if it's possible to get a pc only avi, then export it from unity back into blender and the edit it to make it quest compatible?

I've tried but everytime I do the avatars mesh is laying on the ground while the bones are standing up right..

[wind herald]

Don't "export" it from unity

Just import the fbx file from the project into blender

[vapid elm]

I've fixed the part of the avi and made the new fbx quest ready, but now I have the issue where I have the new fbx that's fixed. But don't know how to add/merge the new fbx with the old one in unity, or maybe I need to somehow add the animations onto the new fbx for upload.

the one on the left is the fbx that I changed, and the one on the left is the original

[vapid elm]

polys are in the meshes them self, so either delete some meshes in unity, or bring the fbx into blender and lower the amount on the avatar that way. Rn I'm trying to figure out the second way lol🥲

[wet spindle]

the cats blender plugin has a decimate panel for just that

blender

unity doesn't edit meshes i don't think

missing textures

or misplaced

[spring sun]

make it yourself

each bit of clothing is made differently in uv

[wind herald]

decimating is pretty bad if you want the mesh to be editable in the future

i recommend just selecting edge loops by holding alt while clicking on them, then dissolving edges

keeps uvs intact too, if you avoid uv seams

[velvet crow]

So I did some mesh edits in Blender, mainly to some shape keys. This included using "Blend from Shape" to overwrite the Basis on a few occasions. It appears that even though I have far fewer shape keys, the avatar uses about 3-4x more mesh memory than the base avatar I used.

I'm guessing that Blender is somehow accounting for every vertex in the blend shapes, causing the memory to skyrocket? Is there a way to optimize this?

[velvet crow]

Now that I've done literally nothing, the blendshapes are suddenly 6 MB instead of 34 MB, so I have no idea

[wind herald]

it could have something to do with blendshape normals

setting normals to calculate instead of import can increase mesh memory usage drastically

[velvet crow]

I see. Yeah I'm not sure what caused it but it seems fixed now.

[cold yarrow]

that's pretty much how shape keys work

definitely use import for blendshape normals too

[graceful condor]

where is bake

[cold yarrow]

is that in cats? baking is a process you can do with blender: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/baking.html

there's a great add-on called SimpleBake that simplifies this process, it's complex normally

[safe acorn]

I need help with an error im having when trying to upload an avatar its an error I get frequently on multiple avatars when trying to upload

[cold yarrow]

Post the error

[raw yoke]

is it possible to merge particle system meshes like you do for avatar meshes?

[cold yarrow]

that's not really a thing, no

[raw yoke]

i see, thank you!

im learning about particle effects rn and i tried out something on my own to see how it worked

something i noticed was that each particle effect uses up a material slot on the avatar despite having the same material. i asked about meshes because i know when the same material shows up twice on avatars it's because it's on different meshes

but it sounds like this is unavoidable with particle systems?

[cold yarrow]

yep, that's how it works

mesh object + material slot = draw call. Fewer is better.

[heady smelt]

If you have less blendshape, it should use less memory, not the contrary. unless you merged meshes together...

Separating things like head is recommended, vrchat rank perf won't be happy but who care, it will use less memory and blendshapes will take way less CPU ressources

[sturdy jay]

This is such a a stretch cause I don't think this is out there, but does anyone know of a script that will delete physbone components that arent tied to any skinned mesh render? Trying so hard to optimize and I set this one up with modular avatar and marshmallow PB

[heady smelt]

So I know that having a multitude of separate meshes is bad for performance, but so are high poly meshes with shapekeys. I know no matter what, the head should be separate. In my instance, I'm using a few accessories that have shapekeys and I don't know whether I should merge them and make shapekeys to toggle them off resulting in less total meshes, or keep them seperate to avoid making more shapekeys.

Basically my question is which is worse for optimization, more skinned meshes and less shapekeys or less skinned meshes and more shapekeys?

[normal nova]

To make manual easier, you can search 't:vrcphysbone' in the hierarchy

[sturdy jay]

Oh excellent, tysm!

[proper grail]

The whole high poly with shapekeys thing is fixed since vrchat upgraded to 2022, if a vert doesnt move it doesnt count anymore

I use cats separate mesh into shapekeys vs non shapekeys button to double check

[normal nova]

It's not so much 'fixed', like, the baseline cost of having shapekeys has been reduced (it used to double the skinning cost to have 1 shapekey active, versus none)

But it's still just generally expensive and scales with the mesh complexity

Separation still a good idea

[proper grail]

So we still call 30k the limit for shapekeyd meshes, darns

[normal nova]

Mmm, it's generally just... less is better, I don't know if there's a real cutoff

[buoyant holly]

out of curiosity are there any tools that could set the editor only tags of an object based off of build Target as I currently construct my avatar in a very modular matter so being able to just go okay skip all the extra knick-knacks on the quest build would be handy?

[quartz geode]

welp, that sucks, I am tryna optomize an avatar but I can't really optomize it without Cat's Blender Plugin, which seems to have been deleted by them for some strange reason

[tulip rose]

https://github.com/absolute-quantum/cats-blender-plugin ?

[quartz geode]

ok so that's open, need to download everything, but then from there, how do I import this into Blender

oh wia tI am in a newer version of blender, hang on

ok for some reason it gives me an error

to where it can't find the plugin for some reason

[zealous wigeon]

If below Blender 4.0 (and some of it still works in 4.0) then the hidden developer version in their discord works.

It is hidden there because the lead dev disappeared and they can't update CATS directly.

It is at the top of the faq channel, in a link to a hidden portion of the github.

[vapid elm]

Anyone have some ideas how I could optimize the eyebrows for quest shaders in unity?

[quartz geode]

I actually didn't see a hidden link of the github

ok so the stuff are located in the avatars section to where it shows the cats blender plugin on it's current version (0.19.0)

or wiat maybe I need to do this ability, god I am stupid

ok so I tried to extract the master folder out of the WinRAR version of it

no success

ok so I got the developement version (dev version)

[zealous wigeon]

#703190726447595581 message

And eh, they are probably fine with the link being shared around https://github.com/absolute-quantum/cats-blender-plugin/archive/refs/heads/development.zip

[zealous wigeon]

And you don't extract it, you just install it through blender, you just select the zip file when installing an addon.

