avatar-optimization

[stoic gust]

its a little frustrating when its not even 1mb

[proper grail]

wrap the tail around you by default, have it unwrap as an animation

[stoic gust]

wouldnt that create bone issues?

[proper grail]

probably will unrender if people arent looking at you though

im not sure what you mean by bone issues. if you are to pose the bones in blender before exporting than straiten them in unity via animation what issues are you worried about

[stoic gust]

i genuinely dont know, i legit like JUST started modeling and i have no ideaa what the heck is going on

[proper grail]

oh, bounds is just a square around the model. if camera can see, render this model. depending on your physbone settings you may not even need to animate the tail straiten out, if it works how normal snake tails do your movements will do fine

just coil it around you, ez pz

[stoic gust]

so.. id just pose it in pose mode and then export it?

[proper grail]

yep, if you never unpacked in unity it will update no problems

[stoic gust]

i think i may have unpacked..

how to repack pls

[spring sun]

you dont

[heavy knot]

you can't "repack", you'll need to drag the FBX back into the hierarchy and transfer any changed things you did to the avatar. You can use Pumkin's avatar tools to simplify the process

[stoic gust]

so id drag these out, and put them on the new model?

[heavy knot]

the avatar is packed still in your scene

[stoic gust]

it is??

[stoic gust]

oh

[heavy knot]

this icon on it inside of the hierarchy means it's packed

never unpack it

[stoic gust]

so where do i drag the neww fbx.. cause everytime i do it just adds a"(1)" after it

[heavy knot]

over the existing FBX

overwriting it works just fine

[stoic gust]

okayyyy.....

is it okay if my tail sinks through the floor in blender? i dont know how to keep my tail locked on the ground when curling it

[stoic gust]

it didnt work

[heavy knot]

those look like 2 seperate FBX files

[stoic gust]

all i did was curl the tail, export the updated blend file, made SURE that it was the EXACT same name

[heavy knot]

in blender, you can overwrite existing files when exporting, the title bar will be in red

[stoic gust]

and dragged it onto the fbx

[stoic gust]

thats what i did

[fathom gust]

im trying to get this avi down a little bit in size only around 3mb and nothing im doing is changing anything

[calm spade]

You scaled your textures down?

[fathom gust]

it was aglitch, i fixed it

[obsidian lake]

it's not a glitch, it's reading from your last build

because it doesn't know the size until after it compiles everything

[fathom gust]

ohh ok, never have had that happen before

(i havent uploaded much either)

[stoic gust]

so it didnt work.. it clips inside of my when i turn right and doesnt allow to be bent the other way than where it was bent

its difficult to explain, but it dont work

guess ill just live with the bad rating

[sharp compass]

How do I lower my material slots?

[pure prism]

what do i do when it says "Failed to create material drawer Enum with arguments 'Thry.BlendOp' "

[spring sun]

use less materials

[crimson thicket]

Hmm optimized

[raw oar]

press the auto fixes

[deft musk]

How do get preformance to good? I've pressed auto-fix on everything I could and I'm left here. 2 of the "material slots" thingies is because I imported a muteboard prop, the other 2 are the meshes or whatever you call them for my character like the clothes and skin. (the muteboard prop is really basic so maybe those material slots aren't needed, I don't even know how to remove them lol)

[buoyant holly]

basically you would need to combine everything into like 1 or 2 meshes

[deft musk]

this is just an avatar I paid for an put in unity and made a few changes, to combine the meshes would I have to try mess around with it in blender?

[buoyant holly]

probably

[gritty needle]

try https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer first

fully reversible optimizer that works on upload

[zinc scroll]

hi, im trying to upload a avi i just bought, and it says i dont have permission to upload, i was wondering how i can get permission?

[buoyant holly]

play VRchat more and make sure it's a vrchat account not a Oculus or Steam account

[zinc scroll]

thats..... very dumb

but alrighty

[crisp oak]

It's a social game I assume it's to help with keeping the amount of toxic avatars, if people could just make a new account and upload immediately then people would use burner accounts and upload crashers, nsfw, or ripped avatars without risk to their main account

its actually very smart

[karmic laurel]

Out of desperation and lack of knowledge about this, I wanted to ask if I make parts of a texture image of my avatar transparent that are not being used, does it have positive effect and makes texture memory go below 10mb?

[zealous wigeon]

It does not, if anything it is likely to increase the size unless you were already using transparency of some kind on the texture.

To get below 10mb decrease the textures resolution and if your avatar has a lot of blendshapes then vrcfury has a component that can remove ones that aren't going to be animated/used.

[karmic laurel]

Oh how do I remove those

[zealous wigeon]

Easiest way, use the blendshape optimizer component that comes with VRCFury.

You just add it and it will do its thing each time you upload, leaving the avatar entirely untouched outside of uploading.

[karmic laurel]

Okok thanks

[eternal tide]

if you can't manage to improve your avatar rank despite trying everything, it's possible to just have multiple versions uploaded with different feature sets. use prefab variants

[merry drift]

Hello (First of all, if you wish to respond to me, please ping me or click on the "reply" button, thank you! - This is what to do so that it is even more optimized than you already know! Thank you very much for your help!

EDIT: knowing that I have a hammer, a flashlight, and I have lots of clothes on my main avatar including this one :p

[heavy knot]

In the priority order it would be to minimize on your material slots first

each material slot is a drawcall on the CPU

[merry drift]

Okay, I take note 🙂

[merry drift]

Thank you for the advice, I will try little by little to reduce certain things that are useless on my avatar, I went from 62 to 53 material slots! thank you very much to you

[spring crescent]

Can someone tell me why quest people can only have 10 mb avatar? Everytime I try to upload on Quest, I've something like 13-14 mb so I can't upload. That's so annoying

[buoyant holly]

the quest has a very limited amount of ram to work with so they need to set the limit low so you can actually have more than two people in the room as the application crashes when it runs out of RAM

[spring crescent]

That's ass, my textures are in 128 I can't do lower

[buoyant holly]

maybe check with vrchat World toolkit what's taking up file size

[wind herald]

how many polygons and blendshapes does your avatar have?

[harsh tangle]

Does it improve performance if I toggle off phys bones with a toggle in-game?

Example: My jacket has phys bones and when I toggle of the jacket, I also toggle of the phys bones for the jacket since it's not in use in-game.

[wind herald]

only slightly, but yes

[obsidian lake]

combine your meshes together in blender and then atlas your textures and use only 1 material. Material combiner addon in blender can do this automatically

[obsidian lake]

if you're on quest it makes a huge difference. It makes a difference on PC too, but less noticable. Please disable physbones when the toggles using them are disabled 🙏

[harsh tangle]

Yeah, that's what I did
I rarely hear someone talk about it.
So I just did it anyways now

[gritty needle]

delete whole meshes at that point

[pallid anvil]

How would i Optimize my avatar to get it down from 10.96 to 10 ? I've tried changing the texture resolution but it only goes down if i set it to a very low quality like below 256

[heavy knot]

try removing unused blendshapes through using something like VRCFury

[bleak maple]

Can't find much on documentation so I'm reposting my question from #1149075823593275504 :

Hiya!
With Unity 2019, I know that blendshapes used to take their toll on performance, with the better practice being to separate meshes with many blendshapes from static parts of the avatar, though this increases draw calls.
I think I've heard that from Unity 2021 onwards, performance of blendshapes have improved drastically, but I don't know how true this is. Is it worth making toggles through blendshapes instead of separate meshes now? Are blendshapes basically free/better than before? Thanks!

i guess i have my answer

Sorry for ping, just know your message and github link has been helpful at least to one person 🙏

Still, does anybody know what's better between these two options for toggling extra-clothing when shader-based toggling is not available (on quest for example?)

• separate mesh for clothing, toggle the entire clothing mesh
• 1 mesh only, but blendshape-shrink the clothing to toggle

according to perf ranks, 2nd should be better but it feels very wrong

[marble rain]

use Poiyomi with UV discard to have clothing toggles.

[buoyant holly]

the question was about Quest avatars so that's not an option

[marble rain]

hmm? they dont say that. unless it was discussed earlier

[marble rain]

oh lol i missed that part imao

[marble rain]

you can test it but it should be seperate mesh. that said your limited to 10 mb regardless

[bleak maple]

I already use poiyomi for that ofc on the pc version

[bleak maple]

is there any way to accurately profile for that even?

I'd be more than willing to but i'm afraid i don't how one should go about it

[marble rain]

check the frametiming in editor

[heavy knot]

Mesh won’t matter if it’s already a separate material slot

Splitting a single mesh that has 2 material slots won’t effect performance/draw calls

[proper grail]

by that math 2+1 = 4

meshes + materials

[ivory sluice]

Materials are processed as meshes
They are both separated between draw calls
That's why the mesh class on unity calls materials "submeshes"

[cold yarrow]

not sure anyone answered, but always-on blendshapes were a significant performance hit in 2019. This is far less so in 2022 but still it'd be better to just apply that to your model. So I don't think the "split the head mesh" thing is as necessary as it was.

but re: clothing, yeah, I try to use UV tile discard when I can

[marble rain]

yes it does lol. your adding more an additional renderer.. another renderer is different from just having a single renderer with 2 materials. sure if you split it into 2/1 so two meshes and 1 material each. it will still only have 2 draw calls. but you end up using more resources by having more renderers.

[heavy knot]

Can you show frametimes and profiler data of a mesh with 2 material slots compared with a separated mesh with 1 material slot each

[marble rain]

no cause i dont have the time atm lol. but why do you think otherwise. both vrchat and every other unity developer says use less skinned meshes. where possible.

and why do u think it batches them

there is a reason why vrchat even recognize that more skinned meshes = more resources used, not just because of draw calls but also because the intial overhead created by having a skinned mesh

[heavy knot]

I'm not seeing massive differences in a scene with 110 separated 2 meshes with 1 material slot from 110 meshes with 2 material slots, please stop sitting on this mound of dunning kruger and trying to nitpick everything I say in this channel it's not really fun to listen to. The main thing I'm trying to say is the slots themselves are way more costly than just having another renderer

if it's somehow different on an Android APU, so be it I'm not going to bother with building a unity player and sideloading it onto my Quest just for that reason

Having another mesh that is probably going to be on/off for long periods of time won't be a dramatic explosion in performance unless it's absolutely soaked in material slots and horrible topology

the original question was if using an entire blendshape to toggle clothes was actually performant, which causes issues and is more skinning calls. There won't be a massive frametime drop just because someone split their clothes from their body mesh since they're already different material slots and toggling it that way, it's a lot more efficient anyway to be just discarding the entire mesh and sending it to memory when toggling it than shrink it weirdly and have weird issues of clothes peeking out on certain poses.

[marble rain]

not my problem if you feel like its nitpicking but its because what u say in general is just not true. or incorrect. plus it doesn't matter if you have 110 different objects that uses the same material or different since they are the same mesh they will get batched. but in case of vrc where every avatar typically has something different to it. it cant batch them. and when it comes to android/standalone vr headests like quest. its even more important to save resources where ever you can and however small it is

[bleak maple]

Just thought i'd drop that, i know how to atlas textures and might do it if performance increases as a result so the question becomes "1 drawcall + blendshapes" or "2 drawcalls +fewer blendshapes" so this isn't really the question

But still! I guess i'll have to profile on my own to find out. Thanks for the insight!

[cosmic plover]

can I layer with 0 weight still use paramiter drivers?

[cold yarrow]

a layer with 0 weight will not activate at all

[ocean adder]

Is there a tool that can tell you what your avatars download size will be before you upload it?

I’m having trouble with an avi that I’ve optimized the best I can and it’s still 40mb download.

[cosmic plover]

no true way to predict download size as the file is compressed at build

40MB is still reasonable for a pc avi with a bunch of features tho

[ocean adder]

just has faceemo with 7 expressions and gogoloco, its just 50k poly too. I dont see why its so high compared to other avatars ive made? do expressions (not blendshapes but the expression toggles) increase the download size?

