avatar-optimization

[cold yarrow]

ahh. sometimes you can

[restive phoenix]

yea.. my issue is this

i only use hoodie, shorts lol

and body ofc

[cold yarrow]

ah yep - take them into Blender and split them up

[restive phoenix]

could you guide me you think?

never used blender before but i tried in 2017

i do have it installed though

[restive phoenix]

just for clothes splitting

[cold yarrow]

I don't really do that, but there are tons of good tutorials out there

[restive phoenix]

fair, you got any vids? i was struggling to find any recent ones

[cold yarrow]

I don't offhand other than often suggesting The Donut Tutorial

or videos by Rainhet

[buoyant holly]

honestly those are listed as separate objects so you could delete them in unity?

[restive phoenix]

pantshoodieshoes are in one

[cold yarrow]

I think the point is those objects have multiple parts inside

[buoyant holly]

okay yeah that would require Blender

[cold yarrow]

yep

it's not too bad - select the parts you want, hit 'p' to "part" it out into a new object.

[restive phoenix]

okie, thanks

will try

since i dont use long hair at all could i theoretically straight up delete this or would that require changing other assets for the avi too?

[long gust]

Is there any bones associated with the hair? if so you can probably delete that too in order to just decrease the bone count

[restive phoenix]

yupp i did

i got a lot of progress

and i worked on it in blender for 6 hrs straight

i got it down to 70k

but now i need new prefab i think?

idk how to properly replace my current fbx in the files

[pure prism]

what do i do when it says the avatar uncompressed size is too large for the target platform,its 533.41 out of 500,thing is im using the older unity 2022.3.6 not the newest one since that one has restrictions

[cold yarrow]

if you didn't unpack the avatar prefab you can just overwrite it.
if you did, overwrite it anyway and use pumkin's tools to copy whatever to a new packed avatar and don't unpack it 🙂

[long gust]

try messing with these transform settings, some people like to export their fbx in different ways

for me i just preferabbly use fbx all for no blendshape issues

[restive phoenix]

correct?

[long gust]

pretty much, if it looks weird, or unity complains about humanoid, check configuration in unity
if the meshes get wayy to big, just check apply scalings again

if nothing works idk, cuz this was the issue that i usually deal with

[restive phoenix]

im not sure what you mean, only thing i did was take fbx from unity project and put it in blender

[cold yarrow]

cool, so save it to the same filename as it is in the unity project

[restive phoenix]

deleting original first right?

[cold yarrow]

no?

[restive phoenix]

so i wanna keep old and new fbx at the same time?

[cold yarrow]

oh, make a new file then

[restive phoenix]

i wanna put it in the fbx folder and delete the old fbx and fbx.meta in that folder first right?

[cold yarrow]

not sure why you'd delete anything if you want to keep both?

[restive phoenix]

i dont tho

i just wanna put the new one i modified in blender

replacing the old one

[cold yarrow]

overwrite the old file then

[restive phoenix]

meta file too?

[cold yarrow]

ignore meta files, those are Unity's business.

[restive phoenix]

oki

[cold yarrow]

(it's where Unity stores settings for the file)

[restive phoenix]

i see, will try to open project now

surely its not that scuffed

how come blender said 70k?

[cold yarrow]

triangles?

[restive phoenix]

ya

[cold yarrow]

right, did blender say triangles?

[restive phoenix]

yes

[cold yarrow]

do you have something else in the scene?

I find this is usually pretty close

[restive phoenix]

there is the android ver

but hidden

[tacit crypt]

Ok

[loud pasture]

yo im trying to make a fall back is there any tips or recommended stuff that anyone could provide?

[gritty terrace]

iirc it needs to be excellent or good on all platforms for it to work as a fall back (read this for each platforms stats: https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-performance-ranking-system/) theres tools like polytool or vrcquesttools that do it manually but it can get pretty messy if the model's super complicated

the model overall will likely need to be very barebones with no special toggles or anything like that

[proud urchin]

yep it has to be suuper barebones. the hardest thing imo is to get the polycount low enough but if youre making an avi from scratch then it simplifies things for sure

[flat condor]

could i get a hand with something?

[gritty terrace]

a hand with what?

[flat condor]

i want to optimize my avatar back into good

i wanted to add a night vission mode in the menu and now i realize the light gives me a poor rating

i dont quite know how to fix it

[gritty terrace]

remove the light component

[flat condor]

if i do the night vision shader does not work

[gritty terrace]

there isnt a fix other then removing the component

[flat condor]

i know there are good rating avatars that have it so i was wondering if anyone know how they do it

[gritty terrace]

what do the rest of the stats look like?

[flat condor]

its a light component

everything else is good

the only bad point is the light and i was wondering how to fix it

i mean yes with out it it goes back up to good

[gritty terrace]

i dont think theres a way you can get it to be good ranked with the light component are you sure you've seen model's with a light component on them that're ranked good?

[flat condor]

yes quite

i gotta go but ill keep looking for an answer later

thanks tho

[cold yarrow]

Yeah 1 light = automatic poor, there's no way around it if you need a directional light, which you do for that shader to work.

[ivory sluice]

the fix is just removing the light component, no setting for it will make it good ranked if it's still on the avatar

[marble rain]

There is non avatar that would be performant with lights. Just remove them

[prime holly]

I have a question about phys bone performance.

I'll give a model system: A bone that forks off into two or more chains of bones.
I can rig phys bones in two ways.

1. One component for the base of each and every chain.
2. One component just before the fork that produces phys bones in each chain automatically.

According to the SDK's optimization, Option 2 is more computationally efficient than Option 1. But why? The same number of bones are being affected in each case.

What changed?

[cold yarrow]

I'm assuming it's because of one system vs. two

[prime holly]

I would have thought it depends on the cumulative complexity of all involved systems. Not merely the number of systems.

[shrewd plank]

So basically it's just because if you have one component affecting many things then you're also limited to one setting for all of said things. With multiple components it has to find, select, and utilize different settings for each one. At least that's my understanding.

[prime holly]

Its creating multiple redundant variables for each component. Iiinteresting...I didn't think of it that way.

Or just generally doing the same work multiple times when it could instead be a one-and-done for the same results.

And then for the last guy with the dynamic lights. I suspect the reason they're so poor for performance is; they require ray tracing of some variety to work?

[obsidian lake]

Yeah they're real time lights

[prime holly]

Yeah, that'll do it...

[obsidian lake]

Although vrchat is working on some stuff to make it not raytraced I think for the standard lite shader

[marble rain]

because every component you add addional components having to deal with updates and doing whatever they do. its always better to have a single component managing well every object if possible

[marble rain]

that would most likely just be for the mobile hardware. and also realtime lights are not ray traced.

[regal citrus]

This is why CATS has an option to create a duplicate parent bone for chains that would likely have physics applied.

So the created root bone can act as a controller to just the physics system rather than every single child bone connected to the original parent.

[thorn oxide]

whats the max stuff allowed for Good rating avis? trying to atlas all my textures/materials, but i was told its only allowed up to 4

[heavy knot]

define "stuff"

Are you talking about material slots

[thorn oxide]

yeah

[heavy knot]

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

[thorn oxide]

so good rating is 8 slots? 😭

[heavy knot]

This lists both PC and Mobile (Quest) ranks

for PC yeah

[thorn oxide]

:yip

okeii, tysm

[thorn oxide]

man

[heavy knot]

just one off, damn

are any of those material slots using same materials

[regal citrus]

Is there any way to preserve transparency when atlasing materials?

[marble rain]

i dont recall it being possible. the shader has to be transparent. but some special shader may have the possiblity. to use a mask to mask something to be transparent.

otherwise you just need a seperate material that does all transparent things you want

[stark bear]

assuming custom shaders are not an option for uv tile discarding, what's the most performant way to hide/show parts of your avatar on a toggle?

is it better to have multiple objects and toggle them, or one massive object with blendshapes to hide stuff

[cold yarrow]

it's actually pretty easy to add UV tile discard to a shader

you know, if you dabble in HLSL

Blendshapes don't really count very negatively anymore, so one object is often better than multiple, since it's one draw call vs. one per object.

[stark bear]

I dont want to use shaders to hide stuff cause people who don't have my avatar shown will see everything enabled

[cold yarrow]

yep

[stark bear]

also is it true that its better to have a shape to turn something on than it is to have a shape to turn it off?

[buoyant holly]

technically animations being disabled would also break toggles

[stark bear]

I remember hearing that blendshapes set to 0 dont have a performance impact

or at least have a smaller impact than being set to anything not-0

[stark bear]

yeah but as long as the default state is to have everything hidden, people won't see things they shouldn't

[cold yarrow]

yeah blendshapes aren't very significant in terms of performance anymore

[stark bear]

ahh ok so it doesnt matter either way

hmm what about in cases where you cant atlas the materials, is there much difference between one object with two materials vs two objects with one material each?