[quartz geode]

I have that installed, but I don't see the icon that shows up that says CATS

[zealous wigeon]

Did you enable it after installing?

In the addon manager, right after you clicked install

[quartz geode]

yeah it said it was activated via the checkbox

[zealous wigeon]

So there just isn't an extra tab in the n menu? (no clue what it is, that is just its hotkey)

[quartz geode]

oh wait, I keep forgetting to press N

ok yeah it is activated. now I am trying to get the model imported via by the ZIP file

but uhh it fails for some reason

[zealous wigeon]

That has to be extracted and when importing you have to pick the right file format to import.

If it is a .blend file then it could be a newer version of blender that your current version cannot open, or it is just taking forever opening.

[raw yoke]

if i put polygons on the main body mesh, gave those polygons a transparent scrolling texture, and then used blendshapes or a bone to scale those polygons to 0% except when playing an animation, would that be better than using a particle system?

[quartz geode]

Ok so I got the model able to be imported into blender using FBX. However. the armature goes at a 90 degree angle and doesn't stay together with the model

let me show ya here:

then again, maybe I should've undid the prefab first before importing it

[zealous wigeon]

Yes, that is an annoying thing that happens in Blender when using models made from the Unity FBX exporter or Maya.

You could try to line up the mesh to the armature, but I have had a lot of issues when a model imports like this, never fully succeeded in fixing it.
Check that everything works (posing bones, blendshapes) before doing too much.

[quartz geode]

all the bones are functioning

ok so I tested it out, and it worked, but stuff were being weird

but what I didn't know is that my avatar had an optimized variant

[night inlet]

no, separation has no more benefit in terms of blendshape performance at all. also it was 10x slower not 2x slower in 2019 to have any blendshape active.

having many blendshapes active at once is still bad as each one is a compute call

and blendshapes that affect lots of verts are also bad

(all this info is for pc, I heard on quest stuff is still bad but you shouldn't have high poly meshes there to begin with)

[normal nova]

Maybe I'm misremembering, do you have benchmarks handy?

[night inlet]

https://gist.github.com/d4rkc0d3r/f77c1e96d4aeefd0d1eaf13fb096a2de (in that it was even worse than 10x from going 0 to 1 blendshape active in 2019)

but I also remember some other random tests here and there that I didn't write down and they were closer to 10x

[normal nova]

Sadly on Android the perf sticks closer to the 2019 data, from what I've been told

Their optimizations didn't apply to OpenGL ES

[night inlet]

yeah thats what I heard, it still uses the vertex shader for skinning

very sad

[normal nova]

There's no split test here for 2022?

[night inlet]

but also, quest avatars should be small to begin with and you get no choice if you want it good ranked either

[normal nova]

They are, but the tight GPU-ness of it makes that scale up anyway

We're doing some wider deeper profiling, but still collecting data on that

[night inlet]

didn't write them down. but they were slightly slower since it was seperate calls instead of doing one for everything

[normal nova]

ah

[night inlet]

the issue with the old method was that it did two unessesary copies of the vertex buffer as soon as a blendshape was active

and its no longer doing that with the compute shader approach to skinning

[normal nova]

We have a new system in testing which may totally change the reccomendations, but that may be a while

(though, quest-only)

[night inlet]

also the compute skinning made even base skinning significantly faster and in the test you can see that even with a blendshape active its still faster than 2019 with no blendshapes

[normal nova]

mhm

[vapid elm]

import the fbx straight from the unity file, don't export it from unity

[normal nova]

Would be worthwhile to figure out just how many active blendshapes you need to make the split worthwhile

[vapid elm]

and easy way to do so would be to right click on the fbx in unity, then its should give you an option to search fir the file location and then just copy the fbx a paste it into blender

[night inlet]

never? there is no extra overhead of a blendshape being in a big mesh now

[normal nova]

Your benchmarks say it's like 0.005ms/shape?

[night inlet]

yeah but like its gonna be like that on the split mesh too...

[vapid elm]

something like this

[normal nova]

But less so, it scales with the number of vertices

[night inlet]

no, it scales with the number of vertices affected by the blendshape

[normal nova]

Does it? At least in the past it was statically applied over the entire mesh

[night inlet]

the old one scaled with the number of total vertices cuz it did the two vertex buffer copies

[normal nova]

Regardless of active or not. Unity internally doesn't distinguish between active and inactive, unless it's a hidden implementation detail

...I guess I could just ask unity to be sure

[night inlet]

it does distinguish. the blendshapes are stored sparse on the gpu. each element stores which vertex it affects and the delta position, normal & tangent

gets applied by this compute shader: https://github.com/TwoTailsGames/Unity-Built-in-Shaders/blob/master/DefaultResources/Internal-BlendShape.compute

[normal nova]

ahhh good to know

[night inlet]

just for completeness. the old one also additionally scaled with affected vertices. it was just completely dwarfed by the really slow portion that scaled with total amount of verts

[dreamy scaffold]

I'm trying to atlas materals on a model wit cats and it keeps ending up all wacky,

The altas texture it creats after combining materials is just one giant image and a tiny white square, and everything appears to be atlased to the square

so the whole model just becomes white

[wind herald]

Just atlas manually, gives you more control too

[unborn basin]

so im trying to create a stupid simple avatar. Its a single billboarded plane with a texture applied, and im getting an error for avatar optimization. Anyone able to help?

sorry, but x-post from help, just realized this channel is probably where i should have posted...

[waxen estuary]

Anyone know a formula for calculating possible vram savings of say optimizing away a few textures inside of my atlas texture? This is because I noticed the parts of the textures that were used by the materials on my avatar which were actually a solid color so I could optimize them down to a simple RGB node in the material settings and then use the blender atlas texture plugin to put it as a 32 x 32 px section of the atlas texture instead 😅.

Atlas Texture (excluding head and eyes): 4k

• Parts of it that fall under this situation: 2,048 x 1,024 (possible 2,048 x 2,048)
• could possible further it down by forcing blender to emit a new smaller texture for the base and a few other mesh's that I clipped some of the mesh out that never displays to optimize the vram even further (on the body texture and possibly reduce that down to about 1k or so as well to make texture 2k and not 4k).

