avatar-optimization

[heady smelt]

All the years I've spent in unity I never knew you could have seperate settings on PC and ANDROID

Do you have a reccomendation on which format to use?

[zealous wigeon]

Since VRChat now wants you to use ASTC for Android, it is quite useful to know.

[zealous wigeon]

I am not great with this, ASTC is what you should use on Quest at least, 12x12 is the smallest size one.

For PC I am very unsure, BC7 is what I think high quality compression is. DXT1 I have used at times when I don't need an alpha channel, not sure if it was the default one though.

[heady smelt]

Sure thing, I'll play around with them. Thanks for the help!

[copper verge]

Well over 17 materials swap animations on several renderers

[vapid elm]

Anyone know a good method for optimizing an avi's mesh and material count?, I've tried both way's I could think of. One being having toggles set as separate mesh and having the materials all joined into one but the issue with doing it that way is the texture overall doesn't look to good and obvisually the mesh count is really high. I then tried doing it the other way around by joining all the meshes into one and making a material for each part and toggling it using an invisible material, and yes the texture overall looks better but now there's the issue of there being a lot of materials, So I was just wondering if there's a method were I can have the benefit's of both worlds, and if not, which one is better to do so in the terms of optimization

sorry for the long paragraph😅

[ruby isle]

Make different copies of your avatar with different outfits/toggles to cut down on them overall. Avatars don't need a ton of toggles in one

[floral mica]

look into uv tile discarding

[vapid bluff]

for mesh optimization youd either have to look into

• retopoing manually or with an addone like remesher
• dissolving unnecessary loops/topology
• minimizing to only necessary blendshapes on the mesh

for materials look into and practice

• merging meshes together
• getting used to UV discard workflow
• using multiple UV sets
• Editing UV islands/unwrapping
• Using RGBA packed texture masks for RGBA color masking & global masks
• Using vertex colors
• downscaling texture resolutions
• lowering bit depth of non gradient black and white masks
• use 2048 high quality as opposed to any 4096 normal quality
• get rid of any unnecessary textures such as heightmaps, things like that

its very doable, u just have to make a solid plan and stick to it

[vapid elm]

is that possible for quest?, Ik how to do it for pc but idk the method to do it for quest since poi toon shaders don't work on the android upload unless I preform a forced upload, but then it's extremally un optimized lol

[zealous wigeon]

It isn't possible to do, firstly because none of the Quest shaders are all that fancy feature wise and because you aren't allowed to use custom shaders on Quest and sidestepping that would very likely break the ToS, since you would likely need to do SDK modifications.

[vapid elm]

so what I'm hearing is it's impossible to make an avi with around 10 or 16 toggles that works for both pc and quest, and falls under the perfect rating

my dreams have been crushed

I wonder if maybe I could just create a toggle method for the uv's using a custom script for the quest side...

my pea brain Is gonna go try even tho I doubt it will work lol

[raw oar]

you know, i cant really tell whats wrong with my avatar. The polygons doesnt seem THAT bad riiiight..?

[vapid elm]

bruh

[raw oar]

lmao i dont understand, does it think im uploading EVERYTHING in my folder???

my avatar is barely 20000 polys

[vapid elm]

how does your pc even let you run that unity project without lagging?

[raw oar]

cuz my model isnt actually 200 million polys lmfao

its 20000

[vapid elm]

I was about to say like, GOD DAAAMN

lol

[raw oar]

idk whats happening or why is it thinking that its 10000 times the amount of polys

ye i think its cuz it wants to upload ALL of my models stored in my folder

[buoyant holly]

I suggest checking for Auto fixing messages and clicking Auto fixing all those

as I know there's some sort of checkbox setting that makes it spit out that ridiculous number

[vapid elm]

have you tried running it threw a test upload with like build size viewer?

[raw oar]

ahhh, so much better

[vapid elm]

will show you how much the avi size would be in game

pog

[raw oar]

still 3 times taller than normal tho lol

[vapid elm]

would be something you'd need to change in blender, or maybe if you set the height just a little to tall in unity just lower it down and make em smaller

other than that it looks very solid for an optimized avi

[raw oar]

ye apparently

im not done, BUT almost

just need toggles for the axes and tendrils

[vapid elm]

ok that makes more sense for the height lol

[raw oar]

lol

[vapid elm]

tis a small sacrifice in the name of being built like a unit

[heady smelt]

is it better to assemble my avatar with all the clothing I want and then optimize it in blender? or is it better to optimize each piece of clothing separately then build the avatar

[vapid elm]

id say do it separate, then combine the mesh after done optimizing

[heady smelt]

ok thanks
also is there like an addon to blender that can make it easier to attach clothing with premade armature? I'm working with stuff from booth and wondered if that exists (cause i know there's stuff for unity)

[vapid elm]

it also help's to know which mesh isn't very optimized when it's separate

[heady smelt]

true

[vapid elm]

can use the cat's plugin

[heady smelt]

ok thanks

[buoyant holly]

VRCFury could also be used in unity for combining the armatures which would make the workflow a little bit more non-destructive

https://vrcfury.com/components/armature-link

[floral mica]

you would have to do blendshape toggles then

quest limits are insanely tight

blendshape toggles are not too bad anymore since we're on 2022

[gray citrus]

Thinking about learning sculpting and just wanting to know how expensive is a baked normal map usually? And can it create performance issues?

[tulip rose]

Once you bake something in 3d, it gets reduced to a single texture. Normal maps are almost free extra detail. Best to export at a large size and shrink down in unity to a normal amount of vram useage.

[raw yoke]

what method is recommended for combining multiple materials into one atlas?

cats doesnt seem to handle normals/specularity/emission. ive heard the addon principled baker get recommended, but when it try to install it gives me errors for not using version 2.7. should i downgrade? is there another tool for this?

[cold yarrow]

There's a bunch - you could manually do it, you could do a bake in Blender or with various add-ons to help, you could just setup your UVs and make a combined material from scratch

You can also use the development version of cats with Blender 3.x if you prefer to go that way

[raw yoke]

what addons are available to do that?

id prefer to avoid doing it manually since ive just had a nightmarish experience with manual texture atlasing and all having to mash together all the various maps and masks

[cold yarrow]

I've used SimpleBake a whole lot, it generally works for this to but normal baking can sometimes be an advanced thing

[raw yoke]

thank you for the recommendation

[drifting turtle]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnmYM3vkYBk
This vid helped me a lot, it uses simplebake

[raw yoke]

oh awesome!

[vital hound]

how fix ?

[heady smelt]

Any ideas why Blender really want's to make my Atlas an all black texture?

[zealous wigeon]

Are you using a standard "shader" (forgot what Blender calls them, might be shader)?
And the atlaser takes the images from their locations, it cannot handle textures that it doesn't know where to find, so if it is this then just reselect the textures (from the file explorer that is) in each material.

[vapid bluff]

make sure ur UVmaps are all named the same before atlasing

some atlasers can have issues if its not

[heady smelt]

Thanks for the advice, I gotta look into it. It's a old ass ps1 model with like, 32 materials ; _ ;

[jade light]

How do i add a blendshape toggle?

[willow wave]

Same as mesh toggles, just animate the blendshape instead of the mesh.

[vapid elm]

anyone have some tips on what might be the best option to pick for quest?

I'm just stumped on which format I should use lol

cause like

DAMN

[wind herald]

I think either of these?

[zealous wigeon]

The recommended is ASTC, the higher the block size (12x12) the less size it takes up, which of course sacrifices quality, but not as badly as I expected it to, so play around with it.

Not sure if you can test how it looks inside of the Unity editor, at least I haven't played around enough to know if you can.

[wind herald]

I might be wrong, but I believe unity shows the texture for your current build target

And yeah, higher block sizes are more efficient as ASTC always uses 16 bytes per block

[zealous wigeon]

That would make sense, should play around more with the setting then, I didn't notice any difference at all playing setting different ASTC block sizes.

[radiant shadow]

You can get vram checker and set format type there easier , 4k works easy on a quest av unless you need excellent rating (this is one of mine)

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

[wind herald]

those are not formats supported on quest though

[radiant shadow]

uh i just uploaded it, so yes

[wind herald]

sdk enforces ASTC for android

check these Android settings on your texture

[radiant shadow]

see it sets it

This isnt something new for me, done it since quest builds were out

[radiant shadow]

want more

[wind herald]

oh, i misunderstood

the default should be ASTC

but ASTC is not enforced

my bad lol

while astc looks a little worse when you use 12x12, it uses just around a quarter of the vram that dxt1 does

8x8 seems to have the same visual quality as dxt1

6x6 is better and also still has lower vram usage

6x6

8x8

[radiant shadow]

all my quest avs are good+ rated 🔨 under 10k poly im never on quest mode so its just fallbacks anyway

textures are baked so they are very packed into a 4k

[raw yoke]

do meshes in deactived game objects use draw calls?

[cold yarrow]

no

[fiery chasm]

I used the decimate --> un-subdivide modifier because the original asset was WAYYYY too large (talking like 2 million polys). I'm at 600k right now but any further makes it look terrible. It also created these seams in the mesh. Is there any way I can salvage this? I have no way to go backwards since I applied the modifier a long time ago

I'm just trying to make the poly count really low, but anything I try either crashes blender or takes forever to load because of how many polys it has

[worthy sigil]

I made great experience with quad remesher. Alternatively, remesh by hand but yeah its insanely dense.

[wind herald]

Quad remesher is magic

[fiery chasm]

I'll look into that. I ended up using MeshLab

[vagrant skiff]

Hi

[warm bolt]

For my avatar I’m use to import the .Unitypackage and all the rigging, blendshapes, physbones, ect… are all setup, then I just apply a new texture from substance painter and add some clothes with VRCFury.

But now I’m trying to figure out how to optimize the mesh for a lower poly count.
If I edit the mesh and import the new fbx file am I going to need to manually setup the entire rig, controlls, ect… or can I transfer those over?

[radiant shadow]

overwrite one in scene, long as you didnt unpack

[warm bolt]

I think I may have unpacked but I should be able to make a new packed prefab.

[cold yarrow]

Just use Pumkin's tools to copy to a new unpacked one. And then don't unpack it 🙂

[alpine talon]

Anyone familiar with VRC Quest tools? I'm trying to convert this avatar to Quest, but the convert button is greyed out. I don't know how to deal with the specific problems mentioned above, like the multiple physbones in a single game object.

Like, it's telling me to change the shaders but I don't know how?

[warm bolt]

Someone just told me about those told today too. Never heard of them before.

[alpine talon]

I figured things out nvm

[raw oar]

2 million is nothing compared to what i went throught lmao

[fiery chasm]

what in the....