[buoyant holly]

that's going to be two draw calls

[cold yarrow]

that's basically the same

[stark bear]

ahh ok good to know. thanks!

so its not really worth combining my props at all if I cant also atlas their textures

[cold yarrow]

yep. I really try to aim for one body mesh and one clothing mesh, then rarely-used things can be separate from there.

[stark bear]

makes sense!

[meager folio]

does anyone have a tool that optimizes triangles in unity

[cold yarrow]

You really need to do that in a 3D modeling program like Blender.

[gritty terrace]

theres stuff like polytool but not sure how well it works

its also a paid assets so you'd need to buy it

[meager folio]

alright ty

[meager folio]

can someone explain how my avatar is failing security checks?

[cold yarrow]

Which Unity do you have?

[meager folio]

2022.3.6f1

[cold yarrow]

ah you should get .22 because there are bugfixes, but that wouldn't block you

[meager folio]

ohhhhh

okay

thank you

[neat matrix]

[night rapids]

anyone got a good guide for avatar optimization?

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_LSvi3K7og

[waxen whale]

im trying to help a friend out but im stumped on this one; their avatar has one mesh and a toggle object. Both are using the exact same material and combined UV space/atlased texture. So one material only and it keeps giving this message saying there is two?

[stable juniper]

[Translate] There are two meshes: the main mesh and the toggle object mesh.
Even if the material is exactly the same, each mesh will have separate slots.
[Original] そこには2つのメッシュがあります：本体のメッシュとトグルオブジェクトのメッシュです。
たとえマテリアルが完璧に同じであったとしても、メッシュごとに別々のスロットが割り当てられます。

[spring sun]

Material slots

[waxen whale]

ah so separate meshes do count. hmmm
Wonder if there is a workaround like have it all the same single mesh but crunch it into the body with a blendshape/bones animation

[spring sun]

Sure but its unneeded

Medium rank is perfectly fine

[waxen whale]

even for Quest version?

[buoyant holly]

yes you're still better than 90% of avatars at medium @waxen whale

[spring sun]

The quest version is amazing if its medium

[forest pebble]

Run it through d4rks optimizer

[stable juniper]

Probably “AAO: Avatar Optimizer” helps you.
It can freeze unused blend shapes and merge mesh.
Here is documentation: https://vpm.anatawa12.com/avatar-optimizer/en/docs/tutorial/basic-usage/

[livid girder]

dm me if you can make me a avi i will pay

[spring sun]

nah

[main scaffold]

watched the furality talk, but ma_textureatlasser seems to not be working anymore

is there any easy way to create an atlas without blender?

my pc cant handle it

[cold yarrow]

you can't change the UV map without something like Blender, so probably no

[main scaffold]

damn

i can merge stuff, it just dies trying to bake the atlas

[cold yarrow]

amusingly I had Blender crash on me 4 times earlier trying to bake a high-poly object to low. Had to close my browser 🙂

[main scaffold]

awww

[cold yarrow]

I'm running on my laptop, it's WAY less powerful

[main scaffold]

i was able to get all the stats down except mat count and polys, trying to upload for android mobile and ios

[stable juniper]

maybe TexTransTool helps you.

[main scaffold]

ill take a look!

thank you, google translate

i will now call july christmas

[cold yarrow]

Haha

[stable juniper]

lol

[main scaffold]

how does it work? only stuff in the tools menu is debug information

[stable juniper]

add the component named "TTT AtlasTexture"

(add to avatar root object)

[main scaffold]

thank you!

does it not have localization for english or something?

thats what my unity language is in

no, weird

[stable juniper]

could you show me the previous errors? probably it is side-effect errors.

[main scaffold]

oh whoops, its because i installed it wrong the first time

the guids changed

ill reinstall

accidentally unzipped it into my assets folder :c

[stable juniper]

wait, VCC is your friend.

[main scaffold]

it has a vcc repo?

didnt notice one

oh there is

whoops

[stable juniper]

Press the button 'Download-VPM' https://ttt.rs64.net/

[main scaffold]

thank you!!!

[cold yarrow]

love the color of that

[main scaffold]

reminds me of the cute images in alot of coding tools

https://react.dev/?uwu

[cold yarrow]

ah yes

[main scaffold]

wtf happened, i alt tabbed out

[stable juniper]

😮 < what!??

[main scaffold]

theres no unity open????

[cold yarrow]

probably leftover processes after the crash

[main scaffold]

ughh

killed unityhub and Unity.Licensing.Client and its opening now

was worried id have to restart

doing this all over remote desktop and havent tested if it lets me connect on the login screen

uhhh

a texture size of 4096 seems to work?

oh wow

thank you so much!!!!!!

[main scaffold]

hey again! is there any way to make it apply permanantly, instead of previewing? planning to use that to atlas and then blender to merge everything

or does it apply on build, and i need to copy it out of playmode

it doesnt seem to apply in playmode :(

[cold yarrow]

most things don't, you can copy the component (3 dots at upper right) and paste values back when not in play mode

[main scaffold]

i mean theres no way to get the atlased texture other than uploading or clicking preview, and preview doesnt save it to a file it seems

[cold yarrow]

ah maybe I'm not following along with whatever you're doing here

[main scaffold]

let me record real quick

[cold yarrow]

I don't know the tool so probably can't help

[main scaffold]

aaand my unity froze

:p

this is what it looks like in preview mode

clicking the material doesnt give me a file, but if i double click it goes to the asset

i dont know where its stored

lemme look in the code to see what it does

ah, maybe after i upload itll go here?

[main scaffold]

omg i had ndmf apply during playmode off

because i was debugging stuff

were so back

oh its midnight

lmao

got it out of playmode !

[main scaffold]

ughhh just joined everything in blender and it looks like my pc died

its frozen

cant connect to it anymore either

unresponsive, yayyyyyyyy

damn my unity project is only on that too, cant keep working on it from my laptop

have to wait until tomorow

[stable juniper]

sorry for late response. Why do you want the texture after atlasing? Normally, the UVs after atlasing are different from the original, so there is no reason to do that.

[main scaffold]

im trying to join all the meshes of clothes and body in blender, and lower the material count there

it still uses seperate material slots even after atlasing

trying to get mat slots down

[stable juniper]

'AAO: Avatar Optimizer' can merge meshes and merge same materials non-destructively.

[spring sun]

then stop using multiple materials and meshes
when you atlas it you then need to delete the materials and keep one

[stable juniper]

If you want to merge material only, check the toggle "MaterialMerge" and "ForceSetTexture" in TTT Atlas Texture component.

[reef osprey]

Does anyone know what to do if it says this?

[cold yarrow]

First error on the left says you have a missing script, you'll need to deal with that. Either remove it, or install whatever package it requires.

[reef osprey]

did it

now its just blueprint ID

[cold yarrow]

if this is a first time upload and you have a blueprint in the pipeline manager component, clear it - otherwise there are probably more errors above that one

[reef osprey]

nope thats my issue

I looked it up and i tride watching a tut but it didnt help

[cold yarrow]

ok so with that cleared, you only have one error message?

[reef osprey]

there is two

[cold yarrow]

ok the second is a side-effect of the first. The first isn't very helpful.

[reef osprey]

it says this when i click on it, sorry it would be diffult to get a photo. BuilderException: Failed to build the Avatar, check logs for more details
VRC.SDK3A.Editor.VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder.Build (UnityEngine.GameObject target, System.Boolean testAvatar) (at ./Packages/com.vrchat.avatars/Editor/VRCSDK/SDK3A/VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder.cs:2258)
VRC.SDK3A.Editor.VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder.Build (UnityEngine.GameObject target) (at ./Packages/com.vrchat.avatars/Editor/VRCSDK/SDK3A/VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder.cs:2448)
VRC.SDK3A.Editor.VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder.BuildAndUpload (UnityEngine.GameObject target, VRC.SDKBase.Editor.Api.VRCAvatar avatar, System.String thumbnailPath, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) (at ./Packages/com.vrchat.avatars/Editor/VRCSDK/SDK3A/VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder.cs:2463)
VRC.SDK3A.Editor.VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder+<>c__DisplayClass104_0.<CreateBuildGUI>b__4 () (at ./Packages/com.vrchat.avatars/Editor/VRCSDK/SDK3A/VRCSdkControlPanelAvatarBuilder.cs:2015)
System.Runtime.CompilerServices.AsyncMethodBuilderCore+<>c.<ThrowAsync>b__7_0 (System.Object state) (at <27124aa0e30a41659b903b822b959bc7>:0)
UnityEngine.UnitySynchronizationContext+WorkRequest.Invoke () (at <cb81df0c49c643b1a04d9fc6ccca2433>:0)
UnityEngine.UnitySynchronizationContext.Exec () (at <cb81df0c49c643b1a04d9fc6ccca2433>:0)
UnityEngine.UnitySynchronizationContext.ExecuteTasks () (at <cb81df0c49c643b1a04d9fc6ccca2433>:0)

[cold yarrow]

triple back-quotes: ``` make for nice formatting! But that's not a very useful message unfortunately

[reef osprey]

how do i make it useful so you can help me? sorry if that sounds mean or soemthing

[cold yarrow]

no idea!