[bleak maple]

Don't know if it still works but I used to use this to know what eats up download size the most: https://github.com/MunifiSense/VRChat-Build-Size-Viewer

just put it in your project and run it in the menu after you uploaded your avi

[crisp roost]

how do i decimate a mesh in blender without using the modifier or limited dissolve

i remember there being an option to decimate the selection in the menus but i can't find it and every single tutorial im looking up is talking about the modifier

[crisp roost]

well i found out how, it’s under mesh > clean up

[vapid elm]

I remember hearing about being able to remove unused blendshapes with vrc fury, but I don't see the option anywhere?

[vapid elm]

nvm lol, I just ended up just doing it manually

[heavy knot]

next time when you encounter this, it's a component (VRCFury Blendshape Optimizer)

most of VRCFury's features are gameobject components

[vapid elm]

what's the best optimized thing's to make sure are checked off and not checked off for quest avi's for when it come's to textures?

[buoyant holly]

none of those things you listed need to be tweaked

basically the main ones you would worry about is Max texture resolution and like the texture compression format

like set the Resolute max resolution as low as you can make it on quest as the quest is limited on the amount of ram it has

[vapid elm]

I have some texture's without the "mip streaming" checked on should I check it on?

sorry on

auto correct be my enemy lol

[buoyant holly]

the sdk prefers if you have it with mip streaming on

[vapid elm]

is there a best compression format?, or is the default the way to go in terms of quest

[buoyant holly]

you'll probably be fine with defaults for now

[vapid elm]

I've just been trying to learn all the bets way's of optimizing for quest since I have so much avi's I'd love to make better looking for the quest side

the best tricks I've got so far is, retopology and combining materials/texture's and mesh. other than that I still suffer with making the texture's look good on quest and still be optimized

I've seen people make really good looking textures for quest that are nice and optimized, but I don't know how they do it

[buoyant holly]

do you know about stacking symmetrical UVS on top of each other

[vapid elm]

I have not no

will have to look it up now tho

[upper yacht]

Not sure if you tested yet, but, skinning is since unity 2020 done by compute on the GPU rather than on the CPU (this can be toggled but is turned on by default). These calls are not batched together where possible and are per skinned mesh. This means that a non-high density meshes would generally compute faster as one mesh since there's overhead depending on the bandwidth between CPU and GPU.

[wind herald]

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

In short: DXT1 for textures without alpha that are simple and don‘t need a lot of detail, BC7 for textures with alpha or that have gradients and should look good, BC5 for normal maps

[vapid elm]

does it matter for which one I use for a quest avi?

one is a the "Linux setting" and the other is "server settings"

[zealous wigeon]

Do you have android build support installed?
There should be another tab alongside "Default" and the PC one for Android.

And Android supports some of these formats, but also has its own, one of which is ASTC which is great for ordinary color textures, the higher the [number]x[number] is, the less VRAM it uses, at the cost of quality of course, but even 12x12 looked pretty good tbh.

[vapid elm]

the android tab is behind the white pop up menu, but I couldn't find the BC7 in the android pop up for some reason tho

what I was reading It looked like BC7 was what I wanted, but I can't seem to find it in the android pop up section

Is it a me issue? or does android just not have the option...

If it doesn't have the option of using BC7 should i just use the ASTC 12x12 then as a substitute?

[zealous wigeon]

Yeah, while I couldn't remember exactly which formats Android lacked, it lacks some of them entirely, apparently BC7
And I do not know if ASTC is the right choice, but it will probably work.
Also 12x12 is the highest compressed one, the one that will look the worst, the one you probably shouldn't use unless you really want to compress a texture.
I can't remember which one VRChat recommends, but think it was 6x6.

[vapid elm]

what I found that works really good is setting it to 12x12 and doubling the resolution or an already compressed texture and it looks really good while keeping the same size

Here's a comparison test I did

I found what works best for me is doing the 12x12 at two times the resolution since it makes it look better, while still keeping the same size as the other methods👌

discovering this today has made me happy, thank you for mentioning this compression meth for quest avi's g @zealous wigeon

[wind herald]

The higher the astc block size, the lower the quality and vram usage

You can just increase it as much as possible without it looking substantially worse

Keep in mind quest standalone usually looks worse anyway, so lower quality textures are not as noticeable

[vapid elm]

I made sure I'm still in the green👍

[celest spade]

how do i fix this

help pls

pls..

idk what im doing

[tranquil quail]

Odds are you have too many things. Start by removing unnecessary items and lowering texture resolution

[celest spade]

how

[tranquil quail]

There’s alot of YouTube tutorials on uploading for quest

Seeing the 10mb limit I’m assuming that’s the target build

[celest spade]

is there anything i should change here?

[vapid elm]

what's your texture memory usage size on ya avi

a good way to check is by using the thy add on for unity

That's what I use at least lol to check how optimized my avi is

[celest spade]

ill try it out later ty tho

[jagged dagger]

Mmh

Is that performance of current active constraints?

[wind herald]

looks like it

assuming fps without constraints is 90 or 11.11ms and there are 40 avatars with that amount of constraints, so 40x0.158ms or 6.32ms, it would bring the frametime up to 17.43ms or fps down to 57

[vestal python]

How can i combine materials and atlas textures?

[spring sun]

#avatar-help message

[obsidian lake]

most of those settings affect appearance rather than optimization. For quality and optimization purposes (although how well this works for you personally depends on the style of your avatar) i would recommend starting out with lower resolution textures instead of trying to compress or downsize larger ones, and use "point (no filter)" for the interpolation. It gives it a more "pixely" look, where each pixel is sharp and visible, so this works better if you do it intentionally and stylistically.

Also when you are making your avatar, make sure you optimize your UVs

the things that need to be high-res should take up more space

for things that are a solid color you only need a few pixels of that color and just scale the UVs to 0

if you are using standard lite, you can try making extra UV maps and taking advantage of detail maps

also for UVs, if you are making cartoon-styled avatars and need solid lines, you can use regular UV unwrap and/or "project from view" along with the UV grid to square addon and/or some careful editing of the UVs to make very solid lines in very small places on the texture

[dense mirage]

Upload help please 🙏

[fiery chasm]

Well you gotta tell us what you need help with first...

[deep roost]

lol yeah

[pulsar cypress]

Heyah, so I was removing some textures to make the loading of my avatar in world go down, but it stayed pretty much the same. Is there anything that has a heavy influence on what the download size is in game? I'm trying to optimize at least so people can see me without having to enable me... because not many people want to do that these days.

should I remove certain clothing I won't use? would that heavily impact the size?

[daring aurora]

Lower the resolution of your textures and delete everything that you won't use, clothes, props, physbones, etc

[marble rain]

typically its ideally a good idea to have seperate versions of your avatar. or use uv discard to have up to 16 outfits per 1 material

[pulsar cypress]

Thank you for the tips. I really appreciate it. I will try both methods ❤️

[sturdy socket]

Just don't be like some people that use uv discard and then use an 8k texture

[pulsar cypress]

whew 8k seems so big lol

I don't think I've been past 4k tbh

[sturdy socket]

It is, and eats a hella lot of vram
I recommend using up to 1k if you have separate parts
And max 4k if the whole avatar is one material

[pulsar cypress]

okay thanks for the tip :3 I'll try to use lower textures

[sturdy socket]

Another tip is if you are using masks on your material you can usually have them at a lower res than the base color/normal map
It varies how low you can go from model to model but I have been able to get masks down to 128x128 without any artifacts

This varies from model to model so you might want to experiment

[pulsar cypress]

oh wow that is a really cool idea. I didn't think about that

thank you :3

[sturdy socket]

Np, happy optimizing

[pulsar cypress]

I will :3 so many awesome tips. I'm glad I asked!

[karmic laurel]

I guess this falls under optimization in a way. When I have a toggle in FX, I set the transition to 0 but the other thing still confuses me cuz many people do it differently and idk if it's just reflex or has an actual use. Some ppl set exit time to 0 before unchecking it. Wouldn't unchecking it already be enough since it's yk unchecked and therefore 0 in theory?

[proper grail]

Its a small detail, exit time of 0 means to try and leave immediately while no exit time means wait for a parameter in any transition to change to try and leave

[stark bear]

Just how bad are animator layers for performance? Is there a breakpoint where they get a lot worse, or is smushing everything you can into as few layers as possible always worth it?

and do layers with 0 weight still contribute to that performance hit?

[supple trout]

Tupper did go over it in a presentation on furality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFBQeNON64Q and justsleightly did do some testing https://notes.sleightly.dev/benchmarks/ , thrys avatar evaluator also labels 33 layers (for my avi) as "poor" already. Thrys tool however counts all the layers, even Base which is running only for yourself and not for others if memory serves right.

but TL;DR:

• each layer adds cpu time, so the less the better
• 0 wight layers still do the update step, hence they still contribute (tupper was made aware of this after the presentation, you see it in the comment section of the video)

Regarding smushing everything into as few layers as possible:
not necessarily worth it, if you go a long way to do so. Performance wise (from own testing, didnt record results but my friends and i did test it a lot) If your avatar is running 20 layers and someone else is doing 100, switching into an avatar with only 3 layers doesnt have any real measurable performance impact, since the one with 100 layers is limiting you in the first place. We did test with unlimited fps, 1080p resolution and 7950x3d + 4080 hardware. What this testing showed as well however, that my very poor (24 mats, 5 meshes, 240k poly, 33 layers) is outperforming a green rated 87 layer avatar. (keep in mind that this testing is aimed to go purely for cpu limitations, graphics wise the very poor one will be worse)

So I personally would aim for "less layers if possible and not too much of a hassle", if you are at lets say 20 layers you are almost always limited by someone else anyways 🤷‍♂️

[stark bear]

Awesome, thank you! Great info

[supple trout]

just to show, the green one has 572 (we go with afterburners fps here, since the worlds fps counter fluctuates heavily when taking screenshots), while the very poor one is at roughly 640

[stark bear]

take that, people who say very poor avatars can't be optimized! xD

[supple trout]

they can, but thats more the exception than the standard

[marble rain]

the annoying part is that unity's documentation clearly states a layer with 0 weight wont update. but apprently this is wrong and unity just have not updated their docs. but the lower amount of layers the better. but the same goes for everything else. such as materials,

[marble rain]

it can easily. the current performance ranking is heavily oudated and does not really reflect what is heavy or not. for instance i have seen plenty of poor or very poor with a super low material count and animation layers. we talk about < 10 but because their polygons is above 70k it goes immediately very poor. i really hope we get a much better ranking soon. that is determined by how heavy something is

[supple trout]

one can easily test that with weight 0 layers and parameter drivers, they still do work in such cases, so the layer in general if functional, just not added to the end result

[drifting turtle]

layer count should really be a part of perf stats 🙏 can't trust the green rank these days

[stark bear]

apparently they can't get that at runtime, the animator gets compiled into a black box

but thry's perf tool warns you about it, im gonna start using that in all my projects

[obsidian lake]

Easiest way to have less layers is using direct blendtrees for your toggles. Honestly, if you know how to use them and are already using them for most of your toggles, you kinda have to go out of your way to not put them in the direct blendtree. This isn't a huge deal for avatars with lots of toggles as you said, but I have an avatar for example with 50 toggles so I managed to get it down to 4 layers (I could've gotten it down to 2 but I didn't know at the time you could use default int and bool parameters in blendtrees like "GestureLeft" and "Viseme". You just have to spell them the same and add them as floats. Direct blendtrees work for toggles, but will not work for sequential animations. Typically though most avatars will not have a lot of those.