How much potential texture VRAM could I save in VRChat if I was to go with this change?

[dreamy hemlock]

I am not the brightest. The first error (on top) does not make sense, and the second one I know how to do. im just curious about the first one.

[spring sun]

You cant have transparency on quest

[dreamy hemlock]

Nope I lied, how do I optimize hair physbones? Like keep the back ones and remove the front one.

[spring sun]

Dont have so many bones affected by the physbone component

[spring sun]

The particle shaders, especially alpha blend, arent really supposed to be used on avatars

The other particle shaders just dont render at all for quest if its not on a particle system

[zealous wigeon]

Alpha Blended is meant to be used on worlds, yes, it is confusing.
Same applies to lightmapped, a shader meant strictly for worlds as it supports baking lighting.

They should be in a different folder, but they aren't.

[dreamy hemlock]

I was able to figure it out! ty!

[jovial valley]

how do i remove physbones

and or fix

[vapid elm]

Either go threw your armature and remove the Phys bones that way, or what I like to use is ( VrchatQuestTools ) witch you can get from git hub. It gives you an option to remove or select each phys bone and see all the Phys bones on your avi

[wind herald]

you don't have to go through it, just type vrcphysbone in the hierarchy search, and it will show all objects with phys bone components on them

[snow knot]

If you aren't downscaling the final atlas compared to the textures you're putting into it. The vram cost is the same. i.e a 2x2 atlas of four 1024 textures will be 2048x2048 and cost the same as those 4 textures. Atlasing is mostly done to combine materials into a single draw call.

If you're downscaling the final atlas to the next level your going from say a 2048 to 1024, which is the same size as the original textures so it's like you save three 1024 textures worth.

Note that you can still downscale textures w/out atlasing, you just don't get the reduced draw calls that atlasing provides.

[wind herald]

the main things influencing vram usage is texture resolution and texture format

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

[restive geyser]

Anyone run into an issue where you get an avi to Excellent rating on quest, upload for both PC and Quest to make a fallback, but then it tells you you can't use it as a fallback?

[restive geyser]

Exported as a package and imported it into 2019 and could set it as fallback. For anyone that has this issue too I guess idk.

[snow knot]

I had a similar issue when working on an avi that was always on 2019. Eventually just worked after uploading it at some point, not sure what I did to change it. Might've just needed to have been scanned server side *shrugs*

[jagged dagger]

did you ever

it finished at 27 minutes

[waxen estuary]

Well oof for me

I found a bug in the material combiner extension for blender.

[heavy knot]

calling sign to just start using baking instead

[waxen estuary]

but I am using on most of my model RGB color node materials

to cut down on texture size

😅

Basically have all the real details in normal/alpha/the other shader maps

[crisp shell]

I need to make space in my avatar contacts and remove some

what is the component called where are they stored?

what can i delete?

theres a lot of physics like necklaces on my avi and i dont need them how can i remove the contacts on it? thanks!

[radiant shadow]

if you ever wonder where components are on your avatar , check sdk build and [ select ] it will show all your avatar

[crisp shell]

ooh cool lemme try that thanks

[radiant shadow]

if you are missing it from list, you need to enable show all stats , for some reason i have 2 (thanks sdk)

[crisp shell]

thanks 🙏

[waxen estuary]

So like

is it a good idea to downsize face texture to 512 x 512 so my avatar would use a single 1k texture?

[wind herald]

yeah, this wastes a ton of space currently

all of those empty pixels are still being loaded into vram

although you might be able to move that purple texture to the top right

and then set the texture to 2048x1024

[waxen estuary]

yeah could if the material combiner blender extension actually allowed us to define placement of the actual materials it combines.

Which would afaik be absolutely nice.

[wind herald]

just move it around yourself

[waxen estuary]

or just move the head texture down to 512 x 512 so it brings the entire thing down to a 1k texture 😅.

it also from looks of it having head texture at 512 x 512 changes nothing on the quality in unity either.

[wind herald]

atlasing manually is pretty easy and gives you a lot more control anyway

[waxen estuary]

hmm true

I do have a goal for the new year though.

which is shortening the hair small enough where I can basically nuke all of it's specific bones

then weight paint it to the head bone

😅

Then I would have under 75 bones.

[cold yarrow]

yeah you can totally make your own UV map and then bake the textures into it. There's an add-on called SimpleBake which makes that really easy.

... wow I was scrolled.

anyway, still true

[wind herald]

i wouldn't bake the textures

just load up any image manipulation program and move the textures around accordingly

[cold yarrow]

ah with SimpleBake it's really easy to just use that

[wind herald]

hmm

baking does not always give perfect results though

especially if you have any intersecting faces

[cold yarrow]

yeah different than normal baking, but you're also right

[wind herald]

haven't used simplebake, maybe it doesn't do that

but it also costs money

[cold yarrow]

this is true

it saves so much time though

[wind herald]

i'd get it if it could bake ao maps without self occlusion

[cold yarrow]

not sure, I haven't tried that

[waxen estuary]

I would get simple bake if it was free 😂.

for now I have to deal with the combiner extension 💀.

[cold yarrow]

It's pretty cheap and well worth it for the time saved.

[urban field]

Does anyone have any cool particles they would be willing to give to me mainly effects like Dragon ball?

[cold yarrow]

there's a bunch of free packages in the Unity store

[urban field]

Alright

[sacred acorn]

i need help please

the avatar im making is 34 gigabytes and the textures are at the lowest quality settings

[wind herald]

34 megabytes and it might have something to do with it having over 300k polys on quest, which is pretty excessive even on pc, and especially on quest

you‘re gonna have to delete a bunch of clothes and other things off of your avatar

[final cove]

how do i make my skin meshes into one skin mesh?

[waxen estuary]

blender

select all the mesh except base then control + j in object mode.

And then select base last so they all merge into it.

[sacred acorn]

ok

[waxen estuary]

by not using them at all.

[sacred acorn]

i should have done that first ._.