[wicked plume]

I would just close unity, flip SDK version on VCC and open unity again. unless editor tool got outdated to start with

[cold yarrow]

definitely restart unity if you haven't - I hate that this fixes many things

[reef osprey]

how do you flip that, i have never done that sorry

[reef osprey]

Very stupid question, sorry. how do you restart unity is it going in and out or something different

[cold yarrow]

it's just a windows application, close it and re-open.

[reef osprey]

it says the same thing

[hollow pollen]

Blender question, normally I just decimate a high body mesh and then ignore the small little texture imperfections it causes. But today I've been trying to do the method of transferring a high polly mesh texture onto a low polly mesh texture to fix the texture issue, tho sadly most of the tutorials I can find on youtube just tell me to use a cage method? which isn't what I'm trying to do exactly, and even when trying it and following the vid step by step it just doesn't work at all and I end up with a weird texture that's all fucked up. Any one have a vid or a post that can hopefully walk me threw how to do what I'm looking for?

[barren belfry]

Same steps, but don't choose to make the cage. Shrink the mesh with the texture (Alt+S or sculpt) slightly under the mesh receiving the texture

[hollow pollen]

so just make the low polly a bit smaller than the high polly mesh and then follow the same baking steps?

or Vis versa

[barren belfry]

Tbh, I havent done it in a while but I think its the low poly that should be under the high poly.

its by a very small amount, though

[hollow pollen]

I'll give er a go ig, I've been at this for a bit so anything is worth a try rn lol

[barren belfry]

Feel free to DM if you need more help

[hollow pollen]

I just tried it really quick and it's the low polly mesh over top the high polly

works great none the less

[barren belfry]

ok, glad it worked!

[hollow pollen]

I kinda feel dumb seeing how easy it was all along but hey, I'm learning at least lol

thanks for the help g

now I just need to fix the uv map cause it's of the shit lol

[barren belfry]

yeah, it be like that sometimes

are you optimizing for PC or Quest?

[hollow pollen]

like... this be looking bit to pixel like

[hollow pollen]

pc atm. I just can't stand using an avi over 150mb

I already got it just under a hundred in unity while keeping it looking the same. But I'm taking it into blender to make it better cause 100 is still a little to high for me

[jolly locust]

are there any guides to avatar optimization within unity

[cold yarrow]

wait, within unity? there's not a whole lot you can do there, perhaps d4rk's optimizer thingy is about it

[jolly locust]

jammin with very poor
hell yeah

the base is just a unitypackage

i can probably export and reimport it but frankly im fine with very poor

[cold yarrow]

remember that your computer has to render your own avatar 2-3 times

[jolly locust]

wdym

what about others

[spring sun]

mirror, shadow, local

[cold yarrow]

^

[jolly locust]

ah ok

[spring sun]

mirror is yknow the mirror duplicate
shadow handles mostly the lighting
local is what you see in first person

[cold yarrow]

The point I'm making is that your own avatar can negatively affect your performance

[jolly locust]

i have a beefy pc im mostly worried about others

(no pc is a match for vrchat tho 😉 )

[cold yarrow]

if it's bad enough anyone smart will just block it anyway 🙂

[jolly locust]

fair

where do you set a backup avatar?

[cold yarrow]

in-game

[spring sun]

or if you mean imposter
on website

[severe crown]

more of a question: what are the biggest things to look out for which impact performance the most?

[heavy knot]

Material Slots are the one of the biggest things to reduce

Triangles is fine if you're at like 140k (the triangle stat hasn't been changed since 2018, even though the pc hardware has changed drastically). The sheer amount of drawcalls this game has in single scenes is the reason why the game is extremely CPU heavy

[radiant shadow]

vram abuse , the murder of my frames 99% of the time

you dont have 24gb vram ?

[cold yarrow]

I do but I don't want your avatar to use all of it 🙂

[marble rain]

Vram abuse is kinda hard to do with the limits that exist. and even then Lower material slots = lower possible max Vram

[silver brook]

When the 8k texture avi loads in :B

[main scaffold]

http://i.lilyy.gay/u/HSG6Kr.png finally got my optimized verision of my avi into play mode, and i'm almost done!!!

all i need to do is crunch polys

[main scaffold]

nevermind, i dont think im gonna be able to take down bones :c http://i.lilyy.gay/u/UYp8IT.png

and polytool on 20000 looks horrible :c

http://i.lilyy.gay/u/e4zmZ4.png

[severe crown]

might have to make a separate avi then with all the fun items removed then, cause man the revolver I downloaded has so many separate materials on its own :(

[proud urchin]

If you have multiple outfits make separate avis for them.

Same with any objects that demand lots of resources

[forest pebble]

That's basically what I do, have a fun version and the optimized version for events / large instances

[severe crown]

I just wish I could find a way to reduce the triangles on my avi for quest. damn kita avali alone is nearly 70,000 :(

it will never be allowed automatically for questies

looks too bad when using the tuxedo optimizer to get to 20,000 since so much detail is needed on some parts

[cold yarrow]

I thought there was a quest version of that

yeah, there is, I've got the package in my downloads

[bold wharf]

Suspicious arrow gizmos.

[main scaffold]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1273423281659314187.webp?size=48

[forest pebble]

[manic knoll]

for people that enjoy "content" on a 56k dial-up modem :p

[prime holly]

https://tenor.com/view/crying-emoji-dies-gif-21956120

Even if its only one particle that needs collision?

Its gonna be weird if a railgun-sabot hits something and doesn't eject sparks.

[radiant shadow]

barely used particles but i just use peoples contacts/ect to trigger particles when hitting stuff

[prime holly]

...I would also kinda like a sound for its impact >_>

Since its really fast, lots of kinetic energy...something akin to thunder? Like being struck by lightning.

[lyric lintel]

Is there a tool that lets me see the size breakdown of the avatar asset bundle? I'm trying to figure out what exactly is using so much space in my avatar

[heavy knot]

VRWorldToolkit is one

It’s a curated package in the creator companion

[lyric lintel]

Does that work for avatars?

[heavy knot]

Just click VRWorldToolkit at the top of Unity and world debugger then click the build report tab

The build report will work on any project regardless if it’s a world or avatar project

[lyric lintel]

Awesome, I'll give it a try

[lyric lintel]

IT WORKS! Thanks so much

[turbid rover]

I just need to know how to make an avatar quest compatile

[buoyant holly]

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

[graceful condor]

if you're patient enough you could do a full retopo and transfer everything over (weights, uv, shapekeys etc)

[heady smelt]

how to fix the materials?

[worthy sigil]

Blender atlas textures

[heady smelt]

what do i need to do?

\

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZnSO3BnoIM

[heady smelt]

so i need blender for this

[buoyant holly]

yes

[heady smelt]

never used

what do I import there?

i only have one unity package file

[buoyant holly]

the fbx file for the Avatar is what you would be importing into blender

[heady smelt]

but

it is a package

my project folder would have it though

how do u do it usually

?

[buoyant holly]

the asset folder of the unity project would have the fbx file somewhere in it

[heady smelt]

yes it does

show inm explorer, right clickl

[buoyant holly]

"/asset/name of the Avatar maker/Avatar name/meshes" tends to be a pretty typical file structure for where the fbx file is hiding

[buoyant holly]

that also works

[heady smelt]

stay with me, im installin blender now

i remember it to be extreme unintuitive

it's just a gray model

r u sure?

[buoyant holly]

you have to click on this button to show the color and texture

[heady smelt]

I see

what'

what's pi llow?

i think blender forces me to install it to use matcombiner

[buoyant holly]

yes that's a requirement to go install that

[buoyant holly]

technically making a atlas textures can be used without that add-on but it is simpler with it

[heady smelt]

the addon wont show up anymore

in the tool bar

and installing it doesnt work either

[heady smelt]

.

[buoyant holly]

have you tried resetting blender to make sure the python script you're installing is properly loaded

and in like 3 minutes I need to head off to take care of some errands IRL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73REcZVWMhA a video that explains how to do the texture baking stuff without the add-on

[heady smelt]

i combined it, but how do i get this now into unity, do i import an fbx file or just the png:>?

[buoyant holly]

the new fbx and the pngs

[heady smelt]

this i guess'

looks weird nwo

[buoyant holly]

that's because you accidentally exported the Sun from blender with it

[heady smelt]

into the materials?

[buoyant holly]

the blender export has a select only selected object export option if you're not wanting to include the Sun

[heady smelt]

can I choose visible objects?

and if i check selected, which one to select?