[raw oar]

2 billion polys lmao

[fiery chasm]

i think you have a little avatar with your polys

you should fix that

[raw oar]

oh

ye you are right, the height might be the problem...

ya know what i love about this

vrchat still lets me upload it lol

[cold yarrow]

that large polygons number is because you don't have read/write enabled on your FBX file, look in the inspector for that file, in the left-most tab, which I can't remember the name of

[raw oar]

i know, i already fixed it

[cold yarrow]

oh good 🙂

[raw oar]

it was one of the "fix now" thingys

[cold yarrow]

yeah, I didn't see that in the pic, it's why I mentioned it

[heavy abyss]

Anyway to remove all phys bone components?

nvm VRCQuestTools has a phys bone checker

[heavy abyss]

Any tips to lower avatar memory? Stuck at 26mb no matter how much I lower texture resolution

I've also used PolyTools and QuestTools and I can't seem to lower it

[proper grail]

if you dont use mesh deforming blendshapes, set blendshape normals to none.
if none of your textures use the alpha channel, dont use high quality (visually, not space saving wise) compression. High quality adds an alpha channel doubling memory usage.
delete unused blendshapes in blender or something before export.
lower non-color data textures (masks and maps) resolution, those can usually be 512x512 or lower.

[heavy abyss]

aight

[hardy hound]

Remove unused blendshapes, normals, compress textures and soo on

[umbral fulcrum]

What's the easiest way to shave 3 whole megabytes off my quest avi?
Textures are all either 1080 or 540.
Compression settings perhaps?
Also, if I have an emission map in a material, but then toggle off emission as i'ts unneeded, will it still be "in" the material?

[scenic valve]

Yes

texture format is also important and some occupy much less space though if this is for quest, it already changes all textures to a format that takes up less space

[zealous wigeon]

VRCFury's blendshape optimizer can be used to bring it down just below the limit, blendshapes can take up a surprising amount of MB.

[umbral fulcrum]

I'll keep that in mind. Though I believe the avatar may already have that.

[heavy abyss]

Is there a way in Unity to remove all blendshapes?

[alpine talon]

Anyone here know how to auto convert unsupported shaders (like MToon) to Quest supported Mobile shaders in Unity?

[hardy hound]

doing anything in unity is harder than learning the basics of blender

[heavy abyss]

Yes IK that, I already know the entirety of blender (8 years of experience) but whenever I reimport a .fbx into unity it always breaks the avi no matter what I try to do so I'm trying to do everything in Unity

and FBX Exporter ain't working either so I can even export the .asset

[radiant shadow]

unpacked ? that would do it

[heavy abyss]

Yeah, it is unpacked

Though I think I was finally able to get FBX Exporter working by doing smth weird

[heavy abyss]

nvm still broken

Would removing unused materials lower memory usage?

[paper zinc]

No, unused materials don't get uploaded

[paper zinc]

And there is. Vrcfury or d4rk's optimiser can freeze and remove non-animated blendshapes on build

[wind herald]

fbx exporter in unity?

if so, don't use that

[wanton carbon]

I use pumpkin’s avatar tools (unity plugin) so when I re-import my fbx my avatar doesn’t get turned into string cheese

Otherwise I’d lose my mind long before I finish the thing

[umbral fulcrum]

do I need that on each mesh renderer or once on the whole avatar?

[heavy abyss]

I'll look into that

[heavy abyss]

D4rk's helped alot but now I am in the troubling time of micro-optimization ☠️

[spring sun]

have you optimized the textures yet

[heavy abyss]

Yes

[spring sun]

hm

whats your material slots like

[heavy abyss]

like how many does the current avi have?

[spring sun]

mmmmmmmmmmmm

thats a lot

also a lot of bones

[heavy abyss]

Yes I'm porting it from a PC Avi

I've tried running it through PolyTools to reduce polys and other things but the model does not like the decimate algorithim it is using

[spring sun]

one large texture with 1 material slot is much better than a bunch of material slots and a bunch of textures

[heavy abyss]

I didn't make the model... I'm just porting it...

[spring sun]

what model

[heavy abyss]

NSFW Model

I'll tell you in DMs if you still want to know

Alright, so 630 KB to go

Welp I scared him off

[spring sun]

or Im just not replying

[heavy abyss]

Oh, 🤷‍♂️

Welp somehow I got it up

[paper zinc]

Once on the avatar root, vrcfury has some components that go on mesh renderers as well though like deleting objects on upload or forcing states on upload

[mint topaz]

are you looking to optimize overall

[heavy abyss]

Looking just to port it to quest

[opaque summit]

My bad mr

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1178356568585162844/1203903528804945941/image.png?ex=65d2c988&is=65c05488&hm=08a3c666ae1f6cdaac760c7374d0cd9f2c916608d27f3d93644046f9a2999a78&

no i aint dyno stop

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1178356568585162844/1204035123637518376/image.png?ex=65d34417&is=65c0cf17&hm=30e534d4058082c442107e166cfe3fb4ec4843c651920f3e8c71aa4defff6e2a&

wht do they mean

[opaque summit]

nvm i got it

[umbral fulcrum]

Got my avatar down to 11MB. All textures are 512, removed most normal maps and things, uneeded bones, only 4 physbones, no contact receivers and got the blendshape optimiser.
I can't get it down to 10MB though. Any things to try?

[crisp oak]

decimate your mesh 🤷

[zealous wigeon]

Do you have a lot of animations on the avatar?

And check Thry's avatar evaluator, it can list all textures, which can help give you an idea of what is taking up space and if you missed a texture.

[umbral fulcrum]

not loads. facial gestures mainly and some now unused toggles as I removed the clothes and stuff

[umbral fulcrum]

Thanks

is thry avatar emulator separate? I seem to have a few thry tings in my project already from a while ago but I don't see anything on an emulator

[zealous wigeon]

I think you could also use the worldtoolkit as it can list everything taking up space, however then you'll have to make a scene that only has the avatar you are uploading for an accurate result. You would have to know what stuff isn't going to be uploaded with the avatar though, scene specific stuff.

[zealous wigeon]

Evalutator https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools?tab=readme-ov-file#avatar-evaluator

[umbral fulcrum]

ree go it down to 10MB but still won't let me quest upload. Need to shave off a few decimals

[sick timber]

D:

[exotic hazel]

I think the answer is "no" based on what I've Googled, but just in case there's something new going around -

Is it possible to test how the toggles look for Quest users while using a PC avatar?

Some Quest users that see my avatar see it without pants (and other users see the pants for some reason), just from toggling GoGo Loco stuff. I think I understand that parameters are the problem, I just want a way to test changes to them.

[zealous wigeon]

There is not.
Your best bet is to just keep the same parameter list between PC and Quest and it should work.
With VRCFury you'd have to have the packages in the same order on the avatar and it should line up.

[exotic hazel]

What if my PC avatar is using more parameters for something PC-only, like the Cig & Zippo addon? I tried adding those parameters to the Quest version but I think they were auto-removed because it's not installed there.

Also, when I asked about needing GoGo on a Quest avatar when I already had it on the PC version, I was told it wasn't necessary? Is that incorrect?

[zealous wigeon]

Parameters aren't removed if they are unused, so probably just in the wrong order, the order of the parameter list is really important.

[zealous wigeon]

Quite sure you need it on the Quest version as well, no reason to not have it.

[exotic hazel]

It might've been the way I added them - I just used the Compare function of VSCode to make sure the two files were exactly the same, then loaded them up in Unity.

[zealous wigeon]

Which wouldn't catch what VRCFury does, since it adds stuff during upload or when in playmode and only then, non-destructive editing.

And if you add the same parameters that a VRCFury package requires then it will ignore them and create its own.

[exotic hazel]

Oh, it was actually franada (the creator of GGL) that said it: https://i.imgur.com/n1ZGiaF.png

It's just a private avatar so I was looking to optimize. Was curious if it was needed. I think most people put GGL on both versions for quest users to use it also.

[zealous wigeon]

Ah, ok.
But does make the parameter issue a thing, so probably want to have gogo on both because of that.

[exotic hazel]

Yup, this makes sense.

Yeah, I think you're right, especially when the issue happened while I was toggling Gogo Loco stuff. Maybe franada isn't aware of that.

[zealous wigeon]

Think they are aware, this is VRChat issue, an annoying one.
VRCFury makes it more annoying to deal with since you can't pre-make the parameter list.

[exotic hazel]

Oh, I see. Because all the parameter changes are done during the compile of VRCfury?

[zealous wigeon]

Yeah

[exotic hazel]

Thus, all the more reason for me to have GGL on both versions of the avatar. I'm sold.

[zealous wigeon]

I don't know if this is how it works, but I assume VRCFury starts with the top package and goes down.
If it does that then all packages that aren't going to be used on the Quest version will need to be run first and all their parameters would need to be noted down and pasted into the Quest parameter list.

[exotic hazel]

Ok - even though the Quest avatar doesn't have any of the things those parameters represent? Files should still be a mirror image?

[zealous wigeon]

I kind of forget something, ints bools and floats are ordered separately, so as long as you just make sure that all bools, floats or ints that appear on both PC and Quest are the same, then you can add extra to PC.

But yes, generally it is simpler if they are just literally the same, even if Quest doesn't use the parameters at all.

[exotic hazel]

Aww shit. I forgot I had uploaded GGL on a second attempt at a Quest avatar, and it's placed last on both PC and Quest versions, and the parameters are exactly the same, so sayeth VSCode compare (minus whatever VRCFury does).

I think my last resort was just unchecking the "Synced" checkmark beside the pants parameter just so I don't look like a Ken Doll to Quest users and just say "fuck it" to all the other weirdness that might happen.

[zealous wigeon]

The parameter list can basically be like this and still work. The cross compatible ones just have to come first.

• HairStyle (int) PC/Quest
• Clothing (int) PC/Quest
• Material swap (int) PC
• headpat (bool) PC/Quest
• ragdoll (bool) PC

[zealous wigeon]

You can find the final parameter list VRCFury makes when in playmode, it replaces the parameter list that is normally slotted into your avatar.

Should allow you to compare, would just need to copy and save it somewhere else since VRCFury deletes it when you exit playmode or finish uploading.

[exotic hazel]

Oh, that might help, thank you.

[exotic hazel]

Ok, this might've solved my whole parameter problem. I'm seeing a whole section of 14 parameters on my PC version but not my Quest version - the lollipop 😆 . So I'm guessing I'd need to install that on my Quest version also, even though it won't work, and I'd probably need to remove physbones from it and other junk?