[obsidian lake]

Shouldn't the get it before building the avatar? If thrys performance tools can get it idk why the sdk can't

[supple trout]

it doesnt work for sequential animations as you said, but if your toggle also triggers a parameter driver there isnt much you can do as well. Also some properties (like Alpha Global Mask) dislike being in a direct blendtree. (at least back in poi 8.2)

I should have clarified what i meant with "out of the way", i meant mainly dissolve toggles and systems where it is not an easy "on off" or "value between two animations" 🙂 But otherwise yeah, adding a simple stuff like a hueshift or a simple on/off thing is way quicker in a direct blendtree xD

[edgy bone]

Could be wrong but it might be to sidestep forbidden SDK's that lie about the stats of avatars since it's all checked sever side. Unfortunate they can't unpack the animators though.

[marble rain]

you diff can easily get the layer counts easily. even at runtime. and they wouldn't need to unpack the animators either.

[edgy bone]

What I mean is there isn't a easy way to prefetch this metric since if it's at runtime the client would need to first load and inspect the layer count meaning it can't be blocked by the safety system proactively potentially, right?

[marble rain]

well not really. its just as they are doing now. before the avatar loads i am pretty use they use some meta data system to detect the stats.

[silver brook]

The layer count can surely be read, as you can see in the avatar debug menu
Even the state names and all the parameters are available to see

[obsidian lake]

Actually I'm kind of curious about this. Doesn't it save the layer names since you can see them in the debug menu? Or maybe I'm misremembering

[edgy bone]

Well this is kind of what I wanted to figure out since someone asked originally, "why not get all of the info on the controller at upload," to which people said they would know how many layers are in there supposedly due to meta data.

So it begs the question if they know how many layers they have in peoples animators then why aren't we able to yet block based on layer count yet is what I wanted to get at. Perhaps it's still in the works or perhaps they can't interrogate this information accurately yet in with the current process of gathering the avatar package's performance metrics at least for now. It's getting a bit out of scope for the channel purpose though so I might drop the topic for the time being.

[patent cave]

I made an avatar in VRoid, but I need to optimize it. Do you have any suggestions for how to do it? (Like, should I use blender?) I need to remove clothes bones primarily!!

[obsidian lake]

Yes use blender and the bone merger addon

[patent cave]

where can I find the bone merger? I have never used blender before 🥺

[obsidian lake]

https://github.com/vr-voyage/blender_bones_merger

[cold yoke]

0 mb tex memory [i haven't gotten to adding textures & atlasing into 1 mat mmm]

[frosty citrus]

Ok so skinned mesh renderers are something vrchat hates a lot of on an avatar, but why?

If I were to merge my entire avatar (including all clothes) into one single Skinned Mesh Renderer, to get a higher performance ranking, it would perform worse due to the toggleable clothing (every major piece of clothing is toggleable), always rendering, even if a shape key or whatever is used to hide it from view whilst not being worn

Should I just suck up a "worse" performance ranking and keep my skinned mesh renderers as they are, or is there some way to do it?

[obsidian lake]

deformations and draw calls. Really the performance of 1 vs multiple skinned mesh renderers depends on your individual avatar. Performance rankings aren't perfect btw, they are just general guidelines. Unfortunately because of how they affect your avatar being shown, sometimes it's more ideal to have a slightly less performant avatar to get a better performance rank. Generally speaking though they are a pretty accurate measurement (aside from some stuff they don't account for like animator layers)

[ocean adder]

are outlines on a shader a large performance cost?

if my avatar has around 69k poly, technically with outlines it would go to double that, right? would people see my shader fallback then with regular shield settings?

also, how much detail am i really sacrificing from 4k to 2k? im trying to keep my avatar under 30mb

[supple trout]

not a lot, it really depends on how your texture is made and how !close! someone is to you. 4k norm (21.3mb if it has alpha, 10.7 if no alpha) vs. 2k high (5.3mb). Let me put in an example of my leg tattoo (it is on the body texture) in 2k vs 4k

without zooming in, you probably wont see a difference, camera in unity is about 1meter distance

[marble rain]

use Uv Discard. you can get around using shape keys. 1 material can support up to 16 toggleable pieces of clothes.

[marble rain]

you sacrifice alot. depending on the color choices and overall design choice. its more blured with 2k.

[marble rain]

depends on the design choice. it varies quite alot. but 2k should be fine

[supple trout]

yes in terms of data and accuracy you loose a lot and it tends to get blurry faster yes, but how much do you see of that loss inside of vrchat during normal use?

[marble rain]

depends alot on the situations. but typically not a crap ton

[supple trout]

situational and texture dependend, yes 🙂 if i go face first over my avi i see a difference between 4k and 2k easily as well, if i look at it from 1 meter away i almost cant tell anymore.

[proper grail]

And you can always upload more than one version, stay in the 2k while nyoomin around and switch to the 4k as needed.

no need to go without~

[marble rain]

well having 30-50 mb of vram usage is not going to kill anyone. most gpus have 8gb while typically 2 gb of it is used to just be in vr. so obviously 6 gb there. but even if you have 100 people at 50 mb each thats only 5 gb. and its only going to be less and less of a concern the more vram gpu's get. like nvidia and amd mostly equip even low end gpus like the 4060 and Rx 7600 both have 8 gb. while the 4070 for instance has 12 gb.

[supple trout]

you are only counting "texture memory" there, the mesh itself is in the vram as well. If one is doing 30-50mb texture memory usage one is obviously in a very good spot in regards of optimization compared to the usual 200mb+ users out there. (and lets not talk about the 500mb nukes)

[marble rain]

no i am counting the total amount. 30-50 mb per avatar.

realisticly most avatars typically sit between 5-15 mb of mesh and 30+ mb of texture. which is ultimately fine. and has no impact on anyone

[supple trout]

kinda wish i would be in such lobbies 😆 guess i have to rethink whom i hanging around with

[tranquil quail]

It’d be nice if there was a way to hide texture memory like how you can block avatars over a certain download size

[frigid badger]

open beta has this i believe

[marble rain]

we prob get it at some point for now we dont have anyway to do so

[tranquil quail]

I’ll have to check settings when I’m home. Always been on the open beta unless there’s a major bug

[frigid badger]

i saw it in open beta a while ago so it would be weird if it was missing

[hallow epoch]

what rank does the fallback avatar need to be in order to qualify as a fallback?

[hallow epoch]

👍 thank you, somehow i missed that

[supple trout]

but if you just wanna have one for PC, you can upload a fitting Android one onto the same Avatar ID as your good/excellent rated PC upload

[hallow epoch]

sick, I was just wanting to optimize a fallback for my pc avatar, and just wanted to know how many tris i had to work with

[patent cave]

I figured out how to add the plugin to blender, but every time i try to merge bones, it says something like "tool doesnt work on meshes bound to same armature". What am I doing wrong?

[obsidian lake]

ah sorry it only works with 1 mesh at a time

so you can only have 1 mesh parented to the armature

[patent cave]

is there some way I can change the model so that the merging works properly without... uh... breaking it 😂

the current situation

[frosty citrus]

how can i armature link without using VRCFury? i don't really wanna use vrcf after it fucked up my toggles between PC and Quest

[obsidian lake]

i haven't found a tool that does this, the workarounds are to either join all your meshes together, or make duplicates of your armature for each one and merge them seperately with each mesh parented to a different armature

[patent cave]

how do i do that? I presume that joining all meshes is easiest?

[spring sun]

in unity without ever touching blender you would unpack the prefab you want to attach to the avatar and move each bone to the respective bone

in blender as long as they share the same name just reparent and switch the armature modifier to the base model's armature

[frosty citrus]

what about if it's one of those that just, has a really weird setup (like only a select few of the bones from the base model)

what then?

[spring sun]

if they dont share the same name then you would need to rename each of the groups so they can use the weight painting

[spring sun]

both would still work

[frosty citrus]

interesting

[spring sun]

its just if it has differently named bones you just need to rename the group on the mesh to the correctly named bone of the base model's armature

like if its a bone named Elbow on the clothing for example and the base body is LowerArm
then you just go in and change the name of the group "Elbow" to "LowerArm"

[frosty citrus]

I see

I'll give that a go and pray that it works haha

Cuz I think I could get a better performance ranking by not having so many bones lol

[spring sun]

yea

[frosty citrus]

anyone know what the general jist for merging my clothes into uv-discardables is? and does it work on Quest?

like, reducing skinned mesh renderer count

[zealous wigeon]

The Poi docs has a video on how to set it up on their docs, explaining how to do it with words wouldn't work well https://www.poiyomi.com/special-fx/uv-tile-discard

And no, it does not work on Quest, this requires a shader to support it and no Quest shaders do.

[next atlas]

I'm trying to export an avatar I've optimized from blender and are struggling with UV-mapping and texture baking. From my research this is the best way to deal with textures?`

Perhaps someone can help me a bit? Whatever I do, it just messes up my textures

[marble rain]

eh? what do u mean it messes up your textures

[next atlas]

UV map and textures does not lign up anymore

But perhaps I should just use CATS and not all other plugins?

[marble rain]

eh if u move the UV map u need to retexture.

[radiant shadow]

create a second uv, move whatever you want to be a hide toggle ( x and y direction )

you end up with something like this , 0.0 is whatever you never want to toggle , others are +1-3 y & x direction

set uv toggle to use uv1/whatever

[next atlas]

Do I have to do this? There so crazy many faces that needs to be managed 😭

[buoyant holly]

yes how else is it supposed to know what to toggle

[radiant shadow]

just shove whatever you want to be uv discarded off the main uv in y/x direction , what i do is just select what i want to toggle , and use , g x 1 , that part is now this place in uv discard

[next atlas]

But I'm not using toggles

And also when i try unwrapping the islands are in no way of matching with textures

[zealous wigeon]

You shouldn't unwrap after textures already exist, unless you are going to bake the textures, which is when you'd use CATS baking (or Tuxedo if using a newer Blender)

[next atlas]

I was going to bake, to reduce the number of textures.

In a tutorial I saw, they first did UVpack and then baked?

[zealous wigeon]

They would have duplicated the UVMap and then packed the copy

and then done the baking.

You need both the original UVMap and the packed one to do baking

Then there is just some finagling with selecting them correctly.

[next atlas]

So then I wont need to move the UV islands?

do I need the discards?

[zealous wigeon]

I don't understand why you would move them at all, that is what the packing does.

[zealous wigeon]

Discards is for creating toggles with shaders.

[next atlas]

So when not using toggles, then I can remove them?

[zealous wigeon]

UVMaps don't take up much space, I don't see why you would remove them.

[next atlas]

Oh ok 🙂

Allready spent so much time getting polygons from 280K down to 51K

Would have hoped for under 30, but dont think thats possible without removing a lot of detail

[obsidian lake]

optimizing avatars is hard. 280k to 51k is very impressive tbh, and i think I'd settle with what you have. Tbh if you want a really optimized avatar, it's better to start with scratch or an already very optimized base/model. As far as optimizing goes for something that bad, you should be proud of yourself lol

I guess I'd just focus on reducing draw calls and unnecessary blendshapes at this point, maybe also removing unused bones or reducing physbones 🤷

[buoyant holly]

yeah definitely draw calls would be the next area to tackle

[next atlas]

Aww thank you for the kind words! I have spent a lot of time since saturday just learning Blender and doing like 30 iterations to get there haha. Will look at draw calls and blendshapes!

Soon I will need to start learn Unity as well haha

[hallow epoch]

is there any way I can merge these physbones together? they all have pretty much the same values, and they come from the hair. So if there is some way i can combine at least a couple to make the physbone count go down ill try anything.

or is this a case of having my cake and wanting to eat it too?

[obsidian lake]

you can use bone merger addon for blender

[hallow epoch]

will it get rid of the ability to interact with the physbones if i merge them with the parents?

[obsidian lake]

No

[hallow epoch]

ooh sick, thank you

[faint spindle]

How do I make it so quest can see my avatar textures with the outlines?

[regal basin]

anyone know of a non-destructive tool for merging meshes in unity that will also retarget all the animations?

[sick timber]

You’ll need blender for it. You will have to duplicate the mesh, scale it up (proportionally to the mesh so it isn’t uneven), flip the normals (so that the main mesh is visible in front of the outline), and apply a solid black texture to the outline to look like an outline.