[buoyant holly]

Armature mesh @heady smelt

[heady smelt]

i see

and what I did here I can completely do again, right?

everything

[buoyant holly]

yeah you would handle the rest of the unity set up stuff from there and I have to hop off

[blazing garden]

learning how to optimize avatars and get started with all of this has been an adventure lol

[stable juniper]

probably you can not upload lol, because your meshe's Read/Write is desabled. and Auto Fix button solves that.(when Read/Write desabled, Control Panel shows "Triangles: 2147483647")

aaaand, you have to reduce your physbone components if you really want to optimize your avatar

[vagrant flower]

how does this even happen

what are all those trigs even for bruh

[gritty terrace]

read/write not being on makes the size look bigger then it actually is

its not actually that large number in most cases

[proper grail]

I have discovered decal based blushes, -1 material slot!

[cold yarrow]

excellent!

[hearty kiln]

Can someone explain to me why in Unity a avatar has a different Poly count then final in Vrchat

[frail herald]

are you using any kind of non destructive tools like vrcfury or MA?

[hearty kiln]

ye

[frail herald]

then those tools must be processing your meshes prior to the upload.

[hearty kiln]

So if i would attach them manually it should be right?

[frail herald]

i don't think you should though. why would you?
is it pushing you over some sort of limit or is it just OCD?
cuz I wouldn't give up modularity personally.

[hearty kiln]

i wanna get to poor

it shows in unity 69956 polys and in vrchat 75000

so its screwing me up

[frail herald]

that's a very big discrepancy. i thought it would be on the magnitude of like up to 1k or something.

i'm not sure at that point it could very well even be Unity being wrong, or the VRChat server side scanning misrepresenting. people have posted to canny, and they've been asking for avatar IDs to get the wrong perf ratings sorted out.

[hearty kiln]

so what should i do in this situation?

[frail herald]

you could post to the VRCF Discord (if it's VRCFury) or contact MA (idk how they do that)
worst case scenario you both figure out it's not VRCFury/MA's fault, and then you'll probably know what's next.

[hearty kiln]

i use both

or atleast vrcfury is inside my project in the back

[frail herald]

hm. I know VRCF doesn't always give out support if people are using MA unless someone is like 100% certain it's VRCF causing an issue.

still worth a shot though. i do however think it's either Unity or VRC being wrong, or the processing messing you up.

[hearty kiln]

alr thanks i will give it a shot, worst case going back do decimate :/

[frail herald]

yeah! one last thing that you could try, make sure you have read/write enabled on your meshes. whenever i didn't do that, i had a range of things happening from vrchat not showing poly counts to being wayyy off on them.

[frail herald]

you could also try out one editor tool i use.
if you have the anatawa12 repo, there's the gists package. and you can enable "Actual avatar performance" and that will try to use the same logic and maths to predict what the performance will be. i use it to quickly iterate when optimizing, and it was very helpful when vrchat was still sorting out issues with the wrong perf ratings showing up as i was able to see them in the editor somewhat accurately.
you would probably just wanna run the avatar in play mode after enabling that gist so that it can run a build and tell you what perf it thinks it should be

[hearty kiln]

Sorry to ask again but what do you mean with enabling gist

[frail herald]

it's part of the anatawa gists thing.

https://vpm-catalog.vercel.app/repositories/com.anatawa12.main

are you using the vrchat creator companion (Alternatively ALCOM) to manage your projects? this is how most of the tools and packages for making avatars and worlds are obtained. through vcc repos

[hearty kiln]

yeah im unsing vcc but also i have other tools manually inside

[frail herald]

you can install the repo i linked above if you wanna give the thing i recommended a shot. i just dont know if you've ever dealt with installing stuff through the vcc so idk how much context u need.

but basically after you install that repo, and the "anatawa12's gists pack" package from it - it should add a thing to the top menu of Unity that will let you pick any of those little scripts (called gists) and one of them will be the actual avatar performance thing. you don't need it but it is useful to just iterate when optimizing, at least in my opinion

[hearty kiln]

ok i checked it with the tool

and it also says 74952 polys

:/

[frail herald]

so unity was wrong after all! also sorry to hear that, it's frustrating.

[hearty kiln]

yeah, its really stressing

you finally see your under the 70k poly count and then vrchat "nu uh"

[frail herald]

i just decimated my mesh to hell to get from 21k to 20k to get poor on quest
i could stay vp as it introduced some minor glitches, but it's nice to have questies not have to whitelist me. as i'm otherwise optimized and if i have to tell them to trust me it won't lag them, they won't lol

[hearty kiln]

i already decimated alot lol

went from 115k to 70

and now this xD

[frail herald]

oh yeah then thats hell. my avi has an official quest ver but i was stubborn to have the hoodie on quest. i'm going to try and do some backfacing voodoo to maybe lower the poly count without decimation as i made my quest version have non toggleable clothing already. i'll probably ""mold it to the body"". i've even figured out how to make the quest version enforce some params so that the pc side is synced to the state my quest ver will be stuck on.

[heady smelt]

what is avatar bounding?

[forest pebble]

The 'bounds' of the renderer object

[heady smelt]

no idk whaty it is

also my avatar spawns 72m tall in game

[proper grail]

How big the avatar could be, including blendshapes

[heady smelt]

in Mb size?

or virtual size

physical

[proper grail]

Nope in literal meters

[heady smelt]

it set it to 1-1-1

it spawns 72m tall

though iun game

[forest pebble]

Is that intended..?

[heady smelt]

nO

[forest pebble]

Lol.., ok so you are looking for 'bounds' not scale

On one part of your avatar

Likely a skinned mesh renderer

Put t:SkinnedMeshRenderer in the hierarchy search box and go through each one

[forest pebble]

In the view you should see a white box around parts of the avatar for each one

Find the one thats massively outside where it should be

Although scale 100 tends to be due to blender export mistakes

[forest pebble]

You need to turn gizmos on

Last button top right or the viewport

[heady smelt]

it is on

[forest pebble]

Can't tell because you keep cutting out random parts of the ui

[heady smelt]

i used that search

t:SkinnedMeshRenderer

u mean these white boxes?

should i move this to #1138520828556890214 ?

[heady smelt]

how do i fix this>?

i knlw now what it is. I thihnnk it is to big bc my avatar is 180m tall in game

[heady smelt]

the command doesnt work anymore

[urban marsh]

ok so, is there a way to make a texture on my avatar invisible, or just see-through, only for myself?

like, if people look at the avatar it's opaque and normal, but in 1st person parts of the texture should become see-through

if i look directly down, the clothes on my avatar cover my screen

[cold yarrow]

use a different material for local, switch them with the IsLocal animator parameter (true = only you)

[urban marsh]

and how would one go about doing that? i haven't played VRC or messed with unity since january i'm just coming back today lol

there are a lot of things i forgot

[cold yarrow]

probably watch tutorials on making toggles and ignore the part about the in-game menus

[urban marsh]

is there a tutorial i missed? i'm asking on the discord server because i already looked through google and reddit and didn't find what i was looking for

[cold yarrow]

I mean, there are lots, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqtSg6_W07Y

[urban marsh]

that one isn't what i'm looking for unfortunately

[cold yarrow]

it literally tells you how to do the animator part, in your case you just use the variable IsLocal which is a built-in one documented on VRChat's docs page

[urban marsh]

the animation already exists

but do i just put the tag here?

[cold yarrow]

I'm not sure where you're stuck then

[urban marsh]

my avatar has a giant cloak that can be toggled on and off, but when it's on i can't see anything if i look down, i don't want to toggle anything, i just want it to be transparent for myself and nobody else

i don't have issues with creating toggle animations and props i've done that before, i'm stuck on the texture part

[cold yarrow]

Simply erase the parts you don't want

[urban marsh]

i'm confused

[cold yarrow]

me too. make a new texture with those parts erased, use it in a second material that only gets applied for you.

[urban marsh]

i'm trying

[cold yarrow]

Ok, where are you stuck?

[urban marsh]

i duplicated the texture but idk how to make the 2nd one transparent

[cold yarrow]

image editor, erase the areas you don't want. Assuming you have an alpha channel.

[urban marsh]

ok i figured it out, kinda

i had to remove the alpha mask

[cold yarrow]

it should be pointed out that this won't work on quest

[urban marsh]

now only thing left is to make sure only i see it being transparent and not everybody else in the server, that's the only part i'm stuck in now

is there something similar with how the head becomes invisible in 1st person but not on mirrors?

[urban marsh]

that's fine, i'm not on quest, and the avatar is desktop only

ok so the mesh has the renderer but not the material itself

yeah i'm lost

[heady smelt]

can i solve these issues in unity?