[jagged dagger]

🤨

how do i get this smaller?

i cannot edit this

would like to reduce that

though not for the avatar rating as its very poor regardless

thats all options available

[heavy knot]

how big is the gif itself

[jagged dagger]

idk

[sacred acorn]

help

i lowered the poly count

[jagged dagger]

i cannot really do anything with that file format

also lol i just noticed, good i have an optimized version that is i guess

but still better than the average eboy/egirl you see in public lol

[heavy knot]

did you make the texture array yourself?

[jagged dagger]

no

[heavy knot]

if not that's gonna be tough

[jagged dagger]

its from an asset i bought

currently already rolling this stuff out to my public avatars

so if i can change that now its early enough to restart the rollout

[waxen estuary]

by not using any gifs

[jagged dagger]

What's that stupid reply lol

Stop saying people should just not use something

That's completely dumb

Rather say something that's useful in any way

I'm not going to stop using something i paid for

[waxen estuary]

what I mean is

see if you can get a non-gif version of each frame

and size them down as far as you can

[jagged dagger]

How would i do that

I cannot open or edit this file

[waxen estuary]

RIP

[jagged dagger]

.asset file extension

@waxen estuary sorry if i was a bit harsh for a bit there

[heavy knot]

would there be any way to contact the asset creator?

[jagged dagger]

That i can do

I already have contact

[heavy knot]

cause getting the source gif file itself will be what to do

can't reverse texture arrays currently

[jagged dagger]

Since vrchat partially broke the asset with their updates

Chairs and stuff yk

[waxen estuary]

I would ask the original creator if they can update it for you.

[paper zinc]

You can lower the resolution of it in its import settings or that dropdown in thry's tool

[jagged dagger]

that does not work

neither of both

trying to do that in thry throws an error

changing import settings... they simply dont exist

[paper zinc]

Then there's nothing you can do about it

Replace it with something that isn't a 39MB big flipbook, maybe

[jagged dagger]

i dont have anything else

my only option would be to ask creator

[paper zinc]

So find or make something

[jagged dagger]

othterwise im SOL

[jagged dagger]

i would simply not be able to recreate it like this

since i do not have the singular files to do that

its meant to look like the portals of the game

[paper zinc]

You can use something else though

[jagged dagger]

changing it breaks this

yeah but what, i dont have alternative files for this

[paper zinc]

Couldn't possibly tell you without seeing what you're after

[jagged dagger]

https://khailchips.gumroad.com/l/iabqr

[paper zinc]

You can recreate this with shader effects instead of a flipbook

[jagged dagger]

yes i know, but i dont know where i would get the required files for this

since i do not have any files i could use for this

[paper zinc]

Well the inside background can be made with the cloud effect in Photoshop

[jagged dagger]

i would be unable to recreate it to look like the original

[jagged dagger]

i dont have access to photoshop lol

[paper zinc]

The outer ring is just a glowy circle

And the particles are just a simple round gradient

[jagged dagger]

you can assume i do not have access or knowledge to any image editor or similar things

[paper zinc]

You have gimp

[jagged dagger]

no substance painter, no photoshop

yeah idk how to use gimp

[paper zinc]

Then use the flipbook I guess

[jagged dagger]

and every tutorial is like 10 years old

[paper zinc]

Leave it as is

[jagged dagger]

my only option is the creator

otherwise im simply unable to do anything about it

the asset itself is partially broke anyways thanks to vrchat

since a vrchat update broke it

[paper zinc]

The required textures are simple to create, the rest is configuring a material. Everybody starts somewhere, if you're willing to learn how to make stuff on your own you can get this sorted

[jagged dagger]

i would if the tutorials wouldnt be a decade old outdated

[paper zinc]

Those decade old tutorials probably still apply

[jagged dagger]

the ui looks different to that now

[paper zinc]

Filters and tools in image editing software don't have a tendency to move around much

[jagged dagger]

i couldnt even figure out how to change colors by selecting stuff with it

and tutorials never helped

cause it was simply different than in the tutorials

[paper zinc]

Well then use the flipbook

As an alternative I'm sure you can also find a gif or video of a portal from Portal, just like the creator of that asset did

[jagged dagger]

i can look for that, but until i find one ill be stuck with the flipbook

[shy charm]

What's the best way to make a bunch of accessories that can be toggled on and off? I saw a method someone used where they made them all one skinned mesh, and had painted them all to individual bones that were specifically used for this as opposed to using shape keys. Is this a good idea?

[weak crystal]

Hi, I am trying to decimate a model with shapekeys to make it perform better and I was able to use this method to split up the deformed shapekey so I can actually decimate the model: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/155930/cant-apply-modifiers-with-shapekeys-on-blender-2-8

However the issue is that I need to keep my vertice count consistent between the two models to re-merge them, and when I try to use decimate, applying the modifier leads to extra vertices being added in different amounts to each model. Ive been fiddling around with different ratios for a good while now and I can never seem to get the vertice count to line up, any advice?

I just managed to also fix said issue but that led to some absolutely horrible transforms lol

im just gonna give up and delete the shapekeys since I technically dont need them I dont think?

nvm, I figured it out!
For anyone stuck, dont use a modifier, instead, use the Decimate command in the Edit Mode

[waxen estuary]

When I changed hair and it caused the material combiner extension to mess up so it left me no choice but to manually bake the hair to resolve it 😅.

[wind herald]

I‘d suggest dissolving edge loops instead of decimating

[wind herald]

If you‘re on windows, use a shader that supports UV Tile or UDIM discard

Make a secondary UV map, then place parts of the model on separate UV tiles which can then be discarded at runtime

[alpine torrent]

heya, so im trying to optimize my avatar for both pc and quest, because for some reason, it has 12 material slots, but making an atlas... does this

everything seems to work but the face

[wary vessel]

Sorry ngl thought that was GeorgeNotFound's Minecraft avatar 😭

[alpine torrent]

its cool! its based mostly on a minecraft ava i made when i was little

[zealous wigeon]

Face seems to use cutout, the atlaser that most use doesn't support any alpha.
And you can't use cutout or practically any transparency on Quest (unless it is a particle).

