avatar-optimization

[somber notch]

Yea they need to be quest compatible

Unless you can do rgba masking

On quest but idk

[cold yarrow]

not that I've seen

[somber notch]

#notbased #sleepisaW

Unless your at work then it's definitely based

[vapid bluff]

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/mesh-baker-free-31895
maybe something like this?

this is ig the free demo version

but if it works then its def looking into

looks like theres several kinds of atlasers and batch optimization tools in the unity asset store

[cold yarrow]

huh, does that in Unity, that's interesting

[somber notch]

Ill have to try this out

[cold yarrow]

I tend to do this in blender using SimpleBake (which is non-free but so worth the time it saves)

[unreal plover]

SimpleBake is goat

[short matrix]

Getting these errors when trying to upload, i really honestly don’t know what to do and this is around my second time trying to upload a avatar

[spare goblet]

those aren't errors, they're performance warnings, your avatar is very unoptimized. You can atlas textures, limit physbone components used, delete some bones you don't need, delete physbone colliders you don't need,

[short matrix]

How do i do that

[spare goblet]

atlas textures - blender, there's an add on for that or you can do that manually
physbones - in unity, look at your physbone components and delete the ones you don't use
same with colliders

[short matrix]

Do i just untick these boxes

[spare goblet]

better delete them, three dots on the right, delete component

[short matrix]

Can’t really delete them

Nvm got it

I think

I just pressed remove component

[spare goblet]

ah yeah

remove

oops

[short matrix]

Idunno are there some that I should definitely keep, as for each body part or something

[spare goblet]

i'd reccomend head so hair doesn't clip

i'd it depends where you have physbones

[short matrix]

Could you quickly just explain what they even are for/do?

[crystal sonnet]

go to components

[crystal sonnet]

some of them prevent you from uploading

like ones u can uncheck are like toes

the jaw

etc

[crystal sonnet]

also 200K+ triangles is a LOTT

try doing some optimization

and also just get rid of things you aren't using and unnecessary assets

also get d4rk for optimization in general

[proud urchin]

Lets take hair for example. Normally if you have no limit or colliders the hair can go in any direction it wants. But we dont want that because then it will go inside our head, chest, etc. So with a combination of physbone limits (limit the movement of a physbone) and colliders (which collide with physbones) you can control their movement better.

You usually do not need very many physbone colliders because limiters should do the heavy lifting, but sometimes a collider is needed

[opaque fable]

T.T I am removing things from my avatar but the size is not getting any smaller, what do?

[proper grail]

size is normally 90% textures, mostly their resolution

[spare goblet]

combine materials and delete physbones and physbone colliders you don't need

you don't need colliders all over your body like that

[radiant shadow]

vroid converted in unity is always a mess if you did the blender route it would be 1 material/texture/mesh (+/- 1-2)

[spare goblet]

most tutorials go the easiest possible way (aka unity converter)

which isn't that good

you should take the vrm to blender and convert it there

export as fbx

and it'll be so much better

doing things only in unity is a mess and not good for performance

i'd recommend blender 3.6 or higher + cats unofficial plug in

someone made like a minute fast video with every step, if i find it i'll send it here again

or you can search for an updated vroid to vrchat tutorial with blender involved

[radiant shadow]

https://www.blender.org/download/lts/4-2/
https://github.com/teamneoneko/Cats-Blender-Plugin-Unofficial-/releases/tag/4.2.2.5
cats plugins
+ vrm importer
+ matcombiner
+ whatever other things cats want to install

[spare goblet]

this one yeah

[radiant shadow]

4.2 ui slightly different now but its in the same place

[spare goblet]

mh,

mhm

this is the way to go

after that you can add physbones and colliders where they'rre necessary, not everywhere like the unity converter suggests

[radiant shadow]