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer you could try this but I'm not sure how well it works on Quest

[heady smelt]

ive already one project open

[balmy badger]

I bought a avatar off of booth and looked up how to insert it into unity. I also fixed all the main red octagons so I can continue to build & publish, but it stopped me at the build and publish and says "building avatar" but no progress has been made after I waited a hour or two. I don't even know how long it would take to publish a avatar

i even tried detaching the blueprint (optional) that i saw in a youtube video and it still didn't work

[buoyant holly]

the avatar for some reason has three different Avatar descriptors which is not supposed to happen try deleting all but one of those and then do the disconnect build ID

[buoyant holly]

my point was to try installing this add-on and see if it helps with your problem or not without having to install blender

[heady smelt]

the addon is installed with a project

not after it is opened

[buoyant holly]

you can install Unity add-ons when a project is open no problem

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer/releases/tag/v3.8.0

[heady smelt]

how did u find rthis one?

[buoyant holly]

on the same page I linked you previously

[balmy badger]

I deleted two of the "vrc avatar descriptor" and then pressed "build & publish." It had then popped up it's own blueprint ID after I had detached it.

[buoyant holly]

you need to exit out of the prefab View

[balmy badger]

wheres the prefab menu?

[balmy badger]

i exited out pressing the scenes button and it ended up in this

[buoyant holly]

that's because you don't have a copy of the Avatar in the scene itself drag the prefab into the hierarchy

[balmy badger]

i dont know how to drag it to the hierarchy either 😦

[buoyant holly]

drag the icon from where I showed to start into the hierarchy

[balmy badger]

alright i did that

[buoyant holly]

then you should be able to just click build and publish

[balmy badger]

:0 it worked

TYSM

[buoyant holly]

glad to be of help I would recommend on the VRchat website also generating an imposter for the avatar so that people that don't show very poor avatars can still see something that looks like you

[balmy badger]

ok

[buoyant holly]

because your screenshot shows it's going to be a very poor Avatar so nobody on Quest will see it by default

[heady smelt]

it didnt fix the mesh problem

i have too many meshes

[buoyant holly]

it does the stuff typically on upload there is a button to generate a duplicate that's optimized

did it make any difference to the other stats

[heady smelt]

I think so

everything else in the game is in the green

[buoyant holly]

so that's at least progress

[eager cliff]

Is there any way to get the impostors that are generated and viewing them in unity?

[buoyant holly]

nope you can only view the imposters in game

[pseudo hazel]

hello! i'm trying to make an avatar with a single skinned mesh (Quest optimization) that can take tools from their belt and carry them in their hands. is there a way i could toggle to move that tool's bone between the belt and hand locations and have them be rigged in the same way that they would if they were parented to bones in those two locations? the VRC Parent Constraint doesn't appear to be doing anything, so if i need to be using that, i'll post my component settings. thanks for any insight

[proud urchin]

As far as im aware you cant do that with bones

Youll probably need to duplicate the flashlight mesh and attach the duplicate to the hand, thats all I can think of

[onyx harness]

You can use the constraint for something like this. It might've just been the setup of the component that was causing it to not work. Personally I set empty gameobjects as the source positions and animate the weight of said sources to move it from A to B or vice versa

[worldly hull]

I would use atlas, but I dont know where is the atlas texture, after I press:
[Save Atlas to..]

Thats how it looks after I hit "Save Atlas to.." There does no folder open and there is also no new texture in the list.

So I combined everything but there is now atlasa created I guess. IDK why peoples even use this atlas tool if it only can combine the verticies but not giving you an option to even get the created image.

[stoic gust]

You should only ever have one Skinned Mesh Renderer on your avatar. Any accessories or additions to your avatar should be done in 3D editing software like Blender, and merged into the original mesh. Any animations or movement should be handled via shape keys or bones

How do i merge it into the orignal mesh? and will it still be toggleable?

[worthy sigil]

Ctrl + j. And yesn. You will no longer have access to the object activity toggle when merging, hence why you need to make "hide/shrink" blendshapes and use those as "toggles".

[crystal shard]

How do I fix this

[stoic gust]

i love you

[molten adder]

Saw a few too many poor avatars with lights this weekend, I'm really surprised there weren't already multiple canny's for this

https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/avatar-ranking-lower-avatar-light-limit-to-0

[cold yarrow]

eh, one can be useful

[worldly hull]

What is better for VRChat?
4x 2048 materials or 1x 4096 material?

[radiant shadow]

8192 materials? 1 material with 4k texture

neither is very bad for a pc build (21 ~ 10mb vram depending if you need transperancy) handy you need different shaders you can still use 1 texture on several mats

[worldly hull]

from this perspective, everything is bad if you want to make a good looking avatar.

But what would be less worse for the performance?

4x 2048x2048 or 1x 4096x4096

4 medium large materials or 1 very large materials?

I have to choose one of those options.

[sick relic]

If all texture are used simutenously then 1 atlas texture is better. But if some textures are being used at time, smaller separate textures are better because it the one not being used doesn't get loaded into VRAM.

[worldly hull]

1 atlas is the whole avatar body.
Sadly, I am only allowed to use up to 2 materials on quest whats makes the choose smaller and those automatic generated Atlas does waste a lot of unused space on the image, but atlasing it from scratch by your hand, only with Paint.net and Blender does take a lot of freetime I sadly dont have left.

and yes, I have everything already selected from the avatar

[sick relic]

Use plugin UVPacker Master and Simplebake for blender. They're paid plugin but totally worth for every penny.

[cold yarrow]

I love SimpleBake. And it's about time I buy packmaster

[worldly hull]

Do I need both? Or is one enough?

[cold yarrow]

you can do this without either

[sick relic]

Just one or both depends on how convenience you want.

But both is really god sends.

[cold yarrow]

I've also been using ZenUV for a while

[worldly hull]

It should be quick and easy. You can see how much space I waste on the Material Combiner Master, which was recommended by Cats Blender Plugin.

[worldly hull]

.

It would be great if the tool can only crop out those pixels, where a polygon is on top with maybe 2 pixels left on the edges to make sure everything in the polygons is filled up.

[sick relic]

Well no. Packing efficiently is heuristic problem.

It requires more advance algorithm to make it efficient.

[worldly hull]

Just crop out everything that have verticies or polygon edges on top of it and every pixel that is not in use, you can overwrite it.

Just imagine the yellow polygons left would cut out the pixels underneath it and arange it with only 3 pixels space to each other.

I even would pay for such a smart addon, so I can use lower resolution images without getting a low resolution texture on the avatar.

So it would only cut out the pixels that are in use and maybe left 1-2 pixel on the edges.

And the black area is free to put another cutout image on it...

[sick relic]

It's easy for human brain to figure out. The main problem is telling the computer what to do.

[worldly hull]

Can the computer not detect what are pixels that are not in use in any material and what pixel are in use?

If I paint for example on a model, it will draw only on the UV shape and never on the areas where those polygons are not.

it also have to know somehow where it is because every pixel that is inside or even touches the orange polygon, will be affected on the look of the object.

[sick relic]

Yes it can detect pixel. With caveat it has to be done one pixel against one pixel at time. So that would be billions of comparison.

[worldly hull]

in short say:

Every pixel than can be affected by brushing with the paint tool on the model. and every pixel that doesen't get affected even if it gets painted on every little spot of the 3d object, is a free to overwrite area...

[sick relic]

Even you have to can detect pixel is occupied, you still need to check for every pixel of an uv island.

And has to restart the process if one pixel is occupied by other island.

[worldly hull]

something like this, but automatic and filtering everything that is Pink.

and if your textures are already pink, than select another greenscreen color to shapeout.

Thats what I would imagine.

[sick relic]

With caveat it has to be done one pixel against one pixel at time.

That's a BigO problem where calculation count has to grow along with data size. Here is a sample: take one island with 100x100px size, which is 10,000 pixel total, against 1000x1000 texture which is 1m pixels in total. So that's already 10 billions check, just for one pass.

Not to mention an island could be scaled or rotate to fit better with other occupied pixels, so complexity glow really fast.

[worldly hull]

how long would that take?
I mean this is nothing what must be done in realtime, imagine doing this with a 4090, I mean it sounds a lot but GPUs are true beasts in rendering millions of pixels every frame.

What would you think, how long would this take?
Just to imagine 🤔

[sick relic]

Not sure. UVPackMaster is already doing that by using GPU and it take less than a second to pack all islands into uvmap per round. But the code has to be efficient enough to run fast.

Still has to run multiple rounds to find optimal uv space usage.

[worldly hull]

Can you explain me please the difference between UVPacker Master VS Simplebake?

[sick relic]

UVPacker Master is for packing uvmap. Simplebake is for baking texture.

[worldly hull]

So I need both to replace material combiner, right?

[sick relic]

To completely replace material combiner.

[worldly hull]

Ok thanks, I give it a try!"

[bold wharf]

Just so you know you don't need either technically. You can bake without simple bake it's just a more involved process. Blender 3.6+ have greatly improved UV packing engines (not as good as uv pack master but good enough for most uses.