There are a lot of caveats, particularly that is doubles the tri count, and can be heavily unoptimised for avatars with already high tri counts. However, you can simplify the outer mesh to reduce this impact, as less details are necessary.

[faint spindle]

I know how to put on Outlines in blender. But the problem is that I don't know if my toggles in unity will save with the new outlined one.

[ocean adder]

I’m thinking of adding a rotating object above my avatars head, I’m not sure how to go about it, or if it will be optimized. I’ve never seen any “rotating” object, just spring joints, which is not what I’m looking for at all.

How would I achieve this without making the performance bad, if possible ?

[sick timber]

If you’re replacing just the mesh alone, it should be a drop-in replacement

If you’re worried, always ensure you have a working back-up though

[cold yarrow]

instead of a spring joint just use a constraint to place it, (likely anchored to the chest bone) and a looping animation to rotate it

[stone prairie]

When looking at parameter optimization. Why does

Go/Float float
Go/PoseRadius float
...

only counts as 8 on the parameters list?

and not 16 or more(if you have more lines)

i feel i can make so many of my avatars optimized if i do this

[ivory sluice]

Animator floats are 8 bits, not entirely sure if they are really floats or just normalized bytes, but the latter is more likely
Afaik they only go from 0 or - 1 to 1, so with 255 values it's enough

[stone prairie]

There were into there too(according to the slot list) and some booleans too.
I helped avatars that managed to scratch the 256 limits and thoughts doing things like that would be an awesome idea

[placid anchor]

Is there a way to see texture memory usage in unity?

[cold yarrow]

I like to use Thry's Avatar Tools for this, it's got a VRAM calculator

[supple trout]

did you check if they are "synced" or not? Only "synced" Parameters count towards the 256 limit. Locomotion stuff does not need to have synced parameters as long as they are not "leaving" the base layer. IK syncs the position/poses of the avatar and not the animations/states themself.

[quiet steeple]

is anyone familiar with booth models i have every texture quest but the body since the body goes black when i replace it

[obsidian lake]

Check the vertex colors in blender

[quiet steeple]

how do i even take the texture into blender to do that

[obsidian lake]

Not the texture, the model

Just import the fbx file in blender

[quiet steeple]

great so for one texture i have to import the whole model and set it all up again

[obsidian lake]

??

No

Just import the model, clear vertex colors, and export the model again

[quiet steeple]

alrighty

[quiet steeple]

so i found it but how do i actually clear it

[obsidian lake]

https://blenderartists.org/t/remove-reset-vertex-paint/624062#:~:text=you obviously use the blender,render this color at all.

[quiet steeple]

already saw that there was no stated options

[heady smelt]

Which is more optimized one really big image or multiple smaller images? Like is it better to have a for the sake of the argument 25 separate 1080x1080 images or one 27000x 27000 Atlas of the 25 smaller images?

Also like for texture swapping I can just like animate my UV unwrap to be in a different area of the image right?

[ivory sluice]

For such resolutions (the atlas would be 5400x5400) you'd be better with separate images
Atlases work well for low res imgs but after like 1024x per image it's better to have them as individual images if not as texture2d arrays

[proper grail]

The amount of images doesnt really matter, for vram literally multiply the numbers, * 2 if there is an alpha channel and that is how much vram it takes. If you are atlasing to combine shaders than you are optimising draw calls.
Back in the day a shader could only have about 13 image references, i dont believe that to be an issue 20 years later

[marble rain]

its far more important to have a few as possible. in this case you would go with a single 4k and 2k atlas. never go with more over less. since every drawcall causes performance drop.

[marble rain]

nope. thats going to cause 25 drawcalls as a minimum.

[marble rain]

the amount of images matters. since each image = 1 draw call. when it comes to materials. so it matters a crap ton. and a single 4k or even 2 4k atlases will not hurt.

[proper grail]

Shader and images are bundled into one material draw call. One.

[marble rain]

he is not talking about images as such i am pretty sure lol. since he also mentions texture swapping.

its 25 draw calls vs 1-2 draw calls. if its actually materials they talk about. otherwise well it should have been mentioned as such

[proper grail]

I guess they did mention uv translation to texture swap without changing materials

The sdk will complain that they have 25 materials, but only one will be on at a time. One at a time technically better than one 25 textures worth of uv translation. Again, the sdk will say otherwise

[marble rain]

even if texture swapping is a thing thats still going to occur some stuff

[ivory sluice]

They haven't specified what use are they going to do with the atlas
I just said what would be better in general

The atlas could be just to pack different material's albedos in a single texture, like a lightmap

[wary minnow]

Hello! What is too many particle systems? Trying to understand how many i can addd without performance suffering

[marble rain]

well there is no scenario where more is better. so

[ivory sluice]

The texel count is equal if not mote on an atlas, in general the best case is wasting less texel space if it's not specified how many materials/sampler calls will be used

[frigid badger]

follow the limits in the avatar rankings panel, and you will likely be fine. particles on quest are scary and instantly mark an avatar as poor, be extremely careful and use sparingly

try not to exceed 2000 particles or 4000 polys on PC, and try not to exceed 200 particles and 400 polys on quest, as this will mark your avatar Very Poor. Reduce particle system count as low as you can, keeping below 2 on Quest and below 16 on PC

[pearl adder]

Please help!!

Any idea how this conflicting data between Thry's VRAM calculator and VRChat's SDK is possible? Where is this 246.15 MiB coming from? I have tried pressing reload SDK in Unity and I have tried restarting Unity. I am trying to upload a quest version of this PC avatar.

1 Material, 1 Texture Atlas, 65,754 Polygons (I know she will be very poor on quest) 65 Blendshapes 105 bones.

And before we suggest animations, all I did was import the avatar, check Read/Write, choose humanoid and map the bones in the Configure window. I added an avatar descriptor with mapped eye bones for eye tracking and visemes. There are no physbones and no special animations mapped everything else is default
In windows explorer, the fbx is 5 MB and the atlas is 12.6 MB. I used crunch compression within Unity

[obsidian lake]

vram and size are different

file size

[pearl adder]

How do I fix it?

[obsidian lake]

https://github.com/MunifiSense/VRChat-Build-Size-Viewer

use this for file size

vram size btw is how much space your avatar takes up in the video processing ram

so crunch compression and stuff doesn't apply, because that just reduces the size of the file for upload/download. But when you render it, your computer needs the whole file

it's like ikea furniture

[obsidian lake]

the box is small, but you can't use it in the disassembled "compressed" format, you can only transfer the furniture. To have it be useable you have to assemble or "decompress" the furniture

also not everything on your avatar is used for vram

[pearl adder]

Ohh I see what you are saying

[obsidian lake]

vram is the gpus ram i think, so it's only the stuff it needs for rendering (like shaders and textures)

and the model

but things like animations, menus, etc, i don't think contribute

i'm not like very technical with this stuff so there is probably someone here who knows better than me and can correct me lol

[pearl adder]

Well she has no animations, all the playable layers and expressions are default. i have not done anything other than map eyes for eye tracking and visemes

[obsidian lake]

the uncompressed file size is usually larger than the vram size i believe, but compression can help get the download size down

as long as you aren't over the max uncompressed size, you should just need to compress things or change the size of textures

[obsidian lake]

oh also that warning only applies after the avatar is built. It doesn't update when you make changes until you upload the avatar again

that's why it says "the most recent avatar's build size"

so it's whatever version you last attempted to upload

[pearl adder]

LMAO What the heck. I uploaded the avatar and the error message fixed. Thats so weird. The original model did not have 65 triangles or 105 bones so only that updated but all the texture stuff was old. Thats insane

[obsidian lake]

it's because it doesn't actually know those statistics until it builds the avatar

everything has to be compiled for the target platform (android/windows), so it doesn't actually know the total size until it does that

which happens when you upload the avatar

i like to think of it like translating

you know how sometimes if you try to translate between different languages, the text or speech ends up being longer/shorter (more/less syllables or characters)? It's kinda like that

i think

idk

like i said i don't know all the techinical stuff

so someone probably knows better than me

but this is my understanding of it

[pearl adder]

I really appreciate that I learned alot

Im just glad I fixed it because I was about to throw my keyboard

And its very helpful to know the differences between download size and vram exactly because I knew they were different but its important when troubleshooting this to know the differences between each one. To know what contributes to download size vs what contributes to vram size.

Yeah the PC one is horribly unoptimized but baby steps at least the quest one isnt so bad at least until I lower the poly count to 20k

[hallow epoch]

can someone tell me which one of my materials uses this damn toon lite shader? i dont have any other assets in the scene besides the base model.

[hallow epoch]

also, what are physbone transforms?

i know about colliders and physbones themselves, but what are they specifically?

[calm spade]

The transforms is the amount of bones that are affected by the physbone component iirc

[calm spade]

Are you certain that it's all the meshes your avatar has?

[hallow epoch]

Not sure how to check

[cold yarrow]

Haha this is SO good

[calm spade]

It's in your hierarchy, anything that isn't a bone

[hallow epoch]

i found the hidden one, it was a random grid material that i couldnt even see in the hierarchy. also i added a bunch of the hair bones to the ignored physbone transform thing and it fixed my issues! thanks for your help yo

[strong rain]

i am having someone tell me that me atlasing my avatars outfits is a bad idea
i plan to keep all my meshes separate for easy togglability, but to have them all use the same atlased material

its gone from 9 meshes, 13 materials, into 9 meshes all on one 4k texture material

they tell me that this will cause the 4k texture to be loaded on the vram 9 total times, is this true?

[drifting turtle]

not true, it'll only have one copy of the texture in memory

Even though you're using the same material for all 9 meshes, it's still 9 draw calls, same as having 9 different materials
You could look into poiyomi uv tile discard for toggles if you're on pc, that way it can all be on one mesh one material, instead of 9 meshes/materials

[strong rain]

heck was gonna be using liltoon for this one

nearly every texture on the outfits are just single colors, i wanted to atlas them to save some memory space so was just seeing if it would make SOME difference

so from what you're ssying it'll just be saving some download size?

[drifting turtle]

depends on the size of the individual textures you're combining

[strong rain]

well it was like 2-4k's, like 3-2k's and 4 512's, so i imagine a single 4k will be much less

[drifting turtle]

oh yea it will be

you will lose detail though, if the textures are detailed at 4k

[strong rain]

i just wanted to make sure than im not about to flood people with 9-4k textures on their vram

[drifting turtle]

cramming it all into one

[strong rain]

yeah i realized BUT funny enough, both of those 4k textures were UV'd horribly, so i re-uv'd them and made them way bigger on the new tile

realistically the old uv's only used like half or less of the image, so it didn't lose too much detail

of course this meant i had to redraw them from scratch but thats fine i prefer clean hsnd drawn anyway

[drifting turtle]

if you know how to UV, you should see if liltoon has a uv tile discard feature and set that up, powerful stuff 🙏

[strong rain]

i'm not really sure what this tile discard even means tbh 🥴

[radiant shadow]

shoves part of a uv off main texture - wich hides it in vrchat

[drifting turtle]

👆

[radiant shadow]

0.0 is where your main texture is everything else is nothing, easy up to 15 toggles on one material without seperate meshes

just shove part of a uv/mesh you want to hide +x / +y direction

[strong rain]

does that not use like transparency? im used to seeing meshes go invisible but they're still visible through fog or ambient occlusion

[radiant shadow]

its gone for everyone , not transparency

there is one exsample

[drifting turtle]

some worlds will have a slight outline yea, but it's pretty rare

I recommend doing this on a separate UV, not the main one

[strong rain]

oh gosh im gonna have to look into this later its a bit more than i was thinking atm xD

i just wanted to try and optimize a little bit xD as long as me making 9 mats into 1 is better then im fine xD i was really trying to not spend a long time on this avatar lol

its becoming a big project ;-;

[proper grail]

REDRAW?! Did you know blender has a bake feature that allows you to transfer the image of one old UV to a new one? blender diffuse color bake for google video info. After youv watched a few videos on it, the general idea is that clicking bake takes the materials in the selected object and copies/draws what is plugged into color in the material to the selected UV map's active (clicked, highlighted white) texture image in each material.