To make the face work you will have to use the knife tool in Blender to cut out the face.

[alpine torrent]

luckily its a face mask so i can just delete the vertices

seems to be working swell so far

it did have lipsync and eye tracking but both seem.... like a lost cause

[sly forum]

How is any avi suppose to be quest optimized (5K polys) and still look good quality?

[wind herald]

10k is the recommended amount and 20k is the max for poor rating

you just have to use those polys efficiently

[green forum]

for me i just made it lower poly in a very undestructive way, and just unsudivided the more detailed parts. It doesn't look the best but its comes to about 5k tris and fits the artstyle!

any highly detailed models such as humans or whatnot will just have to suffice with either being mobile game quality or just not quest compatible, which you could always have a custom fallback for!

textures will also help a lot with keeping poly counts low, a simple normal map can give so much detail into an otherwise flat model.

if you take this more detail freddy model i've made recently, the suit alone is around 50k tris, I made a lower poly version that is nearly half of that. While it wouldn't be able to go to quest its still a good optimization. the textures also look nearly identical if you don't pay attention to the warped uvs from me being lazy with the optimization

there are a lot of factors that go into model optimization for games in general, and you learn to take shortcuts wherever needed the more 3d modelling you do

[jagged elk]

How can I make a fallback avatar?

[willow wave]

Fallbacks require an avatar performance of good or better for both platforms. Once uploaded to both platforms, your SDK will then have the option to set as fallback.

[upper yacht]

That's... like the amount of polys games released 10-14 years ago had on a lot of things. So, you can make things look good. (This is roughly the graphical quality that high quality mobile games have currently)

[wind herald]

games which in most cases weren't vr and didn't let you get up close to the models :P

[ivory sluice]

They're not supposed to be good quality looking in mobile anyways, just need to look like the avatar so quest users know what they are seeing

[upper yacht]

A model can still look good with ~5k polys up close. Bioshock 2 comes in mind. The budget for most models in that game is around that point. You can see it has aged... but, the game is 14 years old. Of course. Most of the time, the thing that does carry the weight of these old games are shaders and textures. The former we can't do custom ones and the existing ones are not applicable to a lot of scenarios. As for the latter, well, not a lot of people doing quest avis are 3d artists.

Besides, for being pretty up close that's mostly a shader and texture thing. As long as the shape is still cohesive enough.

[spring sun]

Smooth lighting

[buoyant holly]

some example of games with about 5,000 triangles for the characters https://middleofnowheregaming.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/kh2-sora-donald-goofy.jpg

https://artasgames.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/h4.jpg

https://www.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/123/1239113/3095466-mgs.jpg

[warm falcon]

what's the best version of Blender to be using for VRC?

[heavy knot]

Latest if you can, though if you want to use the CATS blender plugin the best supported version would be the 3.6 LTS

[warm falcon]

okay cool

[wind herald]

cats is pretty obsolete nowadays

[heavy knot]

I do use it for it's smaller features sometimes

[radiant shadow]

oh yeah cause we all do visemes manually 🔨 every time i see 'its absolete'

[waxen estuary]

Honestly the only thing I use cats for is when I need to make a flat foot sock for a healed foot, then I use the pose mode in cats to apply as rest pose on the socks then change the armature to the real one so I can then sculpt the socks (if needed) to fit in the shoes as well if the socks end up being too big.

[warm falcon]

Okay so I made an optimized model, only problem is I accidentally made an empty atlas material. Is there a way to make my own atlas? (I atlased the Dress and Horns) I do have photoshop 2020

also really proud of this since i'm blender newbie

[wind herald]

never said it has no use at all, the vast majority of people will never make visemes from scratch though

[radiant shadow]

Thats what obsolete mean - no longer used or needed , i didnt even say its no use at all - thats you

its just a tool thats for shortcuts, after awhile you end up using blender shortcut - but im rarely ever doing visemes manually when i can just make 3 and have it do the rest

[heady smelt]

whats the best way to combine skinned meshes for vrc avatars in unity

[cold yarrow]

in Unity? not sure you can. I do it in Blender.

[sick timber]

I mean theoretically you can but… no.

[waxen estuary]

I love how the top part is 4.7k tris alone 😅.

[wind herald]

[spring sun]

Polytool can do it but you require a texture for everything and cant use colored materials other than straight up white because it wont transfer when it atlas the meshes for you

[zealous wigeon]

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer can do it, you just have barely any control over it.

[heady smelt]

eh i just did them in blender

the cats plug in does it too

[waxen estuary]

that available under vcc now?

[waxen estuary]

cats has been doing a bad job on most avatars I work with

only thing that works well is apply as rest pose when fitting a flat foot sock to a HEALED foot.

So then I can easier sculpt the sock to the base then.

[robust helm]

yup

[tranquil plover]

Anyone know of a good tutorial for deleting avatar toggles? I can only find info on how to add them, but wanna optimize my avatar a bit.

[zealous wigeon]

Delete the things that are being toggled, easiest, just remove the mesh, if possible.

[tranquil plover]

Problem is I want to keep the parts that are being toggled, they are part of body.

[zealous wigeon]

Is it a material swap toggle then?

[tranquil plover]

oh, no, it enabled me to toggle off some detail parts, but I always had it enabled, so wanted to remove toggles. Someone just helped me through it. Thanks for taking your time to help as well.

[waxen estuary]

Wait there are material swap toggles that swap the materials and not the mesh itself?

[onyx harness]

yeah, you can animate *what material is assigned to a mesh

[wind herald]

please don't tell me you've been adding duplicates of meshes xD

you can also animate material properties such as emission strength, audiolink, decals etc

[waxen estuary]

not at all, only a normal and quest version of the same materials.

[wind herald]

okay, thank god lol

i've seen an avatar with duplicate clothes with different materials on them 💀

[whole cradle]

I have an Avi very close to being quest compatible I just dont know how to...

And I want it to be the counterpart to my main version.

If I open unity with it it has 2 in there. Very Poor and good optimized

How can I make the good optimized the quest version to my very Poor.