Figure someone should mention this before you go and spend something like $60 on blender addons

[worldly hull]

What is the most realistic skirt you can make with physbones?
To come as close as possible to cloth physics...

It should be ranked as medium, this here is just a bew bones over medium and is ranked with "poor".

[spring sun]

you dont need that many bones in a chain for a skirt

you could get away with half

[ivory sluice]

Don't try to achieve realism cuz not even with cloth simulation you'll be close
Just have enough bones to avoid clipping as much as you can, such dense chains will just make your skirt move chaotically

[empty river]

Is there a way, or some tool, that can let me see the sizes of all the parts of an avatar as I am attempting to upload? I'm getting really weird/inconsistent upload sizes when trying to produce a quest avatar, and I don't know where I'm losing nearly five megs of size when I've done all the optimization I can.

[proud urchin]

BuildSizeViewer

[glass aspen]

vrworld toolkit also works for this

[warm cloud]

oh hello again!

[obsidian lake]

you need better UVs then. you can get away with a much much smaller texture size with the same level of detail by having well mapped UVs.

[buoyant holly]

yeah there's a tremendous amount of wasted space in the screenshots

[ebon stream]

For a female base (making one) how many polygons should it have mine has 27k if I subdivide (2) and 108k if I subdivide (3)

[tacit mirage]

is there a 3rd party tool i can use to determine what is causing such a big download size

[gritty terrace]

thry's avatar performance tool iirc

[tacit mirage]

alr let me try it thanks

[proud urchin]

28K should be plenty. Avoid going over 70k

[worthy sigil]

My avatar has a little over 60k triangles. But i am a sucker for high resolution and smooth deformations so im really pushing it with that amount. Anything above 70k is just pure insanity (for a base, not counting clothing here)

[frail herald]

what is the polycount threshold for VP on PC?

[worthy sigil]

Vp?

[frail herald]

very poor :3

but a friend already managed medium so nvm

[cold yarrow]

this is listed on the vrchat docs site: https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-performance-ranking-system#pc-limits

[frail herald]

oh i didn't know about the tables. thanks

[regal basin]

what counts as a “bone” to the performance ranking system? Do leaf bones count as bones? Does it just count the total number of objects under the armature or does it only count vertex groups?

[cold yarrow]

ooh you mean does it count unweighted bones? Hmmmm

[proper grail]

The third one, number of gameobjects

[cold yarrow]

k, makes sense

[ocean hollow]

Is there any way to delete animation frames like this automatically? I would rather not delete frames manually like this for 600+ frames

[stable juniper]

Ctrl+Del is not a solution for you? This command removes all key frames

[ocean hollow]

I want to keep every 3 frames
basically, I want to reduce the frame rate to reduce file size
Since the asset is an animationclip, I can't go to the Animation tab and reduce the frame rate like I would with an FBX animation

Debug Inspector > Sample rate does not reduce the Avatar upload size

[silver kayak]

@ocean hollow You can try this https://github.com/txtxj/Unity-Animation-Compression-Keyframe-Reducer

you can copy the stuff from the assets folder to your vrchat project's assets folder, then it should work

[regal basin]

wow I hate that, thanks for the info

[pure pawn]

I need some tips at Optimizing... (android Ver.)
(all of them are quest versions)

[zealous wigeon]

Since you are using VRCFury, have you tried adding the blendshape optimizer to the avatar?

Otherwise, just change the texture resolution for the textures for specifically the android platform.

[pure pawn]

I already tried the blendshape optimizer, also "D4rkAvatarOptimizer"

[pure pawn]

Is this hard to do?

[stable juniper]

I found this in the SyncDance’s store page.

Syncdances is now 50% compatible with quest (we still have the Avatar size limit issue)

[zealous wigeon]

No, super easy, you just find the textures for the avatar and in the inspector (under the android tab) change the max resolution

[zealous wigeon]

No audio on Quest, but rest would work

[stable juniper]

Oh i see. then nvm

[zealous wigeon]

Probably is a prefab for Quest specifically with the songs stripped, but the animations to dance to them still there.

Animations can take up quite a bit of space but still

[pure pawn]

worked! Tysm!

[worthy sigil]

Can we discuss UV layouts for a sec?
I've been battling this in my head. I don't need help about how to do X, I'd like to just discuss the pros an cons of messy vs "sensible" layouts. Many people use image editors such as gimp, for which a layout as shown in the picture might be "making more sense". However, I waste a shit ton of pixel space like this. On the other side, my avatar is so detailed already, that there is no way in hell I would get it to "excellent" on pc. "Good" is the best i can do and it's tight on polygons already. My material count is and will stay 3.
So should I really worry about texel density too much or am I beating a dead horse? I am considering making two uv maps, one with whats shown and one with an algorithm compressing the islands to maximize space but then texture artists have to keep asking which layout a client uses and most wont pay attention to there being a second one, so this option seems to do nothing but add dumb steps and confusion.

To sum it up: What would you do and why?

[cold yarrow]

I'd probably do it like you have it, there's some balance between efficiency for the graphics engine (the computer) and efficiency for the graphic designer (the artist).

[worthy sigil]

I really want to keep this layout as well (just gotta touch up symmetry here and there bla bla, perfectionist ahoi) but I feel like I'm wasting way too much space like this x.x It feels unethical xD

[proper grail]

first draft looks something like that just to make the base texture yeah, but for the bake and game ready version everything is sorted by color and seemingly randomly packed. computer doesnt mind

[ivory sluice]

i still don't get why some people draw 3D surfaces in 2D image editors, it's very unintuitive, and even more if you don't have a preview of the model

i puzzle the islands in a way that it's kept in order without having to sacrifice a lot of texels (using always my rule of minimum a 4 pixel margin)
So like if there's a gap between two islands doing an outwards curve and another one doing it inwards like with the legs and torso islands you have on the left, i'd just move the torsoabove the right leg islandand the left arm right next to the right one

prioritizing the order and symmetry of uv islands over texel efficiency will cause people to use very high resolution maps because many of them just don't really like noticing texel interpolation on their avatar

[buoyant holly]

the default 3D painting Tools in blender kind of suck as they don't have any layers so it's either pay for a substance painter or paint 2D for most folks

[cold yarrow]

There are layer add-ons (LayerPainter, ucuPaint) but they still kinda suck compared to a real 3D painting tool

[ivory sluice]

yee tho armorpaint is free
it may have a weird layer system but it has a proper brush projection and scaling, and obvs lazy mouse, which is enough

[cold yarrow]

oh yeah, I still have to try that for real

[upper yacht]

You could always make two versions? One that recommends substance painter (or any other 3d painting software) and another that is 2D painting friendly. That's if you're selling, if you're just making it for yourself, make it however you wish.

[rocky nexus]

hey i'm trying to export my avatar but it says it's too short, but if i make it bigger, it gives me a different error?

is each square on the grid 10cm?

[cold yarrow]

1 unit = 1 meter, but you'll need to map the shoulder bones

[rocky nexus]

got the shoulder bones mapped

now there;s no grid 😭

[cold yarrow]

there are various display options at the top if you like the grid

but your problem is not the height - it's the second error.

[rocky nexus]

the avatar feet?

[cold yarrow]

The avatar origin should be at the world origin, 0,0,0

If it's not, go back into Blender and make it so

(unless for some reason it's mis-located in Unity?)

[rocky nexus]

how do i set the avatar origin?

it probably is mislocated in unity

[cold yarrow]

in Unity, move it to 0,0,0

[rocky nexus]

yeah its there

[cold yarrow]

that scale is small

but the origin issue is the main one

[rocky nexus]

yeah i tried making it bigger but it changed it to very poor

[buoyant holly]

in that case you made it too big then

how tall are they supposed to be @rocky nexus

[rocky nexus]

about 9m in blender

[buoyant holly]

yes that is way too big

as that's 29 ft tall

[cold yarrow]

Ah and you can see it's not standing on the origin in Blender either.

[rocky nexus]

whats the reccomended size for the avatar?

[buoyant holly]

the average male irl is 1.77 m tall

so how tall is the bunny relative to the average man

if you weren't treating the blender unit as arbitrary

[rocky nexus]

well i'd assume he's about 5'11

[buoyant holly]

1.55 m tall in that case

converting from feet to meters

[rocky nexus]

alrighty like this?

[cold yarrow]

yep - make sure you apply transforms to the objects

[rocky nexus]

gotcha

sooooo re-export it and so the whole thing over?

[cold yarrow]

if you didn't unpack the avatar prefab in Unity, you can just overwrite the .fbx file (with the same export settings) and it'll just update

[rocky nexus]

is there a way to make the eyes move the texture instead of rotating it?

cuz they're stuck looking up for some reason

[cold yarrow]

click that green "return" button

[rocky nexus]

did that

they're stuck looking up no matter what i input

and i tried both eyetarget and eye control

[cold yarrow]

probably bad bone setup - eye bones should be perfectly vertical with 0 roll

[rocky nexus]

shit

i wouldn't mind not having eye movement, so how do i make him look straight ahead?