Id do that in blender, if its for pc and below 70k it doesnt matter

easy to get good rating

quest is 'fun' with vroids, you will run into cutout shaders wich quest cannot and need to use knife tool to fix eyebrows ect

can always fix it later , eyebrows will look like this without some work

after knife tool

[spare goblet]

yeah, quest is annoying for vroid

[radiant shadow]

vroids atlas wont be the greatest either but its still better then having 10+ materials (another thing you can bake later)

[spare goblet]

do pc first, after that you can play around with the knife and quest

[spare goblet]

yeah. you can delete the ones you don't need

your shirt isn't long enough to need the bottom bones, cause they're for the skirt part

[radiant shadow]

mmd fix removes those useless ones not weighted

[spare goblet]

oh yeah

it does

[cold yarrow]

in armature edit mode, you simply click them, either in the 3D view or in the hierarchy in the outliner.

[spare goblet]

fix your model first

[radiant shadow]

cats also have these (mmd fix should do it all for you)

[spare goblet]

cats > mmd options > fix model

[radiant shadow]

n - toggle sidebar thing (unless its something else blender loves to change shortcuts)

[spare goblet]

it's n

[radiant shadow]

blender likes to hide them

[spare goblet]

good

[radiant shadow]

to see them again

or object mode and it goes

[spare goblet]

a lot better!

you now need to generate visemes and rotate eye bones

depending on what bones they used. it should be fine

it's automatic

visemes

like in the video Thulen sent

just pick the correct stuff and press "generate"

just rotate eye bones

don't generate eye tracking

it's in unity now, no need to do it in blender

[radiant shadow]

rotates eye for you

[spare goblet]

i'd atlas the materials

so you have one/two (if you use transparent textures, keep the, seperate)

oh that's gonna be fine

100%

you need to get the material combiner

it looks like you dont have it

https://github.com/Grim-es/material-combiner-addon/releases

here

MatCombiner > Update Material List > select all materials you wanna combine (i keep transparent stuff seperate) > Save Atlas to...

ah you need to join your meshes

Cats > Quick access > join all meshes

bravo

you have now one mesh and one mateiral

you can export now

as fbx

[cold yarrow]

you'll be making materials in Unity anyway, what it looks like in Blender won't apply there

[spare goblet]

exactly

export settings i reccomend

you'll pick a shader in unity and it'll look good

like it did before

that's just how blender makes it look

[radiant shadow]

cats dont need to set any of that, it does it for you

[spare goblet]

yup

if you do it by cats it's set correctly automatically

i always recommend new one, cause multiple avatars in one can be messy

what's up?

you need to extract textures

and drag the fbx to the hierarchy

click your fbx in assets

in the inspector (on the right) go to materials

Extract textures first

Extract materials second

what were your export settings?

if you didn't do copy and the symbol next to it to be blue it won't let you

[radiant shadow]

if you want texture in the fbx , or just find where you put the atlas and drop it into unity

(doesnt always work since path can go hurgh)

[spare goblet]

if you atlas it you will have the texture in a folder

[cold yarrow]

but if you have the textures as files already, don't bother with this, just put them into the unity project

[spare goblet]

you can just drag it in

[spare goblet]

exactly

it should be the same place as your blender file

drag it in the assets

create a material

and set the texture of that material to be your atlas

and set that material to your body

[cold yarrow]

assets -> create -> material

[spare goblet]

i'd pick the shader first

whichever one you want

vroid creators after use vrm mtoon

i use mtoon

cause you need to set the texture in the material

and different materials uis look different

and the spot can sometimes differ

where the texture goes

if you send a screenshot of the material settings i can tell you where to put the texture

the material inspector

oh

yeah no

that's a quest shader

it's gonna look bad

with the black parts

like Thulen showed on the screenshot

get a normal shader that supports cut out

because you need cut out

any shaders from VRChat/Moblie will not work

no no

that's not for avatars

get mtoon or liltoon or poiyomi

or any other avatar shader from online

mtoon is here

https://github.com/Santarh/MToon

but you may already have it if you still have the converter installed

many of them come with that shader included

it would be in VRM/MToon

here

and set the Rendering Type to cutout
and cull mode to Off

check mark?

you should be able to

can you not drag the texture in or anything?