Or, no. I can just add those parameters to the Quest version and then call it done.

[zealous wigeon]

Or upload the PC version with the lolipop last in the list, then it should be appended to the ends of the parameter list and not cause any problems.

[exotic hazel]

Ah, clever. Ok. I did it by just brute-forcing the parameters into the Quest version and then re-play mode'd both and compared both VRC files in VSCode to make sure. They're both exactly the same now. Going to try walking around and asking people if I'm wearing pants sometime soon 😆

Thanks a lot for the assist. Fingers crossed.

[smoky compass]

Did something happen to Quest optimization levels? My taidem used to be green but is now red 😦

[zealous wigeon]

Only thing I can think of that has changed is that texture memory is counted, but that happened months ago https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-performance-ranking-system/#android-limits

[smoky compass]

Thank you I must have missed that

[vapid elm]

reduce the Polly count in blender

anyone know why my avi lags quest users?, The texture size on the avi is in the green and the polly count is at 140k. I have other avi's around the same polly count and even worse texture optimization and they don't lag quest users at all, but for some reason this one in particular does?, could it maybe be how the textures are compressed in unity that causes this?

ik I tried using the android compression on this avi just to test it to see if it's better than just the normal default method of lowering the texture size

[cold yarrow]

140k is pretty far into Very Poor territory on quest, for good reason. Do you have all 140k visible but the non-laggy avatars have those disabled or hidden, like hidden clothing or other assets?

[vapid elm]

If you mean that in the sense of does it have toggles and other set of clothes yes, so not all meshes are visible at once

[cold yarrow]

yeah

[vapid elm]

not all meshes are visible at once on the avi

I have more unoptimized avatars that are quest and they don't lag quest users, but for some reason this one avi absolutely destroys there frames. but the weird thing is, is that not all quest people I have shown it to share the same experience, some say it's fine, and other's beg me to change out of the avi

[cold yarrow]

weird

[vapid elm]

I think it might be the new compression method I used. is the only thing new I tried and it seems to look good for the stats on the avi, but ig it lags people for some reason?

idk...

😭

[cold yarrow]

oh that could be the case, some of those are harder for the processor to do

[vapid elm]

ig time to redo all the texture quality for quest

[raw oar]

anyone know why the emissions keep turning off on the shader..?

[spring sun]

it currently doesnt work

[raw oar]

rip

[smoky compass]

I still experience the quest 3 random stutter freeze occasionally. Does anyone know why?

Could it be my avatar, world, other people causing it?

[fresh trail]

Make the material in 1 shader but max out at 4 if needed. You’ll have to do that in blender,
If you can bring down the amount of bones by half that should boost the performance

[fresh trail]

I use the metaspark ar plugin to help reduce polys. Anything that isn’t visible to the users delete for that version of the model that will also help with polygons(you can view how many polygons your avatar has in blender if you go into overlays and click statistics on)

[fresh trail]

When it comes to your textures, you only get up to four slots max so try to use as much space as possible on one before moving to the next. If you can get your UV to be in squares, it is a lot easier to organize so that way you can have as many of the textures on one PNG as possible.
Also, remember to all of your messages once you’re ready to export from blender, so that way you only have one mesh renderer in unity

[trim sierra]

Ok ill try

[wind herald]

What do you mean by four slots?

[golden talon]

So I have an unused material in my prefab, and I want to remove it for optimization sake. However, I have no idea how to do it, if it's even possible. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[cold yarrow]

if it's not applied to a mesh object either by default or via animation, I wouldn't expect it to get uploaded with the avatar

[warm cloud]

i'm trying to upload an avatar for quest, right?
and for SOME REASON, it says it's 18mb??? but when removing the locomotion controller, EVERYTHING IS FINE and it uploads as normal!
i checked EVERY animation file that's used in that controller, and NONE of them were 18 mb, or even close to that! the model is nowhere that size either, and the textures are below 1 mb in total aswell.
I'M SO CONFUSED what am i doing wrong???

[spring sun]

if adding the layer causes it to go up to 18mb then its something to do with the layer

[warm cloud]

how do i fix it??
i'm using the default locomotion layer that's from vrchat's example folder

[spring sun]

idk what all you put on the model

[warm cloud]

i replaced the default animations with custom ones?

but if animations themselves were the issue, then how come the action layer doesn't do the same thing? i have custom animations on there too

[cold yarrow]

Thry's avatar tools helps you find what things are what size, it's really useful for this. Also possibly your mesh has lots of blendshapes - those take up a lot of space too.

[warm cloud]

it is not the fbx, i already said so. it has no blendshapes.

[cold yarrow]

ah I must have missed that. Still, that tool has help me find textures I didn't know were getting applied.

[wind herald]

switch to windows, build a test avatar, then inspect using https://vsk.lox9973.com/abstat/

[sinful depot]

ohohoho i didnt even add anything

[spring sun]

polygon count or the fact it is 4 materials

[crisp oak]

Atlas your materials

[raw yoke]

ive got a texture atlas that im putting emissions on. ive noticed in this case i can tile the emission map and then apply a mask to prevent the map from applying to the other three textures on the atlas

it seems like its a win win. i get higher resolution on the emission map and less vram usage than if i used a map/mask for the whole atlas

but is this actually optimizing it? is this creating extra work for the computer that i dont know about?

[cold yarrow]

you can often make the map itself pretty low quality

Basically go low, like 512, and see if it still looks ok, bump it up if not.

[raw yoke]

yeah it was distractingly bad at low rez

this was my little workaround for that, and it looks nice and it saves 2 megs of texture memory according to my little gauge

but im just nervous that tiling it secretly quadruples the vram usage or otherwise does something worse than just having a mostly empty high rez map

because i got no clue how this really works lol

[cold yarrow]

Aww, yeah sometimes it just is.

So there's a tradeoff - one 4k texture vs. several smaller ones and each of them causing a draw call.

[raw yoke]

this is tiling a smaller image across the 4k texture atlas and using a mask to hide the unwanted tiles

maybe i should just show the texture atlas to make it clear what im doin

1 sec

[cold yarrow]

oh wait, this is sounding weird now 🙂

usually when you do an atlas your UV map takes care of where things go and you don't have to do funny things with masks to deal with it

[raw yoke]

this is for an emission effect using poiyomi shaders

[cold yarrow]

Possibly you can take advantage of packing multiple masks into a single texture via the channels. Maps less so of course....

[raw yoke]

like i guess to generalize my question (thank you for your patience while i work to articulate this)

is a 1k texture tiled four times across a 2k atlas's uv map, with the three unwanted tiles hidden by a mask, going to be more efficient than just using a 2k texture?

[cold yarrow]

No - but why would you have unwanted tiles?

trying to use one texture set in multiple materials?

[raw yoke]

pictures might tell a thousand words here

[cold yarrow]

they might 🙂

[raw yoke]

so ive got this angel avatar
im using an emission layer to bake the light from the halo onto the hair. im not adding it to the main texture because i wanna be able to turn the baked light off and on as part of animations [1st image]

since the atlas is 4k [2nd image] using low rez textures looks bad pretty quickly, and id rather not have a 2k texture just for a gimmick.

since the effect is contained entirely in the top left corner of the atlas [3rd image], i figured i could use a 1k texture [4th image] and then use poiyomi's tiling option to apply it four times across the atlas [5th image]

doing this would result in weird mismatches where the tiled texture goes where it shouldnt [6th image], so i use a 32x32 mask to make sure only the hair quarter of the texture atlas gets the emission effect [7th image]

[cold yarrow]

ooh this explains a lot

I wonder if you can apply this effect as a decal

[raw yoke]

im just a hobbyist so idk what the precise vocabulary is for any of these terms

yeah thats essentially what im doing

[cold yarrow]

right but I mean with Poi's decal feature

[raw yoke]

yeah

[cold yarrow]

it'd mean the halo effect could just be a much smaller texture, positioned appropriately, and it also has emission

[raw yoke]

perhaps this is something i dont understand about textures then

oh wait yeah i see what yore saying

[cold yarrow]

yeah

[raw yoke]

im basically doing that but using an emission layer(?) and i can see why that's not optimal in terms of using the shader if i want more decals and emissions

but it should be in effect the same thing as using the decal layer right?

[cold yarrow]

decals are great for stuff like this, affecting a small section with their own whatever sized texture - I use them for tshirt logos a lot, but this is a neat use

oh true but the emission layer applies to the whole material and must be masked/etc. whereas the decal is applied on top of that at whatever position and size you like and has its own emission settings, and can be a way smaller texture

[raw yoke]

i know decals have emissions, i used a decal for the gowing eye effect you can see in the 6th picture

[cold yarrow]

oh ok, I figured that was just a normal emission section

(I do eye glow there with a mask)

[raw yoke]

like my one hesitation is idk if you can animate decal emissions like you can with an emission layer

i dont see why you couldnt but i dont know what i dont know lol

[cold yarrow]

yes!

even with audiolink

[raw yoke]

i mean it sounds like the reasonable and simple thing to do is to move that to the decal then, because thats basically what ive already set up only for emission

thank you for you help

[cold yarrow]

of course! It's a pretty interesting problem

[raw yoke]

like its a lot of thought and effort i suppose for saving 2mg of vram when my avatar's already well under medium performance rank for texture usage

but i dont want to do the thing where i get into a habit of thinking im optimizing something and do it a bunch and then find out later ive actually made it worse

[cold yarrow]

haha it IS, but a) you can then tell people YOU did it and so should they b) it's a fun problem to solve c) it opens you up to doing even more stuff now that you have more available space and d) your own avatar's performance affects you as well

[raw yoke]

tbh vrchat is just kind of a pretense for messing around in unity and blender at this point like its important because it gets me to think about these things but at this point vr chat is mostly for showing off the avatar and talking to people who know more about avatars than me haha

[cold yarrow]

haha yep, exactly

Speaking of, that's a really cool effect, and how you did it

[raw yoke]

tyty i baked it blender and then turned it black and white and posterized it to make it more resilient to downscaling

[cold yarrow]

oh cool

[elder laurel]

A few weeks ago when I first got into modding my personal avatar, I saw something called d4rkpl4y3r's optimizer script, which I used. I'm wondering though if there's a different optimizer I should use. Also, should I use the optimizer's feature of creating an optimized copy in Unity, then putting VRCFury plugins on the copy? I noticed one plugin I used was fixed when I didn't optimize my avatar on upload. I also can't seem to fly with GoGo Loco Beyond, and am wondering if maybe this is also because the optimizer script broke it.

[cold yarrow]

I suspect if you start layering up complicated tools which do behind-the-scenes magic, there will be conflicts.