[cold yarrow]

you mean without going back into blender and fixing it?

(note that I'm guessing, I haven't seen your armature)

[rocky nexus]

i had this model commissioned i have no idea how this thing works

[cold yarrow]

well you can just remove the eye bones from those slots

[rocky nexus]

oke

oh shit the eye bones got misplaced when i shrunk him

what

[cold yarrow]

expand the window, should be a "auto fix" button there

[rocky nexus]

oh

derp

oh btw i dont think this model has shoulder bones

[cold yarrow]

you need shoulder bones, even if they do nothing

[rocky nexus]

ogh

back to blender

oh

guess i gotta play more

[arctic thorn]

i think it looks fine, though you could make most things a little bigger, don't need a huge amount of white space between islands.
tho if you were planning to have everything perfectly symmetrical, you could save a lot of space by overlaying all symmetrical parts onto eachother. if you're planning on selling this it might not be a good idea though, since other people may want something asymmetrical in the texture
I think it's probably best to just use 1 uv map, you really don't need to be using every single pixel of space available

[worthy sigil]

Yea i think i settled for the layout, however i will maximize usage as much as i can and make everything perfectly symmetrical here without overlaying

[worthy sigil]

this feels a lot less wasteful

[hybrid mulch]

@stoic gust You don't need to yell. Chill with the all-caps.

[heady smelt]

how do i fix this?

[proper grail]

What words in that do you not know how to do

Open blender and do it

[proper grail]

damn i really fell asleep slapping someone with a "do you speak english?"

[cerulean burrow]

how can i fix this i feel like this is out of place

[cold yarrow]

yeah the legs ought to be straighter. Go into armature edit mode and move the feet back a bit

[cerulean burrow]

im new to blender so its kinda bad but let me find armature edit mdoe rq

i was able to find it got no idea how to move it 😞

[cold yarrow]

make sure at the upper-left it says "object mode" - otherwise hit tab, it probably will. Then click the armature and tab to go into edit mode.
I strongly recommend tutorial videos

[cerulean burrow]

alright il watch a tut video im watching a tut on how to make teh avatar and i need to move every bone since they are alll out of place

@cold yarrow something like that right?

[cold yarrow]

#avatar-rigging message

[cerulean burrow]

shhoot mb

[pastel walrus]

i forgot how to fix this

[cold yarrow]

turn on read/write on the model file in the first tab of its inspector

[pastel walrus]

thank you

[pastel walrus]

does anyone know how to apply decimate without removing the blendshapes?

[cold yarrow]

you need a plugin for that, I use this one. It "usually" works: https://github.com/przemir/ApplyModifierForObjectWithShapeKeys
Decimating like that is likely to mess up your shapekeys anyway though

[pastel walrus]

all that just for me is just duplicate the model 3 times, and they still lose the blendshapes

i think it just doesn't work with decimate

[cold yarrow]

yeah it doesn't work in all cases unfortunately

usually anything that changes vertex count is tricky

I mean, the method this plugin uses, not the plugin itself

[proud urchin]

Blender 4.0 required. No plugins needed! Select vertices in edit mode, mesh > clean up > decimate

Ive used this on multiple models and it works fine if that plugin doesnt do its job

[pastel walrus]

tysm!

finally. good performance on quest

best i've gotten before this was poor somehow

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3efrO8dauec a very nice new tutorial video on RGBA Masking

[mental flume]

Help? I've tried everything to fix the quest side and it says security checks failed

here are my errors:

I'm very confused usually I can fix this but apparently not

[spring sun]

why do you have over double the recommended max bones

[mental flume]

i have no clue, and it wont go down

how do i reduce that??

ive never had an issue with it before ive had it hit like 400 no issue

[spring sun]

by not having that many bones?

thats not good

[mental flume]

yeah i know but i dont get it

does it just mean to remove bones in blender

[spring sun]

thats the only way to properly do it yes

[cold yarrow]

it could also be you've got multiple armatures from assets added poorly in Unity

[mental flume]

figured out the issue is a couple of my meshes? idk why it’s giving me problems

but i’m just gonna redo them

[solemn tartan]

download/uncompressed size wont go down to upload for quest. No matter what i do, it just wont go down even if i get rid of everything except the avatar in the scene. I've even decreased the polygon count and that did nothing, same with textures, that did nothing. please help.

it's stuck at 27.02 download and 105.91 uncompressed

nevermind

im just not smart

i never checked the box😅 😭

[obsidian lake]

sometimes this can happen from a broken script btw

i had this happen to me the other day, couldn't figure it out for the life of me, it was because i had a broken script in the project

just had to delete that and then reopen my project and it worked fine

[mental flume]

yeahh i thought it was at first but it’s one of the meshes bugging it which makes no sense, i have avatars that are optimized worse and they work fine..

[magic forge]

for the quest version of this avatar i am creating, should i only have one physbone thingy for the tail? (bones coloured in green are going to be physbones)

[obsidian lake]

No one physbone is very little

You only have 16 physbones that's perfectly fine for quest

[magic forge]

ok its just that the quest thing said its very bad for optimization

(i dont own a quest, i dont know how much it affects performance)

[obsidian lake]

You may be thinking about physbone components

You can have 8 components max

Physbone transforms are th bones

[magic forge]

yes thats what im referring to

[obsidian lake]

Those are seperate

[magic forge]

the components

[obsidian lake]

Yeah not the same thing

Physbone components you already only have one on the tail

Physbone components are what you put at the base

Then it affects all the bones after it

The children

The transforms are the total bones affected by this

You can have 64 on these on quest

Tail = 1 physbone component
Tail bones = 5 physbone transforms

[magic forge]

thats right, yeah

thanks

wasnt sure what the correct terminology for it was

[tidal marten]

no idea why any of my bones/collisions wont go down even if i fully remove them

[proud urchin]

There are several physbone colliders present in this image

Its the green spheres. So you didnt remove them.

[turbid cave]

i did it

[somber notch]

is it a bad idea to use gpu instancing on poi shaders?

[proper grail]

Depends if the object is both not a skinned mesh and appears multiple times from a view

[cold yarrow]

it probably doesn't make a ton of sense on an avatar unless you're doing weird things

[somber notch]

what kind of wierd things?

[cold yarrow]

mesh particles or duplicated props, something where it makes sense to instance

I have not actually quantified anything about performance, I'm speculating from what I know about how it works, which probably isn't much

[zealous wigeon]

To my knowledge it does add some small cost to the material so best not use it unless you are actually using it.

And rare that it would have a use on an avatar.

[vivid arch]

I'm trying to select Body , Eyes , Face to save as an atlas because my avatar has too many material slots- But when I do that, the Face and Body both go white, but the Eye texture remains. How do I fix it to all the materials looking the same- but in one material?

edit : When I atlas them- the textures dont even like- merge like they normally would when doing so- it just only shows the eyes.

[languid stag]

what was it cause im having the same issue

[white swan]

so I just reuploaded a very old avatar that failed security checks due to texture memory usage

is there a way to make vrchat recheck now that the issues fixed?

[proper grail]

enter play mode and leave

[white swan]

in the unity editor?

[proper grail]

oh wait after uploading hmm

shake vrchat until it updates that you updated your avatar

[white swan]

fixed it

I forced vrc to load into it through the website

and that updated it on the app

[gritty terrace]

pretty sure you just need to attempt a upload again to get the updated size in the error (though if its within the limits it'll get rid of the error and just upload the model)

[bold bear]

0

[proud urchin]

Ive never used that tool but you'll need to manually atlas the textures and UVs. There are tutorials for this

[somber notch]

in a skinned mesh when you add a shape key does it add like a bone or something?

[buoyant holly]

lower the resolution on your textures

[drowsy jewel]

i already changed all the texture's max size to 512, is that not enough?

or do i need to change the actual image file's resolution

[buoyant holly]

would you happen to have lots of blend shapes as those can affect file size?

[drowsy jewel]

probably yeah p: but whenever i reduce the shapes on clothes etc they would easily clip through because the body is still high on shapes and changing the base shapes kinda messes with the base i think

[heady crystal]

Does anyone have a link to the new limits?

[elder oak]

How do I remove collision checks?

or at least lower them

[cold yarrow]

fewer physbones or physbone components, fewer colliders

[heady smelt]

heyt

]\

i get this errror for an avatar

[gritty terrace]

what do all the RED errors say?

[heady smelt]

why does this take so long?

[foggy jay]

Did you lock them?

The shaders ^

Also how many materials do you have

[proud urchin]

no, a shape key only moves the vertices around

[thin falcon]

Is it viable to use a particle system to create hair for an avatar? Or is it more optimal/plausible to create hair via meshes and armature?

[spring sun]

why would you ever use particles to make hair

[thin falcon]

I don't know, that's why I'm asking.