[strong rain]

Oh it's okay xD I purposely redraw my stuff because I'm not a fan of most textures baked shadows/lighting and whatnot, I prefer just simple flat colors and I let the shader handle lighting xD I'm kinda weird

But that also means they look fine in low resolution since there's not much detail to lose in the first place

[proper grail]

diffuse with direct and indirect unchecked copies from texture to texture, no scene :3

my model in blender has 24+ materials, the one i use in vrchat has two. The bake button is very nice

[gloomy hedge]

does anyone have some good guides on how to get my avatar to green or at least orange?

[verbal surge]

I was told that there was a way to attach an animation to a radial puppet without using blendtrees. Does that actually work?

[radiant shadow]

just an animation with float as motion time - 1 animation - vrchat radial use that float

[verbal surge]

Thanks, that works. However now it resets to the default state once the radial reaches 100. Does the animation need to have a specific length or something?

[ivory sluice]

why don't you want to use blendtrees?

[verbal surge]

I was told it's better for performance as all I do is scroll through an animation

[spring sun]

I mean yea

less animations

[verbal surge]

But the issue I have rn is that on reaching 100 (or a value of 1.00) the animation just resets to the first frame/default state

[spring sun]

disable looping on the animation

[verbal surge]

You mean "Loop Time"?

[spring sun]

yes

[verbal surge]

Thanks, that actually fixed it! 😄

Another thing: Is there a way to limit parameters to a specific range, like 0-1, so if they pass it they reset to the maximum value?

[spring sun]

you technically could

but itd involve another parameter with animations that have parameter driver components

I dont entirely see the reason why you would want to limit the parameter

[verbal surge]

I have a trigger that adds +2 to the param, but it's also a radial puppet. So it can end up with a value of 1.10.
I fixed it by creating a state that sets the param to 1 if it's >1

[gloomy hedge]

what's a good way to get my avatar to be very good performance level?

or at least orange?

[hallow epoch]

This is for quest, check pins for the pc one

[obsidian lake]

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

This has all the information you should need for quest and pc

People should read the vrchat docs they are very helpful, especially for avatars :^)

[waxen estuary]

Welp darn if only there was a way to get all of this on my avatar to under 10k poly.

[calm spade]

There are probably so many redudant loops you can remove there

[waxen estuary]

Hopefully yeah

I been struggling with that as head itself is 8.5k poly and I want to replace eyelashes with ones that do not need transparent textures just so I can optimize away:

• the head texture entirely (for specific single color aka RGB node materials) (Material Combiner would make each color a 10x10 px island on the atlas texture and reduce the entire atlas textore on both PC and Quest to 1024 (width) x 512 (height) px)
• Hair requires backface culling off at the momment if I could at least get all but head and hair to < 10k poly it would get me to 18~20k poly before messing with the head to optimize that further as well which gives room to duplicate the head mesh and flipping it's normals before joining the duplicate hair mesh with the original to simulate backface culling being off for both pc and quest (performance optimization as well).

So yeah those are mainly my problems atm with my avatar removing some excess edge loops when I can find them, and then struggling hard with the head as well just so I can also fix the hair problem 😅

(Not to mention sadly every time I merge all of the mesh's just prior to exporting from blender it would flip the normals automatically for some bizarre reason as well forcing me to flip them needlessly manually before joining it with the rest of the avatar)

[waxen estuary]

sadly I wish there was a blender extension that when I go into edit mode select all edge loops on a specific mesh, and then a specific key combination would then scan each edge loop in the mesh for ones that:

• change little if not any of the shape of the mesh (minor changes in the shape/detail of it)
• lists for the user which ones they want to apply for certain as well. 😅
• does not require specifying the stuff from the old optiloops extension in blender which is complex to figure out and get correct.

[waxen estuary]

probably bodysuit alone on the avatar could be optimize a little bit more as well. 😅

[calm spade]

Yeah, unfortunately optiloops is what I've used, you could give limited dissolve a try too but it's quite destructive. QuadRemesh would be very nice but would also get rid of the weight painting, so if you're familiar with the data transfer method, that might be a good solution

[waxen estuary]

true data transfer might help as well

[split orbit]

Does anyone have any advice for lowering the texture memory usage of a vroid model?

[calm spade]

Aside from lowering the resolution of the vroid model textures?

[split orbit]

how do i do that? i can't edit the textures

[calm spade]

Why not? What does your unity window look like with the selected texture

[split orbit]

idk. maybe there's something obvious that i'm missing

[calm spade]

Oh, that's a Texture 2D asset within a bundle? You might be able to right click it and duplicate it, which hopefull will end up outside of it to change its format and then its resolution

Hopefully not all the textures in that are 4K, otherwise that's wild

[split orbit]

i've right clicked, but i'm not seeing anything that says duplicate?

[calm spade]

Hmm, I'm quite unfamiliar with the VRoid export process, so I'm not sure why all those files are the way they are

[split orbit]

It's okay. Thanks for trying to help

[calm spade]

I'd look into how to get stuff out of a scriptable object, I have no clue why you textures are in there

[waxen estuary]

and let me guess I would have to redo the vertex groups as well?

[calm spade]

Data Transfer should copy the groups afaik

[waxen estuary]

ah oki

interesting it seems half of the poly of the head is this alone though.

[calm spade]

high poly teeth?

[waxen estuary]

more than likely ye

mouth bag alone is 1k (I think that can probably be halved easily by making those quads bigger).

hmm it looks like some of the poly on the teeth is never seen but I would need to verify it when I join the split head mesh later.

[gloomy hedge]

ok so i did some optimization of my avatar and it's yellow in unity but red in game

which one is it actually?

[spring sun]

in game

[gloomy hedge]

oh ok

why does it show yellow in unity but not in game

[spring sun]

🤷‍♂️

something not taken into account or updating in the rating

[flat ingot]

Okay uhm

I'd like to make my avi not laggy now

but I don't know the first thing about unity so

let's figure this out ^^

[waxen estuary]

yep, teeth was 1.6k poly itself, skin on the head mesh alone was 3.6k poly.

Now I got to see if I can at least half the poly on both of those.

😅

[calm spade]

Might be odd, but I'm going to recommend not removing anything from the face, it's the most important part of the model arguably, if it has shapekey you're risking entirely fucking it up, the teeth is whatever, but removing poly from the rest of the model should be much easier and less destructive

[waxen estuary]

sadly I went through every other parts and removed as much edge loops as I can manually without destroying the mesh, I even tried the QuadRemesher on those as well and it resulted in more poly (and holes in the mesh in places) than what I had prior to those parts as well. I think the only way to get under 20k is to reduce poly on head or find a new lower poly head that is compatible to the base I have on my avatar that also supports quest (sadly my options are very limited thanks to using the healed zinpia fit base) 😅.

[calm spade]

Godspeed soldier

[waxen estuary]

ye

it’s painful

If I knew how to make the mesh from scratch I would 💀

So I would have to ask ZinPia and save up money to ask for them to make a custom head for my avatar probably.

[tranquil quail]

im back from work and on desktop if youre availible

[calm spade]

https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-optimizing-tips/

[flat ingot]

I am about to play D&D but at some point yes help is good c:

[tranquil quail]

no worries, iim availible most time in the evening of EST

[alpine talon]

Hey, I'm using Toggle Assistant to add toggles to an avatar, but I'm running into an issue for compatibility between Quest and PC.

For example, I added a gun to my avatar that is turned on by the toggle and disabled by default. I added the same model and same toggle with the same default off status to the Quest avatar, but Quest people can't see the gun when I turn it on.

Is there something I'm missing?

[waxen estuary]

Yeah having optional props like that is very performance demanding on quest.

Sadly one can’t even use UV Tile discard on quest either.

[alpine talon]

I'm about to install gogo loco onto a PC version of an avatar. What should I do to make sure it's visible on Quest? Do I just copy the avatar and optimize it for Quest, or should I just add the gogo loco through the same process to the already existing Quest version?

[waxen estuary]

or just use vrcfury

all it is is drag and drop the gogoloco all prefab into the scene

and then it works for both pc and quest

[quasi charm]

Quick question: Heard that having too many Blendshapes can tank your avatar performance. Do Blendshapes count that are set to 0? Or just the ones that are set to a value/on 100?

[willow wave]

I've read somewhere the performance hit only happens when the value changes, however I have my doubts as it doesn't make much sense from my limited knowledge of it. Would be good to know if its true or what is actually the truth.

[marble rain]

dont have to many. but having around 100 isn't going to hurt people that much. but that said. unless you have facetracker and eye tracking which requires 150+ its still something you want to keep as low as possible

[stark bear]

Hey what's the more performant way to do props/clothing toggles? Having them all in one mesh with a single atlased material and using blendshapes to hide/show individual objects, or having a separate mesh/material for each one?

I've heard blendshapes have a performance hit but I don't know how that measures up against a bunch of mesh renderers

[marble rain]

Uv Discard. however i have not seen one that works on quest so if its on quest. its almost not possible to have toggles

requires poiyomi to

[stark bear]

yeah it's not supported by standard shader so anyone who doesn't have my shaders shown is gonna see all of my toggles active at once.. not ideal

I try to keep my avis at least moderately viewable without custom shaders

[marble rain]

eh. kinda need custom shaders. you cant do much with the default

[stark bear]

assuming uv discard is off the table though, which of those two options would be better?

[quasi charm]

I’m at a standstill since I’m trying to keep it to 2 skinned meshes in order to reach good performance. But the avatar evaluator is warning me about my blendshapes even though most are set 0

Just questioning whether I can leave them or I need to fully remove them

[marble rain]

depends. how many of the seperated meshes are enabled. if its only 1 or 2 at the same time seperate meshes could be better

[marble rain]

if you dont use them or ever will remove them. since they take up vram

[supple trout]

and not only that, you wrote "most are set 0", tupper did hold a short presentation back at furality - https://youtu.be/JFBQeNON64Q?si=NmLh2lNuItE74TT6&t=987 (timestamp is where he talks about skinning and blendshapes)

[plush trout]

Shoulda probably asked this here so...copy-paste!

Gonna try and be concise:
To cut down on how many constraints i need i figured out that i can probably use particle systems instead in certain places (e.g. instead of using a world constraint that uses two constraints, i can make every object under it into a particle system instead with simulation space set to world, and therefore may only need to drag the objects under my avatar without any constraints needed). My question is thusly if its worth it to do it that way. If particle systems are more optimized/efficent than constraints would be. Does anyone have any insight into this?

I tried looking it up but it was kind of hard to find any information on this, dispite a lot of personal accounts to the framerate terror that is parent constraints

[marble rain]

its not as valid. since we use 2022 which fixed an issue blendshapes had.

[supple trout]

oh did they update it further with 2022? he stated and acknowledged that it got better with 21, but not completely solved

[marble rain]

that was fixed in 2021. performance loss on blendshapes are alot lower.

[supple trout]

thats good that it has got even better then :nod

time to move towards "single skinned mesh renderer" models then to free up some cpu time 😆

[supple trout]

you potentially might wanna wait a bit before you put too much effort in it -> https://feedback.vrchat.com/avatar-30/p/vrcconstraint-optimized-replacement-for-unity-constraints

[sharp trellis]

Hey, my avatar's head right now is roughly 500 vertices, that excludes hair, Do people use subsurface modifier on their models to smooth them out?