[night inlet]

do not do any extra work on the optimized copy. it is intended for testing in editor or straight upload.
if the optimizer breaks stuff you can try to make a bug report here: https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer/issues
and maybe I'll be able to fix it

[cold yarrow]

oh hi! Cool script, lots of neat stuff inside.

[elder laurel]

Thanks! If it turns out the issue is more me just not grokking the manual, would you be patient enough with me to tell me what settings to change, or what might be causing conflicts?

Though one tricky part is that the plugin that was giving me issues is a paid plugin.

[wind herald]

I really should figure out how to properly use it, never got the hang of the mesh merging lol

[elder laurel]

If I'm also using an Android conversion script, should I apply that first to make an Android copy, then apply the optimizer to the copy?

[night inlet]

probably do the android conversion first, then optimizer

(the android part of my optimizer isn't used much so dunno how well it will work/help you)

[eternal axle]

Question for those who know:

Since would it be better for an avatar with 8 material slots to use a single atlased 8K material slot with UV tile discard for toggles, or is it still better to have a 4K body texture mat slot, an outfit mat slot that is 4K, etc? Keep in mind this is using 4K responsibly. All my models are rated good.

Basically; is it stupid to put an entire model on a single 8K mat slot and just atlas everything?

[buoyant holly]

the 8K texture would be doubling the vram for no reason

[eternal axle]

Technically yes,

The theory I want to try is if you can pack a bunch of smaller 2K normals, metallics, etc into a single texture

Because when I cut my models down on VRAM I usually end up deleting a bunch in small detail maps (AO, Normal, etc). But If I am going to have a normal map anyway, why not put them all into one normal map

[proper grail]

normals, data, and visible color are types of textures you would want separated, much like separating transparent and opaque/cutout materials. Focus on the least amount of meshes and materials off of that.

[eternal axle]

Right now I am running a single mesh and toggling via UV tile dissolve

[proper grail]

so in short, atlas everything you can that the shader you will use supports the features you would like

[eternal axle]

Yeah it's mostly just a thought experiment. Since I'm constantly trying to get my stuff better and better rated/performant

don't do it

[eternal garnet]

quadrupling actually

1024x1024 = 1 million pixels
2048x2048 = 4 million pixels
4096x4096 = 16 million pixels
8182x8182 = 64 million pixels

twice the resolution = 4 times as much pixels

going with higher (but less) atlassed textures requires very specific setup if you want to make the most of it without incurring extra VRAM usage.

If your model has 4 equally big mats then thats a good place to do an atlas.

If your model has 6 mats.... i'd highly suggest against atlassing everything together, rather atlas 4 of them together and the other 2 (preferably the odd ones out) separate.

Commonly avatars use ~ 8 mats (if they aren't horribly optimized), that would be 2 atlasses 4 textures each for optimal usage assuming each of those 4 sets have equal texture size. Otherwise you'd require 16 mats to atlas everything together equally and if you start mixing and matching it gets worse.

1 4K atlas could fit:
4 x 2K
or
2 x 2K, 8 x 1K
or
1 x 2K, 4 x 1K, 32 x 512
etc

[wind herald]

quadrupling

[short spoke]

WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!

[wind herald]

it rounds down

so its likely 10.0057 or something

[frosty fern]

I got this pink dog girl avatar down from "Very Poor" to "Medium" on PC! Now I have another avatar to wear to events and such. ^^

[elder laurel]

So, I figured out what was breaking my plugins, and it had nothing to do with your script, but instead it had to do with dragging prefabs straight from the file explorer to the root of my avatar. Since my avatar has a scale transform at its root, this seems to break prefabs, unless I drag the prefab into the world before then dragging it to the avatar. It just so happens that I had done this accidentally the time when I also disabled your script to troubleshoot.

Sorry if that's TMI.

[pine radish]

So, what is better for avatar texture optimization (in-game performance):

One single 4096x4096 texture for all its body or four different 1024x1024 textures? It's better to load a heavy tex or some smaller ones 4 times?

Using the ".zip extraction logic", it's faster to extract a single big file than a lot of small ones, isn't it?

[heavy knot]

a single 4k BC7 compressed texture is 21mb in VRAM, 4 BC7 compressed 1k textures would be 5.2mb in VRAM

[pine radish]

Oh shi thanks, I was "optimizing" my avatar in the worse way so... I had a big atlas for all of it and I was having UV problems because of it

[pine radish]

oh wait, you mean 5.2mb for EACH or all of them?

[heavy knot]

no

A single 1k BC7 compressed texture is 1.3mb

[pine radish]

oh right, thanks again

[proper grail]

because 4096^2 is a number, that 2048^2 x 4 equals. Four 2048^2 images make a 4k image. four 1k images make a 2k image, because squared. To be equal you would need 16 1k images to make a 4k atlas. You could make a 2k atlas out of four 1k images with no quality change.

[pine radish]

Oh so I expressed myself wrong, so my question is four 2k textures or one 4k texture?

it's so numbers my brain go weeewooo

My question is like: same amount of info (technically?) but is more performant to run 4 small textures (that have the same pixel amount of the big one) or 1 big one?

[heavy knot]

the amount of textures won't really matter, it's just the amount of VRAM you're using

[pine radish]

got it, thanks : )

[wind herald]

one 4k is not 4 1ks

its 16 1ks

1 4k is 4 2k and each 2k is 4 1k

[proper grail]

Irc users are incapable of reading any message but one confirmed

[wind herald]

chicken sandwich

[snow knot]

To add onto what was said earlier. It also depends on what that atlased texture is being used on. 4 draw calls is more expensive than 1 draw call so you're still probably saving performance with an atlased model. Though there are exceptions.

[subtle arch]

How tf do people even get to 500mb texture memory and over 100 material slots???

I know it's easier to not give a f about optimization but I couldn't imagine working with an avatar like that inside Unity

Like you'd need a whole ass UML diagram to keep track of everything

[onyx harness]

Not really.
If you're using 1k, 2k and 4k textures and have things like diffuse, normal, metallic, roughness, specular, ambient occlusion and masking textures for each material; different clothing/outfits/accessories, it'll stack up pretty fast. Not to mention gifs which I've removed before being like +100mb alone. It's definitely a lot easier to fall into if you're combining a bunch of assets together from a few other creators, which is a very common thing to do.

Plus currently most people learn to make toggles by doing mesh toggles. Every article of clothing, every accessory, each thing is a new mesh leading to 40 meshes. Maybe an asset comes as 3 meshes for toggling with 3 material slots per mesh. toss 10 of those on your model and plus the head, hair, body and maybe some other things you'll be in the triple digits for slots.
And that's not even starting on the Particle systems or other Renderers
It's not good, but it's common.

[subtle arch]

And 10 of those people are enough to make GPUs without 8GB of VRAM go belly up. In my experience a lot of materials do not need maps as high as 2k or even 1k so the Texture Memory thing is something I will never understand. Yesterday 80% of my 24 gigs of VRAM were occupied. Shameless

[heavy knot]

I love how those avatars are basically either Booth avatars with every outfit you can find, or the most disgusting looking eboy avatar

there's nothing else in that class

[onyx harness]

Yep. People will texture their models in other programs where it's full res, move to unity and then cry that it's blurry so they set it to 4k. That or they'll zoom right in and view the model from 0.2m away and judge the quality there. Most people in vrchat aren't going to get within 2m of you and if your perf is that bad, some will just have you hidden to begin with

[subtle arch]

Also if you have so damn many toggles I'd consider giving yourself the inconvenience of making a few alternative avatars instead of inconveniencing everybody else in the instance

[onyx harness]

I can understand the 3x, 4x, 5x limit models if it's used in a private world with like 5 people in it. If no one is around then you can be 5 people's worth of performance, but you'll just see it everywhere in every public world with 25/30 people doing it.

[subtle arch]

or maybe you don't need to have multiple dick types and maybe you don't need to switch between innie and outie depending on your mood at the time

[subtle arch]

like I bet at least 50% of these togglable meshes never see the light of the game engine

[subtle arch]

god that sounds so horrible

[onyx harness]

even with those things, you don't need them on the model if you're in public

[subtle arch]

yup

then there's me stressing to get below 9 materials

[heavy knot]

hell, that's not bad at all

[onyx harness]

I do get that a lot of people don't wish to learn unity/blender, i get it, but I do still encourage people to try the models they buy/download in game and see what they actually use, then go into even just unity and delete the things they don't touch.
If the thing is always off then there's no point having it

I wish more people would delete things they don't like on the models I put together

[subtle arch]

I'm awful at both but the least I can do is join meshes and combine same materials and maybe decimating

[wind herald]

me with my good rated avatar that uses 5mb of vram :3

[amber hemlock]

Intentionally using more triangles than needed because "Good" makes the nametag smaller than "Excellent" 🤌

[wind herald]

😭

just put contacts on your avatar

probably the most optimized way to make it less optimized

if that makes any sense

[cold yarrow]

haha that's an amusing thing to consider

you could drop a disabled light on it, "Poor" is the same length as "Good"

[wind herald]

most things that are disabled will have no impact on performance

[oblique patio]

new things are new
https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/#write-defaults-on-states

[heavy knot]

I would ignore that warning in all honesty, write defaults off makes you do extra work for the same result

[onyx harness]

As long as you don't mix you're fine. Though there are setups that intentionally have mixed, like mine, so this warning will be fun going forward.

[humble atlas]

Question: is there an easy way to just switch an old Body with a new optimised body

i atlased mine just now but idk how to replace it and dont wanna break anything like blendershapes

[humble atlas]

i uh tried using a mesh transfer tool...

to put it shrimply it became amogus shaped so i think SOMETHING went wrong

[zealous wigeon]

Assuming you exported without "add leaf bones" in Blender then you can often times just overwrite the fbx.

You also have to make sure to export it correctly, if the armature is set to 100 scale in Unity, then export with "all local", if it is scale 1 then "FBX All"

[raven bluff]

Are the links in the pinned messages still valid?

There is a way... as long as you didn't modify the mesh, unity doesnt like that.

For precaution make a backup of your project.
Exort the FBX from blender un the unity folder where your FBX is located, for examples Assets->Avatar->FBX->Avatar.fbx and you want to give the fbx from blender the same name.

AFter that unity should take care of it and replace the old fbx with the new fbx

[obsidian lake]

this is why as much as it's cool that people make unity assets that make it easier for beginners to make avatars, i really think beginners should be making avatars in blender instead, and should definitely be learning about optimization. When I started making avatars, I wanted them to all be medium or better on quest

[onyx harness]

As long as you don't unpack the fbx in the scene you can change anything you want on the model and it'll update. I've changed sexes and even species on some reimports.
Keep in mind if you change bones; removing/renaming them, any added components to those objects could be lost.