[waxen estuary]

honestly for me I actually use the quest version of my avatar to be opportunity to optimize my pc version for people with lower end/AMD PC's too.

(like AMD hardware as it seems AMD no matter what it is is mostly trash and has problems in vrchat)

[whole cradle]

I never had probs with VRchat and I have AMD CPU.

Used to be fully AMD build never had issues.

I don't know how to make my Very poor Avi quest compatible....

[waxen estuary]

mine is an AMD APU with ~512 (0.5 GB) MB VRAM, the graphics driver sucks and most of the time crashes itself saying a timing issue in the driver itself.

[whole cradle]

So I was gonna use the Optimized one make it quest compatible and upload it to my PC avatar so it's PC/Quest.

[whole cradle]

Ryzen 5 3600 6 Core 12 Threads 4.2Ghz.

Currently running 3.95Ghz tho.

[waxen estuary]

Ryzen 7 5825U here

[whole cradle]

RTX 2060 here.

Anyway, idk how to do it.

[waxen estuary]

yes I use the same project and fbx file for PC and quest on my avatar currently.

[whole cradle]

So like... My friend says it doesn't work.

If I import the unity package there is "very Poor" and "good optimized" and they are standing next to each other.

[waxen estuary]

interesting

[whole cradle]

I wanna use the Optimized version as the quest one cuz it's pretty close it's like 13MB so it would still need optimization.

[waxen estuary]

Some people also have separate prefabs for PC and quest and somehow hide the part of the scene for the PC version when building for quest, and likewise for PC.

[whole cradle]

Idk how to do it anyway...

So I was just curious

I'll never be able to.

[waxen estuary]

As to how, idk if there is a way to rig it up to automatically do that upon build configuration change from Windows to Android for quest

[whole cradle]

Might have to pay someone.

[lavish leaf]

@whole cradle send me a dm I can fix that

[whole cradle]

I cant afford that atm. ;-; Im trying to get the version of the avi that i have wich is 2 Versions once i put them into unity i can show you. One is the like "Good Optimized" one and one is the "Very Poor" one and i wanna try to get the "Good Optimized" one as the Quest for my "Very Poor" and i dont know if that is even possible.

[lavish leaf]

Okay, I get it. That you do not currently have the funds for paid software is understandable Additionally, I would be pleased to examine your current Unity avatars and offer you optimization tips. Do you mean that you have a PC version and a Quest version when you say that you have two versions of your avatar? Or are they both PC versions with varying optimization levels? 😊

[whole cradle]

Both pc, the opti version is just pretty close bc it's like 14mb or so.

[lavish leaf]

Okay

[whole cradle]

Imma put them in unity one sec.

Its taking a bit.

[sonic salmon]

how would i remove particle effect toggles without breaking the link to pc and quest

[whole cradle]

My pc struggles a bit with unity.

@lavish leafLeft PC Very poor Right PC Good.

So i was wondering if the Optimized one can be made more towards quest and compatible, and then be uploaded to the PC one on the left so the quest sees the right one and the PC sees the left one. Yk what i mean?

[buoyant holly]

yeah that's completely doable

[whole cradle]

How?

[buoyant holly]

you use the same build ID on the optimized version for Quest and the PC version

[whole cradle]

I just don't know how to make it quest compatible.

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MkgXcidxg4

https://youtu.be/rRAnDMUbWt8?si=YgKjlWpyF29OBzsM&t=645

[whole cradle]

I know Joe to upload

[buoyant holly]

then the first video would be more helpful for you

[whole cradle]

Oh well.

[buoyant holly]

it would describe doing different models for each platform

[whole cradle]

I've looked at it but it is quite complicated.

[buoyant holly]

question do you need to generate the quest Avatar or just get it to attach to your PC avatars build ID

[whole cradle]

No I have to like upload them so my pc avatar is also a quest Avi.

So I think the second options.

[buoyant holly]

you just copy the component from the PC Avatar that says build ID and paste it into the quest Avatar and upload it and it should be attached to the PC Avatar as a cross-compatible avatar

[whole cradle]

So I use the Avi ID from the already uploaded pc Avi and then put that ID in the quest one.

[buoyant holly]

yes

[whole cradle]

I see.

[buoyant holly]

that's all you need to do to make a cross-compatible avatar that uses two different models

[whole cradle]

I now have to just make it quest I guess.

Mhmhhm

Maybe switching the shader is already enough?

Cuz it's already pretty light

[buoyant holly]

would be worth a try to see what it says

[whole cradle]

Well I can switch to android and show what the VRC sdk says right?

[buoyant holly]

yes

[whole cradle]

Alright will do that in a few minutes.

[sonic salmon]

how would i remove particle effect toggles without breaking the link to pc and quest

[buoyant holly]

the build id what determines if they're connected so removing the particles shouldn't break that?

like just leave the toggle itself in your animation controller just remove the particles

[sonic salmon]

okay

ive just removed things and none of my toggles showed at all for quest

[whole cradle]

@buoyant holly

[buoyant holly]

yeah that Avatar definitely needs optimizing to be a quest Avatar

[whole cradle]

Ys ik that but i dont know how to do any of this...

[buoyant holly]

then most people would just see your imposter unless people manually turn on that Quest Avatar

[buoyant holly]

the first video I showed how to do that

[whole cradle]

I will do it later im not really in the mood for fixing or stuff like that in -6°C Room temp.

Thank you for the help tho.

[buoyant holly]

glad to be of help hope it goes well

[sick yew]

(I haven't tried it, but it probably doesn't work with d4rk AO)
https://booth.pm/ja/items/5409262
This tool that allows you to incorporate the "Mantis lod editor" into your avatar build in a non-destructive way.
(NDMF editor extension required)

[opaque mesa]

Recently picked up a model from booth that has good topology (a little overboard on smaller details) but ended up just over 70k polygons on its own. Any way I can reduce this? It feels awkward that a model barely over 70k polygons is automatically very poor.

[buoyant holly]

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

[waxen estuary]

oh my, it does not produce holes and destroy meshes right?

[buoyant holly]

I would point out it requires a 50.00 Unity asset to work https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/mantis-lod-editor-professional-edition-37086

[waxen estuary]

what

[waxen estuary]

I really wish they made a blender version of that tool.