I don't know enough about the process to know the desired end result for an optimized end result of vertices

[buoyant holly]

Might be helpful if you show the picture of the head with the wire frame to see if it's too low poly and are you targeting quest or PC

[sharp trellis]

https://gyazo.com/c81b07c54aa24bc35d2641e5da6b5161 PC And I realize I didn't apply the mirror so I think the vertices are more than500, I forget how it works

oh nvm, it counts the mirrored vertices it looks like

[buoyant holly]

looks perfectly usable as a head to me

[stark bear]

yeah ive got like 20+ toggles and usually only using a couple of them at a time

[waxen estuary]

wait you know how to make heads? Cool

Honestly with all my struggle to try to get the head I currently use (the zinpia zin female head) down to 4.5k poly or lower I might have to look for one that is made from scratch and supports quest as well by default and is 4.5k poly or even lower than that 😅.

[paper zinc]

Mesh renderers that are disabled don't have an active skinning/rendering cost at all, whereas UV tile discards and blendshapes are still being skinned and rendered in some capacity. In your case the most optimal thing to do would likely be to disable mesh renderers so you don't have however many hundreds of thousands of skinned vertices you'd end up with for having everything enabled at once

[stark bear]

makes sense, thanks!

[marble rain]

UV Tile / Discard uses the material it has. does not cost more.

[paper zinc]

A discarded UV tile costs more than a disabled mesh renderer. With UV tile discard the vertices are still being actively skinned, only the material isn't being rendered - the mesh is still visible to post process effects like SSAO too

A disabled mesh renderer only sits in memory, it has no active cost at all

Hence there comes a point where the cost of always actively skinning those vertices is going to outweigh the cost associated with having more individual meshes, especially if only a few are active at any given time

[marble rain]

you dont seem to get it lol. One material with UV Discard giving u 16 options of clothing etc. cost far less and is more optimal then having 16 different meshes, even if they are inactive. One material is still better then multiple

[obsidian lake]

i feel like this also really depends on your goal, since on Quest draw calls really tank performance and so they are very heavily penalized in the perf rank stats. You can't have more than 2 meshes with one material each (skinned or not) OR one mesh with 2 materials before your avatar is poor on Quest

[marble rain]

you wouldn't really be able to do it on quest anyway. atleast i have yet to see a single person with more then 2-3 meshes before going over 10 mb

[obsidian lake]

you can 100% do that on quest...

i have done so myself

the meshes themselves aren't usually very high in file size, so that's usually just an issue with people having massive texture sizes

[marble rain]

well your limited heavily. to texture size. so more means worse overall quality anyway.

[obsidian lake]

you can have high quality textures at low texture sizes. You just have to have well done UVs and consider your texture size while making the model

[paper zinc]

Bro was talking about 20+ toggles, not 16

[proper grail]

whoah, two combined meshs with 32 options. quik maths

[paper zinc]

Yeah, and depending on how many vertices they have and how few of those options are actually enabled at any given time it may not be the most optimal way to go

Because, again, skinning potentially 500k verts constantly vs skinning maybe 70k at a time

[marble rain]

not really. 512x512 will look ugly no matter the UV. even 1k will.

[marble rain]

huh. Vertices has nothing todo with materials. thats only related to blendshapes and some other things

[paper zinc]

it's one of the performance costs we deal with, skinned vertices put a load on the CPU and the more of them you have the worse it gets

[paper zinc]

and this is where you showed us you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about

[obsidian lake]

not really but alright. Maybe depends on the style of avatar you're making, but you can make really nice textures 512x512. I have avatars that are 256x256 for the whole texture

[paper zinc]

there's a tipping point where one performance cost overtakes another and UV tile discards may not be the most optimal way to go for toggles because every single vertex on your material is still actively being skinned and affecting your frametime, even if the material isn't being rendered on the GPU

[marble rain]

you can say that. but it clearly shows you don't lol. go show me a single 512x512 texture on a avatar that looks good in vr. i know you can't.

[paper zinc]

bet

this avatar has a texture memory footprint below 10MB

there's a single texture at 1k, everything else is 256x256

[marble rain]

eh. UV discard prevents that. since it discards the Vertices. so there is nothing to render for that UV and that applies to the texture that was part of that UV.

[paper zinc]

no

[marble rain]

yep.

[paper zinc]

UV discard does not discard vertices

[marble rain]

yes it does lol

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

[paper zinc]

you don't understand how it works

[marble rain]

you clearly dont lol

[paper zinc]

UV discard discards the vertices at the material level only

they are still being skinned by Unity, and still show up to post process effects like SSAO

they still exist

[marble rain]

nope

[paper zinc]

go ask poiyomi himself about this then

he'll tell you what I'm telling you

[marble rain]

go and read the documentation

[paper zinc]

you are being confidently incorrect

[marble rain]

nope

[proper grail]

i use uv tile discard and i can say for a fact that the mesh is still considered "there" for realtime ambient occlusion and the like

[paper zinc]

discarding vertices from the material is not the same thing as removing them from existence completely. you only cut out the material rendering cost, not the vertex skinning cost

[radiant shadow]

you can test this in unity profiler, seperate mesh toggle and memory usage goes down, id still use uv discard but im not making crazy 500k avatars ( <70k always )

[marble rain]

same lol

50k max for me

[proper grail]

it is just the cost of specific vert's material that is saved

[marble rain]

that wasn't a issue for a friend of mine i setup UV discard on.

[proper grail]

most worlds that have it will have the option off by default

[paper zinc]

that would be because they didn't go to worlds with AO then lol

[marble rain]

i have to test that then. all through they are in worlds with AO and other things all the time so

[proper grail]

its subtle and really only where the discarded intersects anything

[ivory sluice]

Depending on which ssao effect is being used it will appear or not, one effect uses shader replacement and renders objects with the opaque tag, and the other uses the current shader's values, i assume that all passes do uv discard including the shadowcaster

[stark bear]

do disabled constraints still have a performance hit?

[ivory sluice]

no

[frigid badger]

does anyone have tips for optimization with dissolving edge loops? i feel like I have some trouble picking what to dissolve sometimes bleeh, i don't want to sacrifice more than i have to since 7.5k polys is hard to reach (likely gonna target 15k tbh 🥹)

[waxen estuary]

for me 20~30k max

30k but there better be minor edge loops to get to at least 20k for quest 😅

[keen sable]

I'm trying to optimize the cloth behaviors for the skirt on Hunter by Yuyuriko, Here is my current settings and I was wondering if there is something I can tweak to make it more optimized and behave better in terms of physics. I've bound the static mesh to be around their wasit until it drops off the pelvis shape and towards the beginning of the thighs, so at this point I'm trying to get it look less like a liquid and a flinging mess and more optimized and proper cloth movement.

[sacred heath]

I bought a PC only avatar. Can I make them quest optimized too?

[silk hare]

Ya can! There is a free tool on Booth that ya can try out called VRCQuestTools.

https://booth.pm/en/items/2436054

Another thing ya can do is upload your PC avatar as a VRChat impostor, which is a low-poly version of your avatar that only Android users such as Quest can see.

[radiant shadow]

quest compatible =/= optimized , it will spit out a unoptimized mess if you are trying to use this on a pc with stats

[sacred heath]

Thank you so much. I definitely will need help because y’all are talking a different language right now. & if I try to optimize my avi for both, will it affect the quality for both? I assume so right?

Oh my god thanks a lot man. You’re really helping answering all my questions. I feel like such a noob to this. I’ve had VR a week now & this is all super new to me.

[sacred heath]

Oh wow damn. So can I merge them into 1 avatar so both players can see their optimized version?

[spring sun]

You dont actually merge avatars as they will always be separate
Just upload an optimized version for both unity builds

[sacred heath]

So then I’d have to switch all the time to get both set of players to see it then? That’s what I’m trying to fix/avoid

[spring sun]

Theres nothing to fix

Thats how it works

If you need to update one or the other you need to switch to that build and upload

[sacred heath]

@heady smelt could use your help again. i got this far but cant figure out how to optimize it so that the collider & transform count are lowered

[calm spade]

400k on Quest

[silk hare]

I guess as far as optimization goes on my end, I'd love to know if anyone's used the Mesh Baker add-on in Unity to combine Skinned Mesh Renderers properly.

I followed their tutorial yet every time I do so, I do get 1 Skinned Mesh Render but my entire avatar vanishes 'cause I was told to "Disable Renderers on All Child MeshBaker Source Objects" and it turns off the skinned mesh renderers on all the ones in question.

Here's their tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_BLaDCoqg

Perhaps someone can lend a hand with this? I'm not too confident on taking this into Blender, so I've been tryin' to stay in Unity, heh.

The tutorial does have a troubleshooting part concerning vanishing skinned meshes but none seem to work. My avatar vanishes in the Scene and Game windows.

[calm spade]

Are there no vrchat specific optimization addons that already do this? I'm almost certain there are at least a few

[calm spade]

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer

"Merges all skinned meshes that are always animated in the same way"

[silk hare]

Ooooooo, I'll look into this! Thank ya so much!

[silk hare]

It worked! My rank is now Medium! I'll keep playin' around with this, but thanks again!

[spring sun]

Id say cut your losses with how unoptimized that is

[sacred heath]

yea im scared to go outside of unity too cause idk enough about making any avis. just bought this one & trying to optimize it for both

[calm spade]

Unfortunately I don't think this is the kind of avatar that is optimizable inside of Unity, but there are plently videos on Youtube dedicated to optimizing VRChat models for Blender beginners!

[sacred heath]

yea i dont think its gonna happen for me. that sucks

[jagged dagger]

More worried about everything else there

Surprised i still fit into the performance ranking with the toys and systems i have on my avatar lol

however 20 of these are still always on it seems like, might need to look if i can reduce the always on amount

[obsidian lake]

combining skinned mesh renderers usually isn't too difficult. You can join the meshes in Blender, then you might have to fix some animations, and reapply materials in Unity. It's not difficult in Blender, you just select them and press ctrl+j then export the file

[ebon relic]

Hey i have this avatar i really like and there is a quest file for it but every time i try to upload it i have to do a bunch of optimizing and then in game i don't have hair physics also i'm new to avatar uploading but help would be appreciated please dm me i need the help thanks in advance

[tranquil quail]

Does your avatar come with separate prefabs for the quest and pc versions?

Also where did you get the model

[ebon relic]

it's 2 diferent downloads i got it on vrmodels i can send the link throught dms if you want?

[radiant shadow]

um you are downloading ripped/stolen asset if you are using that page

[tranquil quail]

Please don’t send me anything from that site. Most people myself included won’t help with ripped/stolen assets as they are usually broken and also stolen

[ebon relic]

Alright sorry i didn't know i will refrain from using that website then thanks for letting me know

[visual olive]

https://www.deviantart.com/vtrevisan/art/MMD-Sora-Harewataru-949730730

[blazing cypress]

Is there a chart somewhere that shows the minimum requirements for quest avis

[heavy knot]

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

[blazing cypress]

Is using modular avatar bad for optimization?

[heavy knot]

depends on what the asset does

are you referring to the way modular avatar puts on clothes?

it should be the best method if you're doing it via Unity, as well as VRCFury

[silk hare]

I don't mean to start a new subject, heh.

But has anyone by chance used Pro Material Combiner (or Pro Material Combiner++) in order to combine materials on their avatar to reduce their number of material slots?

I've had my eye on it for a bit, but was curious if anyone else has used it before giving it a shot.

[heavy knot]

I'd personally use Blender baking with Tuxedo or even use D4rk's Avatar Optimizer

[silk hare]

I gotcha. I do have D4rk's tool and it has brought the number down a bit.

But wanted to see if there was a way to push it further without going into Blender, heh.

I'll keep experimenting!

[blazing cypress]

Yeah like for instance if I use a hair prefab on a body prefab via attaching it with modular avatar. I could instead save a mesh by combining and save some bones too?

[blazing cypress]

what is texture memory and how to reduce it?

[heavy knot]

primarily reducing the "max size" of textures

[daring mulch]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH7Xdol5erw
i used this tutorial for combining multiple textures into one. it might be helpful for you, if you are ok with resorting to Blender XD

[worldly hull]

If I find a item/weapon for my avatar, why does it always have 20+ materials!?
Its just a sniper riffle and the glass is not even transparent. everything would be possible with just 1 material.