But yes, making a backup is always a good move. So many times have people overwritten and then complained something broke with 0 way to recover...

[livid hornet]

I have these messages on unity (2019) while making an avatar (quest / android) with the sdk and wont let me upload, on which ones should i focus on fixing to be able to upload?

[cold yarrow]

See the different icon for the last one? That's a blocker, you must fix that one.

[obsidian lake]

the sdk should let you upload, do you have any stop sign errors?

[obsidian lake]

no that's the poor icon?

[cold yarrow]

oh it is

[obsidian lake]

this is very poor

[cold yarrow]

sorry, had the window too small

[obsidian lake]

you're good dw

it doesn't look like vrchat discord has an emoji for the stop sign one

[cold yarrow]

stupid (I mean great) high-res display

[livid hornet]

So, the physbones are not the problem?

[obsidian lake]

wait can you not use emojis from other servers here??

[obsidian lake]

do you have any stop sign errors?

or do you get an error when trying to upload?

[cold yarrow]

If you're ok with being very very poor on quest, then it's not a problem

[obsidian lake]

like after you press build and publish

[livid hornet]

the ones from the image only

[obsidian lake]

so it does let you upload then?

[livid hornet]

Nope

[obsidian lake]

so you get an error when uploading?

screenshot the error

[livid hornet]

ok, one sec

here

[obsidian lake]

oh so you do have stop sign errors

click "auto fix"

[livid hornet]

these are the stop signs / errors right?

[cold yarrow]

that first one

[obsidian lake]

it is shaped like a stop sign

🛑

[livid hornet]

Holy sheep! it worked!

thanks

i thought i had to do more stuff than simply press auto fix, like optimize the avatar and stuff

[obsidian lake]

if you want better performance though you need to reduce poly count, material slots, and physbone components

[cold yarrow]

well you should do that but you can upload without 🙂

Remember the game needs to render your own very poor avatar at least twice 🙂

[livid hornet]

ill have to learn how hehehe

F :V

[royal laurel]

hey, im not sure if its an optimization thing or something because ive been trying to shrink my avatars file size. but i can only preview it in game, right?

well: for some reason its not uploading? like itll log in, do the build process, and then give up without any error, ive been at this for 6ish hours in total and idk why its desiding not to fully upload. console only says the traditional red error of "SDK out of date" but if i try to upload an older after in the same project, it is happy for some reason

[cold yarrow]

Which SDK version, which Unity version?

[royal laurel]

ive accepted defeat today

[royal laurel]

3.5.1 somehow and 2022.3.6f1 feradey edition

i think its vrchats cdn is being a bumhole for me atm so im just going to mess with the avatar and hope the file size behaves

acc for me to continue, i need to be able to upload cus im also doing rigging edits and im too lazy to dl a player controller. whyyyyyyyyyyyyy

[cold yarrow]

Ok that's the right combo then

[royal laurel]

sorry for the bothering, ive just been dealing with this issue for like... 8 hours now lol

just passively trying to update an avatar to make sure something works

[royal laurel]

welp. ig i was right because now im able to upload just fine npow

me big confusion

[final trail]

Hey so im in need of ways to compress individual .anim files in unity, is anyone aware of anyways that isnt having to go and tediously delete every other 2nd/3rd key frame from an animation? would save me alot of headaches

[calm spade]

There's plenty of scripts to do that automatically out there already, some Unity asset store tools can also do it but all cost money afaik. .anim files are just really fucking heavy and removing keyframes like that will definitely result in some visual issues, but yeah it's usually the only way to reduce size, as well as removing scale keyframes if not used

[final trail]

thanks for replying, yeah ive been searching for scripts/unity addons to do the job sadly all ive been able to find has been paid assets on the store, addons that no longer work, or a sea of things saying "haha yeah just use keyframe reduction on the fbx" which of course as you know, doesnt work in my situation

ive even tried exporting the animations with a humanoid rig as a fbx from unity with unity's export to fbx addon but sadly the animations just kinda lose everything

[cold yarrow]

technically they're YAML files so you could edit them that way.... but they really aren't pretty inside at all 🙂

I've done it a few times, but the kind of thing you're talking about doing would probably be worse than doing it manually.

and writing a script to would probably not be ideal unless you know for sure deleting ever other is righ - I'd be some of those you'd want to manually look at to be sure the animation still looks right. What a pain.

[umbral echo]

If I decimate an avatar for a quest version (the PC is huge), can I keep the visemes and shape keys? any good way to do this?

[cold yarrow]

you'll probably have to be more targeted than just run a decimate modifier

[calm spade]

Friend of mine had this script and found it for me

Right click an animation, "Key reduction half" I think
Probably backup beforehand
Also this was in the 2017 days I think so it might be broke

Hopefully works for you

[cold yarrow]

gotta run that through a translator for the comments, but it seems reasonable at a quick glance

maaaaybe I'll save that for a rainy day 🙂

[paper zinc]

The short answer is no, blender can't apply a modifier to any mesh with shape keys

[wind herald]

dissolving edge loops is a much better way to reduce poly count

[wind herald]

decimate is an operator too

which you can use on meshes with shape keys

[paper zinc]

Oh right true

[wind herald]

okay for quick poly reductions

but i prefer dissolving edge loops manually instead

[paper zinc]

Manually dissolving is the way to get actually geood results, yeah. Decimate is indiscriminate, doesn't know or care which places need more geometry

[wind herald]

allows you to selectively keep more mesh resolution in areas that need it, keeps uv maps intact, keeps topology intact (mostly)

[cold yarrow]

wellll....... there are some really nice plugins that let you do that like this one: https://github.com/przemir/ApplyModifierForObjectWithShapeKeys
Or you can apply the modifier as a shape key and then apply that to Basis with blend from shape

[paper zinc]

plugins I don't know about, but

Or you can apply the modifier as a shape key and then apply that to Basis with blend from shape
this only works for certain modifiers that just move geometry around, for example lattice. anything that adds or removes geometry can't be applied as a shapekey

[cold yarrow]

Yep, absolutely true.

I tend to use that plugin, it's worked in most cases for me so far

[quaint pier]

Trying to transfer bone weight and uh.. should I be worried?

[quaint pier]

Nvm, when in doubt - turn it off and on again

[wind herald]

Really don‘t get why blender can‘t do this automatically

Clearly you can apply it to a mesh with shape keys by just applying it as a shape key and then to basis

[cold yarrow]

yeah I'm a bit surprised there's nothing to just do it in the cases where it's clearly possible

[wind herald]

Another annoying thing is having to apply poses like this lol

At least i haven’t found a better way besides plugins

Armature modifier then saving as shape key

[cold yarrow]

I do really like that plugin, so far it's been great

[paper zinc]

There are a lot of little things about blender that don't make much sense

Like why can't you add a shape key while in edit mode

[spring sun]

because it gets angry

[paper zinc]

there is no logical reason for this

[cold yarrow]

This one annoys me all the time.

[zealous void]

How can I optimize my custom dynamics for Quest users so that they can see them? I'm looking to make a fallback avatar that has the little gizmos on it, all my little fidget toys guns and swords which are also fidget toys that Quest users can see. I have a few ideas but I was wondering if anyone knew how to do it concretely.

[wind herald]

What custom dynamics?

[zealous void]

Dynamics I've made.

For example, I have a Kerambit Knife for my Joongi Han avatar.

You can unsheath it by grabbing a physbone and stretching it. The stretching controls the animation time until its stretched to a certain length where its just moved to the hand.

Pointing moves it to your index and spins it.

I'd like to be able to have this system on a fallback.

One idea I have is to perhaps bake it into the same skinned mesh renderer SourceEngine style.

To save on Skinned Mesh Renderers.

Have it scaled down instead of gameobject disabled.

[wind herald]

Im guessing the moving work using constraints

Those are not supported on android

[zealous void]

Really...?

[wind herald]

You would have to do things like turning off one mesh and turning on another

Or hiding it with blendshapes

Which are both pretty bad

[zealous void]

Man, optimizing for Quest users seems like hell.

[wind herald]

It is

That‘s why most people don‘t do it at all

I mean even I have not uploaded a quest version of my main avatar, which is Good on pc

[zealous void]

How do you interact with Quest users then? It gets frustrating to setup a complex avatar full of little toys that is relatively optimized, and only have the occasional person have the ability to see it.

[spring sun]

dont stick everything on the same avatar

[wind herald]

I don‘t for the most part

I rarely ever visit public instances and pretty much none of my friends are on quest standalone

Running into a quest user is a rare occurrence

[zealous void]

A big thing for me since I came from source engine is optimization, once the toys are made in full I plan to do several rounds of optimization.

[summer goblet]

so i am replacing materials with the same material to reduce material slots ,
but for some reason it wouldnt go down

these clothes used to have their own material but i replaced it with the red one , but it hasnt dropped at all

[heavy knot]

Material slots are the physical thing on the mesh itself, you'll need to go in blender and reduce them from there

[summer goblet]

yeh but im replacing them with that material, it should overwrite it

[heavy knot]

using the same material on each slot won't reduce the amount of slots your using

these are each of the slots, which are only modifable through a 3D editing program (like blender). The other solution would be to use D4rk's Avatar Optimizer to do this automatically for you

[royal laurel]

hey, i use beldner 3.6.1 and im trying to edit topology for teeth but its like clicking behind the normals. if anyone is making avatars, can you help?

[stoic gust]

is 16K polygons good for quest comptaibility?

it might be around 18k by the time i get the hands done

hopefully 17 if i optimize it good enough

[heavy knot]

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

[elder laurel]

This is more a question of curiosity: are there any scripts that can take two different meshes, and figure out how to make one a total shape key of the other? For example, if you had a jacket and a sweater mesh, it would figure out how to have all the polys of the jacket be able to reconfigure themselves into the shape of the sweater, with the weight painting being appropriate.

[cold yarrow]

haven't seen it, that seems crazy to attempt to do automatically, but you could probably use a shrinkwrap modifier in Blender to get close and save that as a shape key.

[wind herald]

you can try https://mmemoli.gumroad.com/l/tOKEh

combine that with a shrinkwrap maybe

[tawdry wyvern]

I have an avi that performs incredibly bad, and disabling the animator gives a huge performance boost.

Any suggestions on what to look at specifically for the animator and animations?

So far I've:

• Reduced amount of animation layers to around 20
• Removed any state transitions
• Removed tons of animated material properties
• Disabled some animated physbones

But it's still not where it should be at..

[cold yarrow]

can you define "performs bad" here?