[cold yarrow]

click onto a different object then back to the material, sometimes Unity gets stuck.

[spare goblet]

top

top right

cutout, off

instead of what you have now

does the avatar look good?

click on your fbx in the assets and check if the material is set to this one

?

my guess is you need to mess with the shade

oh

messed up with the colour or someway else?

set this to white if you want better colours

okay, set the top bar to white

and the shade one you need mess with till it looks good

i just set it to black/grey and set the A bar to 0%, cause i don't want shading on my avatar. and it looks like neither do you

in vrchat it should look good, unity lightnighting sometimes makes avis look weird, i'd play test it in vrchat

generally mess with the shader settings, or get a different shader and mess with their settings

it's all beauty stuff now

[vapid bluff]

u could export them and import them in or drag and drop from the file explorer

oh wait

this is vrm

ignore me nevermind, i know nothing about that or how it works lmao

[cosmic wave]

Why does VRChat allow users to see their own avatars with a Very Poor performance rank on Android devices (Smart phones), while restricting visibility of others' avatars with the same rank?

[spare goblet]

it doesn't

at least not for me

[cosmic wave]

it does

[spare goblet]

huh, new update i guess

you got me curious now, i'm gonna check xd

[radiant shadow]

you can always see your own avatar no matter the rank , seeing everyone elses very poor on android is a terrible idea, there goes all your ram

think ive seen the same question asked years ago , im so not looking it up though

[spare goblet]

oh i can

i must be misremembering

oops

[zealous wigeon]

Not on Android phones, there that was only possible for the first week before they patched that out.

(ignoring ongoing tests that is allowing a select amount of very poor avatars to be shown)

[cosmic wave]

Thats so weird to me, me and a friend were messing around on phones today and I got so confused when he told me he saw my fallback. Guess I gotta upload my quest fallback separately to test out

[cold yarrow]

dynamic lights are a huge performance problem, you really should not be using one to light up your own avatar

[spring sun]

Dont use it to begin with?

Make your avatar look good without a light

[narrow lake]

hii maybe someone can help me i uploaded my avi and i dunno somehow ingame my left hand does not work and it just mirrors my righthand (pls dm me)

[spare goblet]

did you set the rig to humanoid?

in unity

No

do you have an avatar here?

that's okat

there doesnt need to be one

for the rig to work

did you try switching it to generic and back to humanoid?

yeah, you already said you're having those errors

image adds nothing new

take a screenshot

i can't see anything on that image

windows key + shift + s
and paste it to the discord chat

...

okay, number 1, delete the camera and light
number 2 check the configuration of your rig to see if the bones are mapped properly

set the jaw bone to none

cause you have a hair in there

hmm, still getting the error?

the only thing i can suggest is switch to generic and back (remember to delete the jaw after)
or reexport from blender without the light and camera, maybe that messed it up somehow

oh yea

android's gonna be bad

[radiant shadow]

another thing you can do is setting your texture to 4k since its 1 atlas , unity imports default at 2k , you are far below 99% avatars in vram use anyway

(vram checker)

https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools < easy to check them all

[spare goblet]

nice

[radiant shadow]

Thats not cutout shader, arms shouldnt have this

[spare goblet]

oh good catch

set it to cut out

[radiant shadow]

I dont use that shader but these should not exsist when using cutout

Got the same outfit on some avatar

[spare goblet]

show your material settings

and make sure that the material is assigne to the model

it's not assigned to the model

i can already see

nice 👍

yup

[spring sun]

you dont have to but its a good practice cause incase you fuck something up you didnt fuck up the original

thats on the animation file itself

you would need the animation file to exist so ye

although you can make an animation file then toggle it before making the animation

entirely uneeded if the animation is just 1 frame

if you plan on making it have more than one frame

and if you dont want it to loop

[radiant shadow]

I avoid 1 frame they do work but they are much slower then 2 (notice 1 takes awhile to finish while 2 is instant)

[spring sun]

1 frame is usually instant for me

[muted ravine]

Does anyone know if the server side performance ranking now includes the mesh size into the VRAM limits ?
I didn't see any changenote about that.
But I have an avatar that is 104MB < 110MB texture mem (Thry VRAM Calculator), but marked as poor by the server instead of medium now.