[buoyant holly]

then that wouldn't be the same tool as that wouldn't be a non-destructive workflow

[waxen estuary]

I know of a few specific mesh parts before I merge my meshes together on the unity side that needs to be made lower poly

[robust helm]

Can you send me a link to this in my dm's? I deadass cant find it on booth

[smoky willow]

I only have a quest 2

[buoyant holly]

https://booth.pm/ja/items/5409262

[sick yew]

This asset uses very good LOD generation, but there is a possibility of holes. (Although, I once used the free version of this LOD editor to cheat the polygon count when the maximum polygon count was low in the SDK2 era, and it was useful)

The mesh is not destroyed, because when you go into play mode, it is generated in a separate file at avatar build time, and when they are done, it reverts back to the original mesh. (You can manual bake if you want, but even that is a separate file)

If you use VRCFury or D4rk AO, you should have some idea of how it works.

This is a tool to make Unity plug-ins work with NDMF, so it would be difficult to make them work with Blender.

[waxen estuary]

I discovered that my base and the gloves I cut from it are using a lot of needless edge loops.

I think dissolving those can help.

[waxen estuary]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/avatar-30/p/i-would-like-to-be-able-to-set-a-fallback-in-vrchat-for-avatars-that-meet-the-av I commented on this.

[wind herald]

is this optiloops?

[waxen estuary]

yes

I patched it to work in blender 3.6 mostly

just the bevel and crease does not work though.

managed to bring my avatar down to just under 32k using that extension though.

[vapid elm]

anyone know why the eyebrow might be looking like this in unity?. in blender I re did the mesh for the eyebrows, but for some reason the one on teh left got broken and Idk why?

I thought maybe a weight paint issue but it wasn't, so idk what could be causing this

[radiant shadow]

used knife tool to cut eyebrows?, if you make new vertices they have zero weightpaint

[vapid elm]

I used knife tool on both but for some reason the left one is broken

🥲

Imma just redo it and hope it fixes it self lol

😭

why must I be tortured this way

[vapid elm]

should I just make new one's from scratch?

actually, I just answered my issue

nvm lol, gonna just make new eyebrows from scratch lol

[jovial heron]

does the crunch compression option worth to enable? since it doesn't reduce vram usage and the textures are LZMA compressed in assetbunde anyways

[radiant shadow]

only filesize, pc its useless

[vivid night]

You probably cut the eye brows and stopped the cut in the middle instead of going all the way into the edges which screws with blend shapes

[waxen estuary]

the best compression is to use 1k textures or less and have at least 1 or 2 atlas textures total as a sum of all the smaller textures used (or bigger ones sized down small enough without too much quality loss).

My Avatar for example performs very well with a single 1k texture used for both PC and Quest and I did a few tricks to do such an optimization 😅

[heady smelt]

I need to delete some parameters but idk where they are

[waxen estuary]

Avatar 3.0 Manager will help you with that.

[cold yarrow]

in the avatar descriptor nearish the bottom, under the animator layers, there's a spot where the menu and parameters get plugged in, you can click on them

[hardy hound]

thats a feature built into blender... called decimation

[manic depot]

Decimation can be destructive

I usually just seperate parts you won't notice and decimate them some and then on more noticable bits I just manually dissolve verts where it doesn't matter.

[wind herald]

decimation is destructive

i try to avoid it lol

[tulip rose]

Decimation destroys mesh, but is quick.
Retopo Takes forever, but is better mesh.

[ivory sluice]

i recommend to use unsubdivide (it's on the decimate modifier) if the mesh has a good topology, else dissolve edge loops manually
decimation works for static irregular surfaces

also you can slide vertices (double click G) to fix the topology and use the methods in the image to keep quads when reducing polygons on one side, doesn't require retopology

[languid brook]

How can I have multiple hue shifts for separate parts of my avatar on the same skinned mesh renderer? whenever I shift the hue for my hair it also affects my shoes even tho I made them separately :/

[languid brook]

Yeah I am stuck on this since hours lol

Not even sure if that is possible to do, but it's kinda weird that I don't find any information anywhere about this, as if nobody tried it before

[paper zinc]

using poiyomi, set your hue shifts as animated (renamed), then lock the materials and redo your animations

[paper zinc]

^

I'm not sure if any other shader can do it. animations control properties on a mesh renderer, and multiple materials will just have the same properties. poiyomi works around this by renaming the properties on a material basis when you enable the renamed option

[languid brook]

Sorry I'm still a newbie when it comes to Unity x) What is animated (renamed)? And I thought locking a material doesn't matter since this is a thing

And yeah I am using Poiyomi

[paper zinc]

lower option, renamed when locked

it should put a little green RA where the A is next to hue shift

[languid brook]

Okay I will try to figure this out, this is already a big help knowing it is possible

[paper zinc]

I mean that's literally all you have to do, there's nothing else to figure out

you just have to lock your materials for it to work

[languid brook]

Alright thank you so much, I hope I get it xD

[sonic salmon]

whats the best way to lower my quest file size

[languid brook]

sorry to bother more, but for some reason it only works for the hair. I have enabled RA on the hue shift slider on both materials (shoes & hair) and then locked them. Now I created a new animation clip for the hair and another clip for the shoes. Only the hair animation works when I test it, when I try to change the hue for the shoes nothing happens. Would you know what I did wrong?

[paper zinc]

Lower texture resolutions

[paper zinc]

Most likely something in your animator gone wrong

[languid brook]

omg I got it finally working!! thank you so much again

[paper zinc]

[valid verge]

guys, should I use solidify on t-shirt? or it is best for unity and vrchat when it is just a plane? speaking baggy and not skintight t-shirt

[ivory sluice]

Select the loops on the holes, fill them, poke faces, select the vert in the center, shrink them
That's how i do it to not have to solidify them

[valid verge]

gotcha, thanks!

[ripe shore]

So is Unity uploading severy single texture I have in my project instead've just the ones I'm using?