[zealous wigeon]

For animator benchmarks https://notes.sleightly.dev/benchmarks/ is quite informative.

[tawdry wyvern]

I was having some major frame rates differences after turning off the animator completely.
But now I'm not seeing that anymore. So I think I got the animator optimized.

[heavy knot]

Any State is fine, just don't use the "Can transition to self" function on the transitions coming from Any State

[wind herald]

vrcfury offers a direct tree optimizer which optimizes all non-conflicting layers into a large single direct mode blend tree

you could give that a shot maybe

[cold yarrow]

ooh, I didn't know it did that, I was considering writing such a thing

[wind herald]

it‘s pretty robust nowadays

[night inlet]

my optimizer does it too

[cold yarrow]

well then I don't have to build it! Thanks for doing it 🙂

[wind herald]

cool ^^

there are a couple edge cases where optimizing into a blend tree doesn’t work well though

like for rotation animations

[cold yarrow]

or when you want to play with animation speed

[elder laurel]

is this something I should strive to fix? Or can it be safely ignored? For the face control, I basically just took the left hand layer from my FX controller, and gave each transition an additional condition to check for a particular contact receiver to be active.

the ears are just two blend trees, and the Any State only goes to Neutral if both hands are not equal to Fist. The ears perk so long as I'm using the Fist gesture on my left hand, and the gesture weight is greater than 0.01, while on the right hand the Droop only activates if there is a gesture weight less than 0.01 on my left hand, my right hand has a Fist, and the Gesture Weight of my right hand is greater than 0.01.

[cold yarrow]

why is there an anystate there?

[elder laurel]

I think it was in the layer by default, so I utilized it. Should I avoid the use of it?

should I have the two trees just feed back to the neutral instead?

[cold yarrow]

I don't see what it's doing here at all, if all ways in just go to one state, it seems unnecessary

oh - you have no way out of the states other than via AnyState, I see.

I suppose it's a valid way of doing things.

[elder laurel]

also, this is the mess I get after applying GoGo Loco. Do I just leave it alone?

[cold yarrow]

I'm guessing this is from VRC Fury, which I've never used, so have no real suggestions

[elder laurel]

ah, fair. When does the number of FX Layers start becoming an issue?

[cold yarrow]

https://notes.sleightly.dev/benchmarks/ some interesting testing and discussion here

(I happened to have this page open actually)

[elder laurel]

So, this is what the Gesture Controller looks like currently. Would it cause performance issues if I had Any State instead jump to an empty state if the GestureRight condition and the Wrist_Touched condition are met, and then from there transition to the appropriate facial expression only based on GestureLeft? Would this cause similar issues to having "Can Transition to Self" enabled? If so, could I fix that by having the Receiver type of the Contact Receiver be "On Enter" instead of "Constant"?

also, sorry that this is a little off-topic, but it seems that no matter how small I made the transition duration, unless I make it zero, there seems to be a max speed at which it'll transition to the next facial expression.

[night inlet]

you don't need to worry about single digit layer count. that said there is no fixed number where it "starts becoming an issue". the more layers there are, the slower the animator is.

[elder laurel]

I'm curious though what the thresholds are for different performances rankings of number of FX layers, since I noticed it's included in your script, but not on the VRChat website.

[night inlet]

I just made up some numbers that sounded half reasonable (on pc its the same as material count and for android half of that)

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer/blob/v3.5.3/Editor/d4rkAvatarOptimizerEditor.cs#L1356-L1371

[bold wharf]

its there to prevent dead-ending. It'll reset you back to neutral. Could do the same with either a transition to exit or reverse back to neutral.

[cold yarrow]

Yep, I realized that after I said it, that was the next message I sent

[bold wharf]

As you can see, my reading comprehension is impeccable

This is why we read through the entire conversation first 😔

[cold yarrow]

hey I think overall we've provided detail that can help others, so everyone wins here 🙂

[restive night]

blender-related question
so I have several assets that uses the same base, but I want to use just the base armature instead of relying on parent constraints within unity
how do I make it so that the assets use the base armature of an avatar?

[cold yarrow]

in each of the assets' armature modifiers, select the base avatar's armature.

Weight paint accordingly.

[restive night]

uhhh

I'd rather not?

the assets are made for the base avatar I'm working on

I was able to merge the bones together as one armature, but how I was able to do that is still a mystery to me

[cold yarrow]

If you want to do it in Unity there are some tools for it

[wind herald]

https://vrcfury.com/tutorials/linking-clothes

doing it in blender is as easy as kazin said

just select the mesh in blender, go to the modifiers tab and swap the armature to the base avatar's armature

or use vrcfury 🙂

[snow knot]

If the clothes have additional bones that aren't on the og model it becomes less simple.

[cold yarrow]

that's not too bad, you just have to merge them on 🙂

[dusty sable]

I'm looking for some ways to make a fallback avatar that will work on quest with (quite long) skirt. Is there some known trick that I can use? Any ideas? So far best I could do with lowering physbone and colliders count is something like that, but it's FAR from being even medium on quest, so I'm looking for a way to do it without physbones (or sth D:)

[wind herald]

instead of colliders, utilize limits in the physbone components

you can define a max angle along with pitch, roll and yaw to limit how far and where they can rotate

[near raptor]

😐

[heavy knot]

SDK version 3.5.1 fixes this issue of displaying rounded filesizes

[near raptor]

That’s the one I was using

I just removed a pice of clothing tho so it’s fine

[low halo]

I have an avatar I converted to quest and I literally removed everything and compressed it to and it still says it's to big I'm at 11 mb and yet I can't upload it

[wind herald]

What do the validations in the sdk show?

[low halo]

That it's just to big

It needs to be 10 mb for quest

And it's at 11

[hardy hound]

Just doenscale texture

[lean wedge]

Maybe decimate some polys in blender?

[lapis cedar]

uh oh, any ideas how to optimize phys bone collision checks, I managed to get them up to 1428 ;-;
and I need to get my avi from very poor to poor

[lean wedge]

If you merge bones in blender I think :3 You can merge some to parent bones I think

[lapis cedar]

I guess I can sacrifice some of the hair movement ;-;
But anyways not sure how much it'll help as the avi has quite a few colliders to stop physics based objects from clipping through body
Any idea id there better way to do that than having lots of colliders around

[lean wedge]

A lot of people sacrifice colliders for quest tbh

Most of the time I just save chest and floor colliders if I’m capable

[lapis cedar]

pcvr usage

[lean wedge]

Ohhh

Yeah I’d say floor, chest, and maybe wherever else hair clips or toys. You gotta be sparing

[lapis cedar]

just few events I wanna use the avi on have no very poor rule

[lean wedge]

Ohh I see

[lapis cedar]

hair clips pretty much all around the body as it's pretty long

[lean wedge]

Oh nuu

Maybe sacrifice a few bones then? :o

That way you can delete more colliders for optimization

[lapis cedar]

prolly should, the hair I got for temporary usage untill I learn to make visually appealing ones is bretty bony one haha

[lean wedge]

Yee :o

[radiant shadow]

can rotate the bones so they points toward avatar/mesh, then use angle limits to avoid them ever clipping

no collider needed

[lapis cedar]

oh, I should look into that

[lapis cedar]

I just remember when I tried to do that with other asset, had the problem that I could only edit angle limits to all of the bones in the asset instead of select few, or do I need to add sepperate phys bone component for the bones I want to add angle limit to?

[radiant shadow]

Thats where the recalculate roll comes in , no bone will have the same rotation

otherwise they are the same and one setting will be wierd for all of them

[lapis cedar]

oh, so there was an checkbox or something like that I didn't notice

[radiant shadow]

blender

[lapis cedar]

oooooh

[radiant shadow]

wont clip after (old av)

if you use fbt its super easy to still clip it but eeh well

[cold yarrow]

Oh good, you even have a video of this - this is the best way to do it, for sure.

[lapis cedar]

[peak lion]

My avatar is around 7 MB, would I need to reduce it further to allow GoGo Loco? Because last time I tried it would bring it up to 15 MB, and could not get it to port to quest because of that

[regal basin]

So I'm trying to pack a detail mask into the alpha channel of an existing rgb texture. Though I'm running into trouble because it seems unity applys a white matte to the rgb channels where the alpha is even with "alpha is transparency" off. Am I doing something wrong or is this just yet another unity bug?

oh ok nevermind, it looks like unity expects premultiplied alpha, which is confusing because im packing a mostly unrelated mask, but sure, whatever

[cold yarrow]

I don't see what in gogo loco would increase it that much

[regal basin]

no wait it still not quite right, now the parts not affected look too dark, ugh

[proper grail]

when saving this texture, if an option window comes up be sure to check the funny save data from alpha = 0 checkbox. Otherwise where its fully alpha your data will turn to all 0s which is that weird white edge outline thing. Alsoand unless you need to save this texture as high quality compression and youre just packing data in for no cost, keep your data packs rgb as rgba is double the size.

[regal basin]

It looks like the issue is blender cannot export png files with straight alpha, if you ask it to it exports with a strange sorta inverse premultiplied alpha (where the multiplied areas get brighter instead)

so far the only workaround I’ve found is to use exr files

[proper grail]

oh yeah, same issue as described. export as rgb and a separately and pack manually. Or that works too

[regal basin]

what’s more worrying is I’ve been exporting moes metallic maps like this for years and not noticing lol

[proper grail]

and uh, set the save to format from srgb perceived to raw/data

(strange sorta inverse premultiplied alpha)

to
... dont

[regal basin]

its already set to raw, doesnt seem to affect that

[proper grail]

huh blender weird. Metallic in the sdsf can affect bake colors too, but thats a longshot

[regal basin]

weirdly some people said tif should also work, but for me it seems to have the same issue as png

oh wait maybe 16bit tifs work, but not 8bit

no wait thats even weirder, 16bit tifs look properly premultiplied, while 8bit tifs get the strange inverse premultiply that pngs do

but either way tif wont work for packing work because its not straight alpha

ok so I settled on exr with unity override to the format so it imports as bc7 instead of hdr.

moral of the story: never try to pack masks alongside color textures unless you like pain

[marble rain]

ngl those new limits are abit wierd. Ram isn't a issue

[silver anchor]

What’s some of the best plugins for unity for optimizing an avatar that I can get on VCC?

[marble rain]

uh i mean depends on what kind of optimization you look for @silver anchor

Vrcfury can help. and dr4k or whatever its called

[silver anchor]

Oki Ty! How can VRCFURY help with optimization?