[spring sun]

Then make it 1 material

[worldly hull]

But I hate, that the creator dont already do it optimize it by themself. Its so time consuming to scale the UV mesh exactly for every pixel and search for every texture to combine them in paint.net before exporting and importing into blender and and and and......

[spring sun]

🤷‍♂️

[worldly hull]

There is also this material combiner from the cats blender plugin, but it never works like it should and still combine stuff to stuff, that should not combined. thats why I atlas every texture by myself in paint

[radiant shadow]

hide whatever you dont want to combine to that texture , they wont get atlased - anything that need alpha is one i put on its own

(seperate by material)

[proper grail]

The video right before you asked will solve that. 2nd uv map, pack, put a active bake target texture in all 20 materials copy paste style, bake color. 20 materials to 1 in 5 minutes

[obsidian lake]

I've had no problem with it as long as I wasn't using tiled textures (it also has given me strange results for normal maps), but it may be the cats addon itself. I've had lots of trouble with cats breaking my armatures and stuff, but the material combiner is actually separate from cats. I prefer to have material combiner installed without cats

[frigid badger]

if you need, atlas it all into one large material or fewer large materials (@worldly hull)

and yeah, material combiner is best used not with cats = =,,

[verbal surge]

Is it better to have 2 mesh renderes instead of one mesh renderer or would that lead to worse performance?

[grizzled shard]

in general, less mesh renderers is better

[heady smelt]

It is good practice to separate the head from the rest since it might contain a lot of blend shapes. Merging everything can indeed perform worse

[floral mica]

not since unity 2022 as far as i know

[heady smelt]

The number of meshes aren't t a problem unless they generate a lot of draw calls

[silver brook]

This used to matter a lot pre 2022

But it can lead to lighting issues, despite you setting the anchor correctly :(
My main has these issues, as it was made when it was still important to separate the head

[heady smelt]

I just benchmarked again and I confirm that splitting your meshes aren't improving the blendshapes performances in unity 2022.

70K polygons avatar gives better performances when combined. 500K polygons avatar performs slightly better on splitted meshes, but just about 5-10%

[silver brook]

Oh, thanks for verifying!

I didn't know the exact numbers :P

[marble rain]

thats not exactly true. Every seperate mesh creates draw calls. the less the better. and in regards to blend shapes. they might not be a issue atm but the more people getting face + eye tracking will promote a heavy increase in blend shapes unless better ways are found to well control those parts. mostly a avatar with both eye and face will have 100-200 blendshapes extra just to control those parts

[lone escarp]

Does anyone know of any videos that go into details on how to optimise an avatar from poor to excellent and works with quest if possible

[obsidian lake]

I think you're best off learning how to optimize specific aspects of an avatar to match the statistics of the performance rank you'd like to match. For example, say you need to reduce physbones and poly count (you may not need to, this is just an example), then you would look up tutorials on those things specifically.

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

[lone escarp]

Oooh okay thank you I’ve got a magpie rexouium I and wanna optimise that from poor to good so I might have a look

[marble rain]

Excellent is not really necessory. a Good rank is more then good enough. but as long as you keep material count as low as possible and physbones within a reasonable amount etc it really shouldn't be so problematic and blendshapes

[wanton dove]

When did they make the max download size 500mb? Bc I swear it was higher before

[zealous wigeon]

https://ask.vrchat.com/t/developer-update-14-march-2024/23401#avatar-file-and-memory-limit-changes-12

[zealous wigeon]

These limits haven't gone into effect yet actually, so it will be further reduced to 200MB.

[wanton dove]

Oh. Why?

[zealous wigeon]

Because VRAM expensive

[wanton dove]

Oh

[zealous wigeon]

No avatar should be 500MB

[wanton dove]

Oh…

[zealous wigeon]

You must be using several 8k textures

[wanton dove]

16k lol

[zealous wigeon]

No wonder.

. . Why!?

[wanton dove]

Idk. I was bored and I tried to get it really high

[proper grail]

Sir this is a avatar optimization

[heavy knot]

The VRCSDK prohibits building with 16k textures though?

[wanton dove]

Close enough

[marble rain]

that limit has nothing to do with vram. its size of the avatar download size. which is compressed the other number we have is uncompressed in memory. which most likely will stay at 500 mb for a while. realisticly your Avatar's total Vram usage should stay below or at 100 mb at max for now.. until majority of people have a minimum of 12 gb of vram. then it can be raised to 200 ish or even 250

[marble rain]

no and never will or should be. even 8k is to high

[heavy knot]

what are you disagreeing with?

[marble rain]

that VRCSDK doesn't allow 16k

it does not

[heavy knot]

I'm stating a fact that SDK 3.5.0+ stops you from uploading with 16k max size textures

I tried doing this immediately on the beta

[marble rain]

i read it as a question imao.

still waking up

[obsidian lake]

Is it more optimized to use 2 transtions (entry>state>exit) rather than 1 any state transition?

like for an int toggle

[proper grail]

yea

any state checks all exits every update, has exit time of 0 checks when the parameter is changed

[heavy knot]

Disable “can transition to self” on the transition from any state and it’s fine.

[wanton dove]

Is there a tool to merge multiable meshes or items?

[heavy knot]

If you just want something quick and dirty to use in Unity, use D4rk's Avatar Optimizer. If you want more control, you'll need to learn blender

[obsidian lake]

I would use blender tbh

it's very easy to merge meshes

just select them and press ctrl+J

[wanton dove]

Ok. Cuz I know blender but some of the stuff I have aren’t fbxes and they are a meta file

[wanton dove]

Yea ik lol

[heavy knot]

you should always have a model file (Obj, FBX, ect), unless your avatar is ripped

[obsidian lake]

.meta file?

those aren't model files

.meta is the metadata for unity files

[wanton dove]

You can’t open them in blender

That I know of

[obsidian lake]

if the file extension is .meta and it's from a unity project, then it's unity metadata

[wanton dove]

Oh

[obsidian lake]

like import settings, prefab id, stuff like that

every file you import or create in unity will have a meta file

[wanton dove]

Is there a way to convert meta files to fbx?

[obsidian lake]

no meta files aren't models

[wanton dove]

Oh

[heavy knot]

meta files are just the import settings of the original asset

[obsidian lake]

every file in your unity project will have a file of the same name with the.meta extension

[wanton dove]

Yea ik

[wanton dove]

That’s why if you drag a file into unity it automatically creates a meta file when you click back into unity

[obsidian lake]

the one on the left (readme.txt) is the actual file, readme.txt.meta as you can see just stores data about the file

so there's no way to convert from .meta to .fbx because they aren't storing the same type of file

[wanton dove]

Yea. Ik all that stuff

[obsidian lake]

that's like trying to convert a .mp3 to a .png

one stores audio, one stores an image

[radiant shadow]

uuh so what kind of files are you using then fbx, obj,blend,pmx,vrm if you know this already

[wanton dove]

Also I was talking about a .asset file

[obsidian lake]

those are usually scripts

[wanton dove]

Oh

[obsidian lake]

like udon behaviors, menus, parameters, etc

what you probably should do is find the objects that you are trying to merge, then find the skinned mesh renderer that is on it. If you select the mesh in the mesh slot, it will highlight where the model file is stored in your unity project

or just mesh renderers

for example say i want to find this "body" mesh

i select it and find this in the inspector

click on this body mesh

and it shows me that the mesh is embedded in this fbx file

now if i right click on it i can select "show in explorer" and it will open file explorer with my fbx (or whatever format your model is) selected

if you know where your unity project is stored, you can easily find this filepath manually as well

it's good to keep your projects organized

[mystic wind]

Does somebody know what is this problem for?

[mystic wind]

(VRM model)

[radiant shadow]

material is opaque you want cutout and it likely have a white sphere infront of eyes that need it (see eyebrows very thick)

try that see if behaves , somethingsomething

[mystic wind]

hmmm, it still white

[distant osprey]

i have a question about performance. I want to add a particle aura surrounding the body. Whats more performant?

a) Using the high poly body-mesh (idk ... 90k Poly?) of the Avatar as mesh-shape for the particle system
b) Making a very low poly (~500 poly) second body and constrain it to the body to use this as the mesh shape?

Whats hitting more? Having high poly mesh-shape or causing another material / mesh Drawcall and the constraints?

[plush trout]

Does the heaviness of constrsints still happen if theyre toggled off? Like, will the constraints only be intensive so long as theyre toggled on? Like world constraints for example: if both constraints (the one containing the world transform and the one with the reset target) are toggled off until theyre required to be on, will it reduce the lag?

[quiet steeple]

Anyone know how to fix this everyone says its something entirely different and nothing has yet to work..This only happens when i switch the material into a quest one yet it appears fine in the material slot.

[spring sun]

vertex colors/paint

[willow wave]

Vertex colors. Can be fixed in blender, however I've heard there is also some unity plugin that will fix it as well

[spring sun]

vrcquesttools can autofix it

[willow wave]

^

[spring sun]

otherwise go into blender and paint the vertex's white

[willow wave]

Can just clear the vertex colors, don't have to manually color it

[spring sun]

I forgor that you can clear

[verbal surge]

Are there any go-to tools to decimate a model without deleting shapekeys?

[dense fern]

Hi I need help with my avatar I want to reduce the amount of polygons from 28k to 20k

[ivory sluice]

You'd need to manually dissolve verts or edges to keep the shapekeys (you'll also have to check frequently if the shape keys didn't break cuz that could happen any time when removing/adding verts)

[velvet crow]

Does anyone have insights on how skinned meshes work in Unity? Mainly, is it GPU or CPU, or both? And what does it affect the most?

[foggy eagle]

Yes I know

[marble rain]

its both.and it affects both heavily.

[velvet crow]

Yes, but are there any technical breakdowns on how it works or conditions for performance?

[marble rain]

eh. not that i know of. all you need to really know is that each skinned mesh causes a minimum of 1 draw call. and a bunch of other operations. keep it as low as possible

[plush trout]

Hey yall. Im about to get back to this update to my avatar, and if i mathed correctly the resulting layer amount is gonna total to about 36. And I got a buddy of mine saying that I shouldnt really be aiming for anything over 20, and even then thats pushing it. So im just wondering if anyone has any insight into this; if theres like a layer threshold i shouldnt cross

[willow wave]

Direct blend trees. You can potentially combine many layers down to one.

[edgy scarab]

How do I trigger 2 animations with 1 parameter properly?

[edgy scarab]

Oi did you use the Chise LoRa to make her a red-haired oni xD

[plush trout]

So i think the thing i have about that is: nearly all of my layers are gonna be complex togglew and not simple on-offs. And while some will (and i assume that for those toggles i can use direct blend trees) i wont be able to do so for all of them. Hence why im looking for a general number to aim towards so i know if i neee to cut back some stuff or not

[edgy scarab]

I few people have told me 20 as well

[winged spire]

You can use blend trees for a lot of things, what exactly are these "complex toggles"?