I can't possibly wrap my head around why my VRAM usage is reported as 130 MB, I've gone through every material used and the textures are all like ~2-3MB max with most being lower

I also have some marked as editor only that seem to be getting accounted into my totals too for the preview at least, can't imagine those would show up ingame but idk

[wind herald]

no, only the textures used on your avatar

[wind herald]

you're confusing the compressed size and the vram usage of your textures

[ripe shore]

ahhh yup that would make sense, whoops

[wind herald]

to check the vram usage of your avatar, use https://vpm.thry.dev/

you should remain below 75mb if possible

[ripe shore]

hah, just installed that about 30 seconds ago :p

found the culprits, I'm blind

I also need to atlas some of these textures 😅

[wind herald]

look at your textures from around 1m away, and reduce the resolution until you can notice a difference

[ripe shore]

also just figured out I had some large textures that were still referenced by my shader config but had that section disabled

[wind herald]

ahh yeah

[ripe shore]

beautiful, down to 30 MB now

[wind herald]

nice c:

[thorny shell]

wow, thanks for the tip on the thry tool. Just took mine down from 97meg to 30meg too!

[cold yarrow]

It's such a great tool

[pastel prawn]

how do i lower this??

[robust helm]

I think pumpkins avatar tools has a solution for this

[pastel prawn]

do you have a link for it?

ill have to figure out how to fix it

[robust helm]

https://github.com/rurre/PumkinsAvatarTools
You add it via VCC

[pastel prawn]

uhh

im mad confused already

[robust helm]

Where are you confused? I'm not super knowledge but I can do my best

[waxen estuary]

and polygon count

[waxen estuary]

I wish the atlas tool did not need alpha on my atlas then I could reduce that by 50% on the 1k texture alone just by going DXT5 -> DXT1

[paper zinc]

Do it anyway? Surely you don't run the atlas tool on every build

[waxen estuary]

I run atlas every time in blender actually before I export to as an "Unity FBX".

[paper zinc]

so why do you need DXT5 in Unity for that thing's sake

[waxen estuary]

I don't well once I figure out the partially transparent eyebrows and eyelashes.

If all else fails I might need to look into ways of remaking them myself on the flat face texture and calling it a day.

And then use DXT1

😅

[paper zinc]

eyebrows you can paint or bake onto the face directly, will have to redo blendshapes and maybe add some geometry to the face to take care of them, eyelashes you could mesh out too. alternatively, split the base colour and alpha so you can use DXT1 for the base colour and lower res R BC4 for the alpha map

[waxen estuary]

true, except it seems quest shaders for the quest version lack the ability for alpha map 😅.

[paper zinc]

on Quest you... can't use transparency anyway, so time to mesh it out

[spark cloak]

anyone know how to do this?

[cold yarrow]

Atlas material, re-assign to the atlased material in Blender

[spark cloak]

thankyou

[tribal glade]

Does anyone know anything about a skinned mesh combiner for Unity by chance? A model I have has a scuffed FBX compared to the prefab counterpart, and just trying to optimized it by combining the meshes (along with trying to keep the animations).

[robust helm]

https://booth.pm/ja/items/4664467

I've used this one, it's easy to reverse and it works pretty okay.

[tribal glade]

I'll give this a try! Thank you!

[robust helm]

Hell yeah, I found it randomly yesterday

[tribal glade]

Thank you so much! It does indeed work and so much work has been saved as a result! Such a coincidence for you to find it yesterday!

[modest oyster]

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer one-ups the other tools by automatically combining meshes where possible (not animated on different toggles) in a non-destructive way on upload only, or you can make a permanent copy

[elder laurel]

do I remake my avatar with this, importing a few things? Or can I add it to an existing avatar project?

[elder laurel]

is there a way I can replace the rigidbodies in this with something more optimized? I'm fairly new to avatar optimization.

[wind herald]

Physbones and physbone colliders

What exactly are you trying to do with them?

[elder laurel]

on mine? They came with the avatar. I think though, that it might be something to hold a handheld flashlight, so I'm gonna see if I can just straight-up get rid of them.

[fossil bane]

can someone answer me and please help me

[raw oar]

just by curiosity, how does an avatar go from being multi-platform, to pc only

what are the limits of quest-compatible avis

[spring sun]

technically speaking
the pc build and quest build are completely separate builds with the same avatar id to tell the game to load that avatar on the platform it was uploaded to

[raw oar]

wait so what im understanding from this is that I need to upload my avatar twice, one for pc and one for quest?

[spring sun]

yes

[raw oar]

i see

[spring sun]

one on pc build and one on android build as the quest side is just android

[raw oar]

alr

but what ab the limits tho

of quest avis

ik theres a polygon requirement, but is there a polygon limit?

[radiant shadow]

<10k for fallback

I just look at that mostly, its in documents somewhere

likely changed somewhat, its not up to date

[heavy knot]

https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-performance-ranking-system#android-limits

[radiant shadow]

wish they nuked very poor already on quest

[raw oar]

LMAO i was ab to say sum ab that too

[radiant shadow]

they can behave like crashers easy

[raw oar]

yes but cant crashers have only poor rated avatars

[heavy knot]

Performance rank isn’t a good indicator for a crasher

[raw oar]

thats what im saying

[heavy knot]

Shaders aren’t calculated

[raw oar]

weird

im kinda surprised about the bone limit lol

actually now that i think about it nvm-

[copper verge]

:)

[spring sun]

How do you have only 43 renderers but over 200 materials

[vivid night]

Glad everyone's avis are blocked unless I show them now

[copper verge]

Particle systems I think

[plucky warren]

💀

[buoyant holly]

potentially material swapping

[alpine talon]

Hey guys, I'm trying to optimize this Avi for quest, and one of the things suggested to me was to "simplify the hair bones" in this picture. How exactly do I do that...?

[wind herald]

Bundle them together and/or reduce them to only two bones per chain

[heady smelt]

Just had to ask, but does the compression quality affect performance, or just the speed it compresses the texture in unity?

[zealous wigeon]

Compression quality affects the format Unity chooses in the end, high quality adds an alpha channel which can increase actual texture size quite a bit.

If you want better control then go into the second tab and you can choose a specific format for PC and the fourth tab is for Android.