[silver anchor]

Just any and all ahah wanna start making avatars optimized

[marble rain]

you may have to read up on the documention 😄 i kinda forgot ngl

theres a few things

[buoyant holly]

the quest has unified Ram so it's absolutely an issue on there

[marble rain]

well its not for the quest either so. the patch is for non quest on the quest it remains the same 10 mb

[buoyant holly]

they also tweaked the quest numbers as far as the maximum

And some people do upload avatars on PC that are quite the ram hogs with lots of animations and audio sources separate from the using way too much vram issue

[zealous wigeon]

It is if you only have 16GB, which statistically half the people on Steam do.
I think having these limits are entirely reasonable, you really do not need, nor should, have that much memory usage for a single avatar.

[marble rain]

it's still far from a issue with Ram lol. not a single person has complained about that ever. and if i remember correctly they mentioned this will only affect 2% of the playerbase

[buoyant holly]

that 2% number was how many avatars are affected by the new limits

[marble rain]

so i did remember it correct just in the wrong order

[ivory sluice]

It's been a long time since i haven't unlocked very poor avatars but back then i ran vrchat mostly on virtual memory because of the absurd amounts of vram some people used, in most cases by crunching 8k maps so the download size is smaller

[marble rain]

that said yea 1.2 gb is way to much imao with that 200 mb it diff will be better.

[marble rain]

i never even unlock poor lol. i always check poor/very poor users before i unhide em. if it says texture memory 200 or so mb i am just naah nope

and i do have 12 gb of vram

[buoyant holly]

this is a nice change as far as clearing up ambiguous language

[ivory sluice]

It's not something big but it's nice to make it more clear

[buoyant holly]

I have seen a decent amount of times on this forum hey why doesn't my avatar fit in the limits the polygons says it should be fine even though it's a triangle that's needed

[cold yarrow]

there needs to be a way to see what an avatar's got for stats before you agree to download it

[marble rain]

just hide anyone that is not your friend by default. and you wont download it

[cold yarrow]

oh I do, and also limit download size, but it's more that I occasionally want to see something and it'd be nice to be warned before I take the plunge

[waxen estuary]

crunch does not help at all, and honestly most avatars don't even need 8k, nor 4k, nor even 2k textures.

For example my avatar I been working on for months works and looks just fine with a single 1024 x 1024 texture.

For both PC & quest.

😅

Also most materials one could get away with using pure rgb nodes in blender and using the blender material-combiner extension to atlas them to 10x10 px islands on said atlas texture.

That is how I reduced my avatar to that size of a texture.

[cold yarrow]

that's a great technique if all you need are solid colors

[obsidian lake]

I do a lot of my cartoon style avatars like that now, you can also do some funky stuff with UVs to get lines on stuff without having to texture them based on the mesh

[cold yarrow]

Yeah I love the idea

[obsidian lake]

I don't have wifi rn so sorry for picture of a screen lol

But here's an example of an avatar I'm working on rn that uses that technique

Most of those blocks of color are for solid colors

Or like lines or sections of colors

So I don't have to draw them or add extra geometry

[cold yarrow]

oh very nice

[zealous void]

What is this referring to?

[heavy knot]

put outfits seperately on seperate newly uploaded avatars by themselves

[zealous void]

I see. I thought there was a way to "swap" avatars by toggle, moving outfits to separate avatars.

[obsidian lake]

You can have toggles for outfits, it's just saying that it's not very optimized.

[zealous void]

Oh, I know! I just thought it was referring to some sort of new system that would let you easily swap avatars via toggle for outfits to further optimize heavy avatars.

[marble rain]

there are a crap ton of ways to reduce overall use. but most avatars wont ever use that much Ram

[karmic laurel]

If I had a texture that is 1024 and accidentally kept it on 2048 in the thingy where u change resolution and compression stuff is that a bad or does that do nothing cuz the original is smaller anyway?

[buoyant holly]

it's not going to make the texture bigger than it already is

[proud mango]

Hi everyone, I was wondering there a way/methods to put baked textures or textures in general and convert/bake them into a vertex colours?

[atomic smelt]

Trying to optimize my Vroid avatar to work on quest. Anyone know how to fix these weird texture, and model issues?

Normally looks like this.

Is there anything I can do to make these issues not happen?

[tranquil glen]

the usual "cut the transparent part with knife tool" procedure
#avatar-general message

[atomic smelt]

Hm, that is on unity or will I have to install blender?

Also I don't get what the video is or how to do that stuff.

[tranquil glen]

blender

[atomic smelt]

Alright.

How do I import the converted VRM into blender?

[atomic smelt]

Wait, figured it out. Gotta figure out the cutting stuff now,

It looks like normal in Blender though.

[wind herald]

1. it doesn't help and 2. your cpu has to uncrunch, which makes your game freeze when loading someone's avatar with crunched textures

[waxen estuary]

ye

makes it worse when the pc is set up to use 512 MB of VRAM and nowhere in the bios lets you change this to reserve more of the system shared ram for this.

[floral mica]

4k/2k are definitely needed if theres small detail bits where the uv may be small

[ruby isle]

2k is plenty. If you need more than 2k then you're either focusing too much on the unnecessary details of your avatar or you have too many textures in general (in the case of atlasing)

[floral mica]

i will usually do 4k on the body texture

still plenty of room

[marble rain]

ram and vram is very different. and shared ram has nothing todo with vram

[waxen estuary]

lol I can fit plenty of details on a 1k body texture. If done creatively it provides more than enough and provides similar if not the exact same details as a 4k texture.

Just learn how to pack your uv’s smarter.

Also consider modeling half the body and using mirror modifier so it only requires 1 uv for both sides for half the texture work needed as well.

same is normally said for head as well and other mesh except hair

hair is the special asymmetrical part of an avatar.

Rest is most of the time symmetrical unless it is some oddly shaped accessory that goes on only a single side of the avatar.

[floral mica]

i don't make stuff from scratch

[waxen estuary]

That is most of why my avatar legit uses a single 1k image texture for the whole thing btw.

I don’t either

but I mess with the UV and abuse mirror modifier to optimize texture usage so

yeah

[floral mica]

if a single 4k still leaves me with plenty of room idrc about wasting the time doing that 🤷

[waxen estuary]

Bruh it’s not wasting time

[floral mica]

if the end result is the same

[waxen estuary]

Think of the people seeing your avatar in the game

you will make people’s gpus work extra hard

[floral mica]

oh no +10mb of vram

if that

[waxen estuary]

also with enough 4k textures you can also blow out someone’s new 4090 btw

[waxen estuary]

actually more than that

each 4k is 400% more vram than 1k, 8k is 400% more than 4k.

etc

each 4k texture is legit 20 MB of vram sometimes too

[floral mica]

that depends on the format

[radiant shadow]

4k isnt that big

[waxen estuary]

Assuming png with alpha that is not DXT1

[radiant shadow]

just put whatever alpha on another

or decals if you are on pc

[marble rain]

thats not even the best compression either

[waxen estuary]

Also consider most people on vrchat has 512 MB of VRAM too

[floral mica]

huh?

[radiant shadow]

wat no

[waxen estuary]

so an avatar with say 30 4k textures and say there is 5 of those

that will trip up Windows TDR for sure

[marble rain]

most people have 100-200 lol

[floral mica]

who is running a 2000s gpu?

[waxen estuary]

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/timeout-detection-and-recovery

[waxen estuary]

funny my Ryzen 7 5825U has 512 MB of VRAM

[marble rain]

tdr never happens from lack of vram

[radiant shadow]

if you are still running that low vram , be lucky it can even run vrchat , single room can eat more then 512

[waxen estuary]

most people who use vrc is on laptops

which means low vram

[floral mica]

lol according to who?

[marble rain]

also false

[radiant shadow]

my laptop have 4gb vram and its like 10 years old

[waxen estuary]

mine is not even 1 and a half years old either and has 64 GB normal ram

👀

[buoyant holly]

normal Ram is not terribly relevant as far as the texture size questions on pc

[floral mica]

thats where vram gets dumped when you inevitably fill so

[waxen estuary]

Also at the same time my laptop should be able to use vrchat normally as well.

[buoyant holly]

if you're using any PBR texturing you would probably need to have that number be 3 times bigger

[heavy knot]

iGPUs use the system memory for VRAM

[waxen estuary]

HP HP Pavilion Laptop 15-eh2xxx is the laptop I use btw (2 TB NVMe SSD (WD Green), 64 GB DDR4-3200 memory 1600 MHz (2x 32 GB))

[waxen estuary]

yes, but also there is a maximum amount of processing they can handle as well

and with the TDP of my APU being 15 WATTS that becomes a problem quickly.

Which probably explains why whenever I run VRCHAT ALONE it drains the battery even when connected to my 45 WATT charger.

I could use the 55 WATT charger from my older laptop that fits on it, however it might instead damage it.

[heavy knot]

that's the same for any other piece of silicon

[waxen estuary]

exactly

so optimizing textures as much as possible by doing tricks I discussed above (with smarter UV placements onto a smaller texture surface and using mirror modifier for half the mesh) would result in similar to exact same details with 400% less size (or more).

Also it don't matter what format the texture is stored the GPU converts it to a form that it understands anyways 😅.

[marble rain]

your way below specs. so it matters not how much

also format matters hugely

[obsidian lake]

100-200 textures?? who would need that many??

[marble rain]

no 100-200 mb of vram

[waxen estuary]

LOL

my avatar looks very good (realistic even)

[obsidian lake]

oh okay i got scared for a second

[waxen estuary]

with 1 MB texture VRAM and 5 MB of mesh VRAM

so yeah

now do math assume there is 400 of my avatars in a world I am in

how much VRAM would it use compared to many others (with 100~200 MB VRAM each).

😅

[waxen estuary]

this is pc version btw, quest is lower than 1 MB of texture VRAM, 1 MB is with backface culling off on PC).

[buoyant holly]

could we see a picture of the very well optimized Avatar

[waxen estuary]

sure

let me boot up unity rq

So 400 of my avatar (PC version): approx. 2.4 GB VRAM (both texture and mesh VRAM)
400 of avatars using 100~200 MB VRAM (most of the time texture alone and not mesh): approx. 40 GB~80 GB VRAM (again sometimes without the mesh and textures alone)

Also some meshes like the ones in my avatar I got away with using a single material that in blender has no texture, but a solid color that is picked by a color picker, that when I atlas becomes 10x10 px on the texture 😅.

[marble rain]

doubtful.

[ruby isle]

Realistic looks bad in VRChat though

[waxen estuary]

well more like semi-realistic really.