[cold yarrow]

wat

[somber notch]

You could try poiyomis particle shader it's not making mesh but you could make it look like it is but it would be heavy on performance tho particles in vrchat seem to always be

The particle shader adds particles around a mesh like off it's surface, I haven't messed with it much but it should work

[thin falcon]

I see, the heavy performance is more what I'm worried about. I'll take a look at poiyomis particle shader and see what I can do. Thanks for the pointer! :)

[somber notch]

yea of course! also its patron tho so you'd have to buy it

[thin falcon]

ohh I see, I don't mind paying for quality tho so if it seems like what I want I'll go for it

[somber notch]

if you look on the poi patron you should see a clip of it on there

[indigo plover]

how do i make my avatar smaller

i cant uplaod bc its too big apparently

[heady crystal]

Anything about new quest compatible sizes?

[buoyant holly]

no change it's still a 10 megabytes file size and 40 megabytes uncompressed texture size

[gritty terrace]

you'll need to take it into blender and merge some materials and bones aswell as atlasing some textures

you could also try auto-quest optimizers like VRCQuesttools or Polytool though the results can be poor depending on how well the model was made

[indigo plover]

oh

alr ty

[tepid dome]

Screenshot from yesterday

Screenshot from today

@indigo plover i believe we are both having the same issue, its the same avi with nothing done with it

[cold yarrow]

how do you have a 670MB avatar

[gritty terrace]

it likely got smaller when you re-opened your project because either your SDK wasnt updating the size properly or you didnt attempt another upload but you deff need to remove some things as 500 for an avatar is overkill

if i saw that in game it'd be a insta block for sure

[acoustic raptor]

Anyone know some low hanging fruit I can go for?

[smoky mirage]

Hi

[sick timber]

Texture sizes, reducing them to 2048 or 1024 is a really easy way to reduce both uncompressed and download size

[silver kayak]

you can also try to remove the Blendshapes that you aren't using, or just use the d4rk avatar optimizer that does it for you

my avatar had like 400+ blendshapes, but I only used about 20 of them, it increased the download size by about 10MB

[silver kayak]

Is there a way to tell my UV packer to not to use multiple space for the same texture in Blender?

[silver kayak]

oh great, that's exactly what I was looking for, thanks

do I need to first unpack everything as normal, combine the repeating parts into the same uv space, then unpack again? I think it should work

[mellow maple]

what i usually do is shift each of the original UV map by a multiple of 1 in order to make sure they dont overlap, then do pack islands

[cold yarrow]

I keep finding myself annoyed with the results of auto packing tools

Though a bunch of what I've got to do is world stuff nobody's going to actually edit later so I should just get over it

[tropic hill]

That's a big pain to me 😭

I had 10.02

Like bruh

[crystal plume]

not sure what channel to put this in, but i recently uploaded an avatar intended for fallback use. it is excellent performance for pc, and good performance for quest. i don't see any option to mark the avatar to be a fallback upon upload. did that change, or will the fallback appear in my fallback avatar list? i don't see the avatar in that list after uploading the avatar.

am i missing something? please ping me with a response.

[mellow maple]

it has to be uploaded on all platforms and then marked as fallback on the android build menu

[crystal plume]

i did not see any option to mark the avatar as a fallback on the quest build menu. i am using the latest version of the sdk

[mellow maple]

have you built it on ios as well? idk if that makes a difference since it's still in beta but i usually build my avatars on ios and they work as fallbacks

[crystal plume]

oh wow. didn't know that was a requirement. I'll try that then

[mellow maple]

im not sure it's a requirement or not tbh

[crystal plume]

I'll see if it makes a difference

[mellow maple]

ive also recently had an issue where i upload an avatar on quest and it's just doesn't work even though it says it successfully built 🙃 so maybe check out the avatar page on the website in order to see if it uploaded properly

[crystal plume]

is is a common issue?

[mellow maple]

im not sure, just something i've personally come across, i never asked around about it

[crystal plume]

weird

[mellow maple]

it could have been that i was building the cross platform versions too fast

[crystal plume]

even more annoying when the game doesn't update immediately

[mellow maple]

around where it says "this avatar is currently set as your fallback" was a button that said "set as fallback" or something along those lines

[crystal plume]

haven't seen a button like that

I'll upload the avatar for iOS and see

[cosmic trench]

hey, im tryna understanding something, why is it exactly that an avi, after the new 200mb limit, isnt blocked when its memory is this big, yet the new size demands anything must be under 200?

[crystal plume]

looks like it worked

[mellow maple]

nice

[sick relic]

200MB is compressed size, aka download size. VRAM and uncompressed size are 2 other different metrices.

[cosmic wave]

Trying to optimize an avi, unity tells me this. Should i be worried ?

[mellow maple]

thats just how unity displays really small numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation

[cosmic wave]

Ahh gotcha thank you

[sick timber]

How do you get 2 bytes of texture memory?
genuinely

[tropic sonnet]

So optimised you can store the textures on your fingers and toes

[cosmic wave]

i baked the texture as vertex colors and used smol texture to compensate for the lack of colors, i could technically remove the texture all together and have 0mb, but the colors become to faded out.

[sinful vine]

anyone know how to solve this problem about when try to convert an avi to quest ? about fallback , i was not have it that issue before 😮

[cold yarrow]

make sure you've read and followed this: https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-fallback-system#uploading-a-custom-fallback

[proud urchin]

It looks like you didnt upload to quest and ios yet

[round kayak]

is this expected behavior? my avi's bounds are just slightly over recommended and in the editor they only drop it down to "good", but in game they're dropped all the way down to "poor"

although actually the middle number is much lower, hmm

[heavy knot]

does this avatar use vrcfury or some tool that runs on avatar build

[round kayak]

it does

why would that cause the middle number to be so much lower tho?

[heavy knot]

vrcfury puts a "Bounding box fix" on

[round kayak]

oh hmm

why is the avi penalized for having a smaller bounding box though?

does the penalty work in both directions?

[heavy knot]

your x and z bounding area is more than 5

[round kayak]

and it brings it down that much???

my whole point was that the editor says it's good but it's much different in-game

[heavy knot]

just like how 70,001 triangles makes it very poor, the perf rank system is really jank

[round kayak]

but it disagrees with the editor!!

[heavy knot]

VRCFury

[round kayak]

lemme try it without vrcfury

[heavy knot]

you can disable it at tools > VRCFury > settings at the top of Unity

[round kayak]

yeah i did that

now it fails to build the avatar

????

nevermind, it was a fluke i guess

ah. now the bounds are fixed, thanks for the help

[sick timber]

Well in the game box is larger and there’s a penalty because bounding box has the capability to make an already bad avatar significantly worse
The larger the bounding box, the less the avatar is blocked by occlusion, and the more quickly it starts rendering, even if off camera.
So while a good avatar with a large bounding box may have little impact, and very poor avatar with a large bounding box will have a much larger impact
Although, according to the docs, bounding box doesn’t even cause the avatar to be blocked sooo

[restive phoenix]

could someone help me understand whats happening here

why its 1.5MB but in the calculator and ingame its 21MB

[unreal plover]

Top is download size and bottom is VRAM size

Crunch compression only reduces download size

[restive phoenix]

i see thanks

[restive phoenix]

how come compression only works on normal or lower and not high?

bug or am i uneducated once again?

[heavy knot]

Don't use crunch compression

[restive phoenix]

why

[heavy knot]

crunch doesn't change VRAM usage, it still has to decompress it when it reaches VRAM. It only assists in raw filesize for the avatar's bundle

https://www.poiyomi.com/blog/2022-10-17-texture-optimization#crunch-and-you

[restive phoenix]

yea i know but if can lower the download size without seeing a massive change in visuals why not do it?

[heavy knot]

quality of your textures, and LZMA assetbundle compression already compresses bundles down significantly

[restive phoenix]

what is LZMA?

[heavy knot]

it's already used on your avatar's assetbundle when you upload

[restive phoenix]

oh okay

[winged owl]

is there a way to preview an imposter from pc?

[proud urchin]

play the game, click on your avatar, and then below the preview there's a button to show it

[silver kayak]

I would say crunching can be good depending how you use it. If you have 4K black and white texture masks, it can in fact reduce the file size by 90%+ on these masks, and the decompression is also way faster on these

and it also makes your avatar visible to more people, who limits the uncompressed size of the avatars

[heavy knot]

you shouldn't have 4k b&w texture masks to begin with

[silver kayak]

I know, it but even if it's a 1K or 2K texture, it still reduces them by 90%, my PC avatar has a single material, that use two 1K mask textures that I use for the color mask, but I can still see some imperfections because the lowered mask size. if it would be 2K, then I wouldn't see any problems with it

[proper grail]

If you have data masks with no gradients that define a model piece, i guarantee they can be 128x128 with mips off

[cobalt ivy]

Help please