Mesh is 16MB , so total with mesh is 120MB > 110MB
if I trash a few material swaps / textures use and get around 90MB texture I go back to medium ..
But it used to not count the Mesh into the calculation before ?

[radiant shadow]

it doesnt care about fbx mesh sizes (for now)

[muted ravine]

ok , thanks for the confirmation.
Server side calculation is still / again buggy then.

[radiant shadow]

have some uploaded with beta sdk, but i doubt anything changed there

[radiant shadow]

matswaps add up

[muted ravine]

Yeah but it's still under 110 MB ?

so should be medium , while server sees it as poor now.

and sdk sees it as medium too

I know sdk doesn't account for material swap, but Thry VRAM Calculator does normally ?

afaik Texture Memory in Thry VRAM Calculator is the worst case scenario if I was using all materials at the same time basically ? (and it goes through the fx controller / animation / material swap in that calculation)
which will never happen.
But even so in that worse case scenario it's still < 110MB. => medium.

[spare goblet]

quest or pc?

oh that's unusual

[radiant shadow]

scroll up abit, first red ones

[spare goblet]

the console

not sdk

?

[radiant shadow]

doubt it

ok? nothing wrong here

you still not showing your red console errors, top ones matter

bike pose just reset it

[spare goblet]

dude

i'm not a god

listen to Thulen

[radiant shadow]

stop preview/recording or reset it pumkin tools, this is basic stuff

still not showing your errors, im guessing its complaining about being under ground cause of bike pose after creating animations

[spare goblet]

first of all

you didn't

[radiant shadow]

you didnt show any top red console errors

[spare goblet]

and second of all

go take a walk outside and come back with a clear mind and willingness to listen
just because you think something isn't connected, doesn't mean it isn't

yes.

?

enable your main avi, and delete the copy

try uploading again

[spare goblet]

like this.

[muted ravine]

Made a few more tests, slowly dropping things,
As as soon as I drop the total size texture + mesh < 110MB (medium limit) it's seen again as medium by the server side calculation

so it kinda seems that mesh size is now counted into the rank VRAM limit on the server side calculations

[spare goblet]

how are your visemes set?
and animations

[cold yarrow]

you're not? 🙂

[spare goblet]

I am not XD

[cold yarrow]

well one can always strive for greatness.

[spare goblet]

true true

[spare goblet]

?

dude

[radiant shadow]

animations imported with fbx , shouldnt be there, nothing to do with visemes

[spare goblet]

that

that's not how that works at all

if your copy uses the same blendshapes as the og, which it doesm it should work

unless you didn't set it up

or set it up wrong

okay

stop screaming at me

don't want help, don't ask for it

i didn't tell you to make a copy

dude

[cold yarrow]

if you didn't make a backup, that's on you

[spare goblet]

i'm done

[radiant shadow]

if you generated them in blender, last time ill bother with you really

[cold yarrow]

Probably best.

[spare goblet]

if i explain to you what happened will you listen?

no you won't

it's a copy. most tutorials online tell you to make animations on copies and then deleting the copies so then the original avatar doesn't break

okay

good, so am i

[cold yarrow]

this is where we ask you to take your tantrum elsewhere probably.

makes popcorn

you're in a public channel

[radiant shadow]

oh no

[cold yarrow]

I'm sure I'm quite worried.