You might still be able to convert them into a blend tree

[plush trout]

some of the animations turn on, scale and disolve things over the course of a few seconds, some toggle on and off constraints over the course of a minute etc. and according to the page i read on it you cant really utilize direct blend trees for those sorts of animations.
additionally a lot of them are within their own catagories using a bunch of driver bullshit so the toggles are exclusive. So for example a layer labelled "ice", and the beginning state csn transition into a substate depending on the bool thats active, and from there each substste has its own web. and from my understanding you csnt really do complex stuff like that with direct blend trees

[winged spire]

Yea, not really possible with blend trees, you can do blending over time but its complicated and only useful for smoothing values

[plush trout]

Yea i figured as much. But hey, at least i was able to get it down to 36, my fear was needing a layer for each specific toggle which would brought me up to like, approaching 100

Oh-while im here i got another quick question if thats ok; Do constraints still do a performance hit if theyre toggled off completely? The avatar uses quite a few constraints, specifically world constraints, so one way i thought to work around that is like, keeping them off completely until the object the constraint is on is used. So realistically only like 2 or 3 are on at any given time

[supple trout]

i will carefully say it doesnt matter "too much" if you are at 20 or 36 layers, if someone else in your lobby has more than you, your performance is limited to them anyways 😅 But still the lower the better and if possible go for lower 👍 (likelyhood that someone in your lobby has more than 40 is pretty high sadly)

[marble rain]

20-36 layers are faaar to many. ideally you wanna stay far below plus you can easily combine alot of layers that has similar logic Or does not require specific masking

[supple trout]

im not saying that they are/arent too many, i am saying it is likely not worth the hasse if it takes too much effort since one wont get any returns for doing so if someone with an 80+ layer avi is in the lobby 🤷

[marble rain]

eh. the difference is there.

[supple trout]

are we talking about measureable or "real impact you can actually see/feel" here?

cause when i did test with someone and unlimited fps in desktop to "force" cpu limitations, i could switch between a 10 layer and a 80 layer avatar with maybe 2 fps difference (and i had around 360) since the other avi with its 200-300 layers was limiting 🤷

and when another 2 ppl with their avis joined i had 0 difference

[marble rain]

it all depends on the person's spec. some maybe less. but others it will

[supple trout]

oh trust me, i agree with you completely since less of something is always better, i am just at the same time trying to find a balance "my time investment vs. what i get in return"

[marble rain]

luckly there are plenty of tools that can sorta optimize animators etc

plus for me atleast i dont think about it as how much time i use versus what i get. because in the end if i can help improve a platform even by a fraction then thats my reward.

[supple trout]

thats the thing, in the (privateish) lobbies i run around it literally doesnt matter fps wise if i go with my <20-40 layer avis or a big goodfall like one with >100 - it always depends if that one single individual is running a 200-300 layer nuke or not

[jagged dagger]

wonder how many layers i have, i have a few systems in my avatar

let me look

37 layers

my optimized has 21

thats with running something that auto-optimizes layers into blend trees

[chilly sigil]

Hello!
So trying to upload my avatar on I get a VRAM even though the Avatar Evaluation shows all green and small size.
Does anyone know why something like this can happen? This is the first time after optimizing a lot in the past so I'm really confused.

[heavy knot]

the SDK calculations are weird, if you reuse textures it'll count

[chilly sigil]

So what should I do to fix this?
This is a pretty simple model with only 8 Materials and barely anything fancy no Matcap no Normals no nothing and every texture is already crunched pretty hard 🤔

[heavy knot]

Does it say this performance rank in game?

[chilly sigil]

Ooh okay I get what you meant now; this is how it looks in-game so yea I guess just ignoring it on the SDK works hehe

Thanks a lot!

[winged cobalt]

any idea how people get their Texture memory so "low" ?

is there a detailed guide for this ? preferably for liltoon shader

[stuck yacht]

make it like 2k or bellow that of pixel

[radiant shadow]

4k can be 10mb (dont have transparency on it) , my worst av somewhat similar to that one but 45mb vram

move whatever has transparency onto its own atlas/baked texture, save alot of vram (or decals if you are on pc)

im nowhere near that amount of poly tho 340k~

already seen some avatars that wont survive the July 16th update , over 200mb compressed , course its some public avatars

[supple trout]

Rule of thumb is roughly:

1. Lowest texture size you are happy with looking at it from roughly 1 meter distance
2. Lower size high quality is "better" in terms of size than higher size normal quality
3. If you dont need an alpha channel, remove it from the texture
4. Due to nature of normal maps, set them always to high quality 🙂
5. Maps for metallic, roughness etc. Might even work with 512 size - depends on uvmap

[stuck yacht]

oof forgot about that am good got 30mega thx god

[winged cobalt]

there must be more to it, those people have 100+ mats and only 100 tex memo, which equals to not even 1mb of load for each mat

[supple trout]

uhh actually no. you can reuse textures between materials, they will only get added once to the avatar, not once per material

and then there is even the case of "combining" textures, like atlasing or putting maps into different channels of a single texture. poi does that for metallic&smoothness for example. You can extend that however to other maps as well

looking at this avi in trys vram calc, i notice she has roughly 100 textures in here, something i might wanna work at 😅 make use of thrys tool (secodnd screen) to see what your textures are taking up on space https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools

[cold yarrow]

wow... 2.4M polys, that's crazy

[obsidian lake]

do y'all think 4 1024 textures would be better or 1 2048 texture?

for the whole avatar

3 of them are for matswaps so none of them would be used at the same time, would it be better to keep it seperate?

[supple trout]

Hmm.. vram wise it shouldnt make a difference - I would probably go the 4 on 1 texture and move coordinates around accordingly option. Dont know how it behaves on fallback shader however

[obsidian lake]

I'm using vrchat shaders so it will be all good

Like quest shaders

Just toon lit and matcap lit

[marble rain]

one 2k.

and also swapping in textures has a downside that needs to be considered to

[obsidian lake]

yeah it's for a comm and they wanted a gameboy with an animated screen that works on quest

i have each animation on a different 1024 sprite sheet

[solemn trail]

whats going on with the july 16th update?

[buoyant holly]

the max file size for avatars is being changed on PC

[obsidian lake]

there's no reason to have an avi that large anyways

if you want so many different outfits or whatever just make them into a different avatar

[solemn trail]

if you can somehow do 200mb avatars compressed I question how much it would take up on VRAM at that point

[obsidian lake]

jesus christ

you can upload an avatar with an uncompressed size of over a GB?!?

on quest you can't even have worlds with a compressed size of over 100 MB

[solemn trail]

Im assuming it is that high for audio??

[obsidian lake]

audio doesn't take that much space if it's short

which it probably should be

unless it's like for a show, you don't need a whole song

[solemn trail]

people put music on their avis as much as its not needed

[obsidian lake]

just do some compression also

like externally

in like audacity or smth

so the uncompressed size is smaller

and for compressed size, set the quality to 1

it doesn't make a noticable difference

[marble rain]

200 mb compressed is alot.

[solemn trail]

Yeah that is im just hitting around 100mb atm but I am currently going through and fixing things

[obsidian lake]

i can't even comprehend making an avi that large

i make all my avatars quest compatible

i've only ONCE had a problem with going over the compressed limit for quest, which is 10 MB

[marble rain]

100 mb download size is gonna be mostly high resolution textures and such

[obsidian lake]

most of my avis are like 7 MB

[marble rain]

i dont remember the ratio of unity packages. but its quite decent

[obsidian lake]

compressed

uncompressed is like 20 MB usually

[solemn trail]

Iv had no trouble just making cut down versions for quest removing the most of the clothing and doing some quest/android specific compression types

android has some special compression support on unity for some reason

[obsidian lake]

I think most of the issue is people using a bunch of different assets that aren't optimized for usage with eachother

in a way that really can't be done unless you make them together

stuff like doing really packed UVs so you can have as much as possible on one texture

or having low-res textures in the first place

if you're designing your textures to be low res, they won't look blury at the same size

as like a high-res texture that you change the resolution of

[solemn trail]

most of my ways of doing normal mapping through tilable textures isnt possible on quest I just dont do normal mapping on quest :)

[obsidian lake]

almost any scaling of images always results in blurrynesss

[obsidian lake]

yeah but you can atlas the albedo textures at least

[solemn trail]

I have done my fair share of atlasing

manually

[obsidian lake]

I just think people need to design things to be optimized from the start

and I think a huge part of that is making things yourself

or having one person/team make the whole thing

[solemn trail]

on base makers yes but people who just use a base add a few things on there aint gonna do that

[obsidian lake]

because when you combine a whole bunch of assets together from different creators, it's not going to be optimized

most of the unoptimized avatars I see are because they have a bunch of outfits they didn't make on a base they also didn't make

and all of them are unatlased and high-res

but like if you make all the clothes, then you do all the UVs, so you can pack two different items UVs closer than you ever could if they were made by seperate people

which means same detail for less texture space

[solemn trail]

dont have todo that I did do a few things with bought assets like this

[obsidian lake]

yeah but it's way harder and you can never get it as good as you can if you make it from scratch without redoing the textures

[solemn trail]

no

you can bake diffuse textures in blender onto a new UV

from the original model

its not that hard its just knowing HOW todo it theres ways

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/feilen/tuxedo-blender-plugin

[obsidian lake]

sorry i'm thinking with my quest brain again

[buoyant holly]

this add-on makes it pretty easy to rebake multiple different meshes into one

[obsidian lake]

i make all my avatars for quest so there's certain limitations like you can't do much with multiple UVs

[solemn trail]

no not even that

you can just

[buoyant holly]

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

[solemn trail]

I can get a video of what I mean

[buoyant holly]

it's not difficult to bake from multiple meshes into one texture

[solemn trail]

yep

[obsidian lake]

maybe i'm not understanding, but if you change UVs in a way that affects scale or rotation (which I feel would be necessary for optimizing your UV packing) wouldn't that affect the texture in a way that you'd likely have to redo it for it to look good?

I'll look into what you're talking about more later though bc I can't watch videos rn

i'm on a train so the wifi is super slow and spotty

[buoyant holly]

not really because you would just bake it from the old layout to the new layout

[solemn trail]

yeah

thats what I was trying to say

but theres a point where putting all the models together could be worse then just keeping them separate

[obsidian lake]

I just don't understand how that would have no negative affect on the quality of the texture

[solemn trail]

if you have blendshapes

[obsidian lake]

because you'd have to scale/rotate it in accordance to the UVs

and scaling, but especially rotating textures always significantly reduces the image quality

[solemn trail]

(if your textures are high res or simple enough its not that bad)

[obsidian lake]

oh well I guess that was the part I wasn't understanding

because I understood what you were talking about but I didn't think that's what you meant since it can mess with image quality

which is why I said you'd have to redo textures

because they might look really bad after being translated

[solemn trail]

if your working with a good base and set of textures its a non issue

[obsidian lake]

well I guess it also depends on texture resolution and interoplation algorithms

because some are sharper than others

[solemn trail]

I personally fully put the deira base onto one mesh with an atlas it looked just as good as the original

[pallid token]

0_0

[obsidian lake]

I'm just used to working with avatars that have like on 512 or 1024 texture for the whole avatar

so each pixel matters

[solemn trail]

meshes can also take up alot of space

[buoyant holly]

https://booth.pximg.net/ed52788c-0b3b-4e38-9ded-1e5797daf0ef/i/3681787/2409bb9f-24f3-42dd-8ad6-89a0656f2166_base_resized.jpg most folks are probably running around with something like this where it's mostly just solid blocks of color and gradients

https://booth.pximg.net/c80ffe79-d9d7-4481-bc64-40d80bcd71e6/i/4340548/4bce4e41-ac0b-4987-b616-001ae428e998_base_resized.jpg

and probably closer to a 2K texture for a whole shirt so any optimization would involve down sampling anyway

[solemn trail]

I also think at times unity shoots its self in the foot with import settings

on meshes

their tangent space calcuations can add some extra size to the model for something that shouldnt be any different between blender and the unity engine

[verbal surge]

How much of a CPU impact do animator layers have? I removed around 4 layers, but barely saw a difference in Animator Performance (in Gesture Manager).

[heavy knot]

Depends on how many animator layers you have in total

4 layers shouldn't make too big of a difference, but if you go above like 40-50 you could notice a slight hit and even more will be worse.
https://notes.sleightly.dev/benchmarks/

[alpine bloom]

So, really trying to clean up this avatar a bit for public instances, are there any tools to help remove menu stuff/toggles along with the asset? Like, If I remove a specific piece of clothes it'll take out all toggles related to that piece? Or do I gotta do that manually?

[buoyant holly]

why does it have so many bones

[alpine bloom]

I honestly have no clue, I've already removed several things