[ivory sluice]

PBR shading looks as realistic as it can
That it looks bad or good depends on the world itself

[waxen estuary]

ye

[wind herald]

i think you can actually assign more in the bios

[proper grail]

that number is a forced minimum, it scales as needed. only bad things come from raising the forced minimum

[wind herald]

yeah, "shared" gpu memory and allat

[waxen estuary]

I tried, did not see it

[fathom gust]

I'm going to try and optimize a pc only avatar soon to use as my main but I'm super new to doing it. Any big things that usually take up a lot of space that I should focus on Optimizing first?

[heavy knot]

what are you optimizing for mainly? Are you optimizing for a specific vrchat performance rank or just to get it to have a decent total frametime?

[fathom gust]

Just to get it to upload on the android build which is 10mb

[heavy knot]

primarily it would be reducing the amount of textures it uses and reducing texture size, and if there's any dance animations remove those since they can be pretty huge and can't be compressed too well.

[fathom gust]

thats what i need to get down

[fathom gust]

yep. about me rn

[buoyant holly]

https://www.poiyomi.com/blog/2022-10-17-texture-optimization some decent text documentation on reducing texture memory size

[fathom gust]

thank you! i will use this

[buoyant holly]

glad to be of help and your texture memory would need Improvement even on PC they are options in the texture in port settings to set the size per platform

[fathom gust]

what would you reccomend i set them to?

for pc

[heavy knot]

1024 can be used for most things if their UVs are fine, never use 4k+ for something like this

[fathom gust]

would it tank the resolution too much?

[heavy knot]

depends

[fathom gust]

could 2k work?

[heavy knot]

make sure to be looking at your avatar at a comfortable distance, gotta remember people aren't gonna be eyeballing every detail so some things can have a lower resolution

[fathom gust]

thats true, would you reccomend i upload it first to test out the different resolutions?

or juist look in the unity page

[heavy knot]

looking at it in Unity will be the same as in the game

it'll show it in the respective compression format

[fathom gust]

ok, sounds good. and just for clerification texture memory is not relevant to the ingame size right?

in terms of uploading for quest with the 10mb limit

or will it change both

[heavy knot]

Texture memory is different from the AssetBundle build size, yeah

texture memory is the texture VRAM usage when the assetbundle is decompressed (loaded in the game)

[fathom gust]

so the ingame size doesnt contribute to frame drops as much as the texture resolution will?

[heavy knot]

texture resolution won't effect framerate at all unless the it is outside the GPUs VRAM, which that sense you could say VRAM can effect FPS

if you want to directly fix FPS issues with your avatar, you'd want to mainly minimize the amount of material slots you use

[fathom gust]

so for the pc build i can leave everything the same but i should lower the texture resolution correct?

[heavy knot]

that texture memory usage is pretty high so I would yeah, since VRChat is probably going to block viewing that avatar by default with their new "Uncompressed size" limit coming out in a couple months

[fathom gust]

do you know what that limit will be or around what i should aim to get the avatar to?

[buoyant holly]

you'll be fine as far as the new change but you still probably should cut your texture memory usage in like 1/2

you should aim for under 150 megabytes at minimum on PC @fathom gust

[fathom gust]

ok that shouldnt be too incredibly hard to acheive then

[buoyant holly]

and like your metallic smoothness map doesn't need to be the same resolution as your color texture

[fathom gust]

i have no clue what that is

[buoyant holly]

okay in that case I would suggest you just half resolution like most of your textures on your Avatar to see what happens as far as setting your PC numbers

and you can set the resolution in the texture import settings non-destructively

[fathom gust]

i just got my avi and have compressed and half'd most the textures for the body, how would i check the numbers on it?

[heavy knot]

the SDK builder tab will show it in the performance stats

[fathom gust]

ah thats right, thank you

im having trouble with logging into the sdk, its not sending me the verification code

ive been trying for the past 10 minutes

[buoyant holly]

not that it would help with your SDK problem but making a texture half Rez uses 1/4 of vram

[fathom gust]

thats good, right.?

ok so i changed it for a bunch of the textures and it only went down by around 3 mb 😭

i need it down another around 50

[buoyant holly]

this tool can tell you what's taking up file size on your avatar when you do a test upload on pc https://github.com/oneVR/VRWorldToolkit

[fathom gust]

thank you 🙏

what function in it is it called?

[heavy knot]

build report

VRWorld Toolkit > World Debugger in the unity toolbar at the top

[fathom gust]

🙏

[fathom gust]

anyone willing to teach me how to use blender to optimize a avatar?

ive never touched blender before

[calm spade]

That would be a very large undertaking for someone, so I suggest following tutorials for that first
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2EEbgwoJzdt5kFVDyY2lliNqf7cWJeD3

[fathom gust]

i do have 1 thing though, how would i get my model into blender when all i have is these?

[calm spade]

The FBX file you would want to import is the avatar that is shown in your assets in your unity project

[fathom gust]

got it down from 40mb 😄

might do some more work on it tomorrow but i have work but hopefully that will fix a lot of the space issues!

[buoyant holly]

still too big for Quest but definitely nice Improvement where was most of that megabytes hiding

[fathom gust]

I just put everything into 4ths/squares whatever it's called instead of triangles

And then pressed all of the textures down

I'll probably see how far I can push some of it after work but that's all I could figure out in the hour and a half before I left

[buoyant holly]

that's not going to help any because Unity only uses triangles that's going to become triangles again when it's imported

but it definitely can be easier to dissolve Edge Loops when they're squares instead of triangles

[fathom gust]

I watched a blender video for Optimizing avatars and that's what it said to do :p

[buoyant holly]

like it definitely seems like you did something to take care of the file size just it probably wasn't turning it back into quads

[fathom gust]

Well as long as the file stays like that then it's cool

[fathom gust]

I'll most likely tinker with it more when I'm home. And is the size of the fbx file the size of the entire thing?

For exporting and what not

Or does it only contribute a little

[buoyant holly]

the fbx would only be the mesh data not the the textures

[fathom gust]

So the "in-game size"?

Like if I wanted to upload it with nothing tinkered, the ingame size would = the fbx file size

[buoyant holly]

fbx+ all of the pngs that make up your textures

[fathom gust]

So the goal for quest is to get the fbx > 10mb ?

[buoyant holly]

fbx & pngs > 10mb

[fathom gust]

Ok sounds good, thank you🙏

I'll let you know how it goes

[fathom gust]

theoretically since im uploading the avatar to the same blueprint as the pc version could i remove all the png's from the menu since i would only be seeing the pc version?

it would remove a little bit of space that i wouldnt really be using

[waxen estuary]

or just size down each texture as much as possible

like 8k -> 4k
4k -> 2k
2k -> 1k

in that order

and then test it in vrchat and see if it still looks fine.

After that I would consider implementing an atlas using the material combiner blender extension.

but first optimize the UV's as well to allow much smaller textures than those as well while preserving as much quality as possible.

For example if you see texture > 10x10 px that is a single solid color consider converting it to a solid color node instead of a texture from a file and using that extension to convert it to a 10x10 px island inside of the atlas texture to save space as well.

[marble rain]

that wouldn't do anything. and you wouldnt have any texture then apart from a flat color. also there are limits as to how far down you can go with textures or even colors before it turns into a a impossible to view mess.

[waxen estuary]

true but for things that would look the same way regardless it would cut down on size a metric ton.

[fathom gust]

I already put it way down in unity with crunch

[waxen estuary]

lol crunch changes nothing

if anything it makes things worse

as now your cpu has to then uncrunch those textures before the gpu can use them.

Resulting in major performance problems.

The only fix is to downsize the textures.

[fathom gust]

I've been told crunch compression is good for texture memory

Is it just a temp fix to be able to upload it?

And then it breaks in game again?

So what's the deal with that😭

I'm very confused now

[radiant shadow]

crunch is bad - only for those who need to fit within 10mb usually use em , pc should never use it

[heavy knot]

crunch compression is just for the download size of the avatar

it won't effect VRAM since it's uncompressed on load

[radiant shadow]

https://ask.vrchat.com/t/developer-update-14-march-2024/23401#how-do-i-reduce-the-compressed-and-uncompressed-size-of-my-avatars-17

[fathom gust]

Very good to know, might re-upload my pc avi then

Would crunch compression also contribute to avatar switch lag for other people?

[heavy knot]

it can add more to it, yes

[fathom gust]

Hmm ok

[waxen estuary]

it also can contribute to people crashing as well.

especially if you got like 200~300 4 or 8k textures

as it can easily overwhelm even a 4090.

with enough avatars like that that is.

[fathom gust]

I have no 4-8k, it's all 2k or less

So it really shouldn't strain too much

I think the pc version should be fine, if too many people have issues with it I'll re-upload it without so much crunch compression but I don't think I did too much h

For the quest version I'll make sure to do minimal crunch

Only maybe to squeeze under the limit

[waxen estuary]

quest does not need crunch at all

it will overpower it

and make it so hot it be like roasting their head like a grilled cheese

[radiant shadow]

some random quest fallback with 4k texture still under 10mb limit - 2.3mb compressed - no crunch / 9.9k tris

[waxen estuary]

I have a single 1k atlas texture my avatar uses

for both pc and quest

bc I upload both with same fbx project and texture

😅

[marble rain]

not correct. nothing is uncompressed into vram. it stays compressed. however crunch compression does not affect vram that is true.

[heavy knot]

So

How would AssetBundle size be effected, but not VRAM without uncompressing that texture

it has to be uncrunched somewhere

[marble rain]

because the compressed format gets only uncompressed. to the cpu

but the underlying format which is compressed

stays that way when it gets uploaded to the gpu

or send over rather

[heavy knot]

So, then where is that texture that is unaffected in size to GPU memory at all in the AssetBundle

are we just trying to nitpick certain keywords here?

[marble rain]

the texture was uncompressed by the cpu. which is stored in memory. but the gpu gets the compressed version of it since it knows how to read the compresed data faster.

[heavy knot]

My point still went across in the original post. VRAM usage is not effected

[marble rain]

you just need to word it differently.

[heavy knot]

I didn't try to blow out a explanation of crunch formats to someone

cause that wasn't the question

[marble rain]

anyway dont use crunch compression. unless very specific needs are required. but even then lowering texture resolution might be more beneficial

[fathom gust]

so i made the new fbx for it and replaced it in the file in unity but it just seemed to kinda break, did i do something wrong?

does the prefab asset have anything to do with this?

[lapis prawn]

earlier it was mentioned you have to drop it into the prefab in windows, not unity. then drop the entire thing into unity.

[fathom gust]

oh were way past that lmfao

but thank you <3

[stoic gust]

Does anyone know how i could get around the bounds? i worked really hard for this model to be quest compatible just for it to be ruined because i have a BIG tail