[radiant shadow]

if you must learn from others instead of watching tutorials/reading/trying things self yelling here dont really do anything

[cold yarrow]

and they left again, good.

oh interesting, it doesn't show on your profile

[spare goblet]

[cold yarrow]

ahhh

[spare goblet]

you're stuck now

[cold yarrow]

that seems extremely unlikely

again, public channel, anyone can speak

you should feel free to ignore people if you don't want to see them

[runic slate]

...

isn't this the second time they've joined and then left the server?

[cold yarrow]

yep

[runic slate]

after starting a fight with someone over begging them for help??

uhhhh... maybe a mod should ban them.

boop, sent a report in on one of their worse messages with context ❤️

[spare goblet]

same

it's the second time?

wow

they should be banned

[runic slate]

I remember they joined before because of the username and icon, iirc they picked a fight with Kazin actually

[spare goblet]

xD

[runic slate]

the reason i even know they left is bc ppl commented on it after the fact, I have a feeling they're joining to start fights and then leaving thinking they can't be banned if they aren't in here

[cold yarrow]

yep, pretty much.

[spare goblet]

that's horrible behaviour

[runic slate]

yep

[cold yarrow]

not really, no. this right here is why I use git for my projects.

[obsidian lake]

You could select them and edit them together in the inspector? You can also set presets for import settings

[mystic trout]

is it possible to optimize booth avatars

if anything my main problem is the high amount of skinned meshes

everything else i could get down to medium

[wicked plume]

simple answer be yes,
You may put it into blender to optimise yourself.
(depends on how much you want to reduce, if it only bit, can be use tool like AAO kind)

[mystic trout]

okay

gonna look into some guides for that

cuz if i want to optimize down to quest

2 skinned meshes at most. ☠️

[wicked plume]

yeap, some resource pinned on #1139216499123437668 for note

[viral knoll]

this cant be good huh?

[wicked plume]

red usually meant yeap

[viral knoll]

sad ill try to figure it out this is my first time doing this :v

[hardy hound]

Were would one even put 43 physbone components?

[spare goblet]

new one on each hair bone i suppose

[urban wind]

Which extension is this ?è

[radiant shadow]

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

[vapid bluff]

optimization is the greatest enemy of booth creators

mmmm physbones on every hair strand

[molten adder]

If I just want to do simple hand gestures = facial expressions, what's the optimized way to do that? Is the SDK examples a good place to start? I know how to make my own facial animations

For something barebones like that, should I be looking at fx layer or gesture layer?

[heavy knot]

Hand gestures (Finger muscle animations) go into the Gesture layer, and the facial animations are dealt with in the FX layer

[spare goblet]

you can take vrc_Avatarv3HandLayer and repurpose it into an FX layer.
So you should use the FX layer

[orchid apex]

Hello quick question regarding Direct Blend Trees, i am currently trying to combine some layers with them but i noticed there is no way in a blend tree to use the "motion time by parameter" settings i would have in a normal state, is that correct or am i missing something ?

[radiant shadow]

Its just really annoying then just having a layer with just state+motion time , here is one that requires a thing to be active first , tried to merge it with my other toggles and exploded

vs just

[orchid apex]

i see, my main issue is that i have an animation curve like this, which to my knowledge i could only replicate by adding a bunch of intermediate states to the blend tree to somewhat get close to the shape, or using one of the math blend trees shown here https://vrc.school/docs/Other/Advanced-BlendTrees/#460ada1c048a4e618e8370a52b175634, but at that point i'm not sure if it's really more optimized anymore

[obsidian lake]

yeah it's up to you what you'd prefer to do, if something is a total pita to do in a blendtree, i won't. It's okay to have a few layers on your avi, just as long as you're not adding a new layer for every single toggle then you're fine

i usually have between 3-8 layers depending on what i need the avi to do. It doesn't make a huge difference unless you have tens of layers

[orchid apex]

for this specific case i have five layers each with only a single state but each of those states/animations motion time is controlled by a different parameter and all use very specific curves to give a smooth logarithmic curve, it'd be really cool to compress them all into my already existing DBT layer but i'll have to see if it's worth it for the downsides, thank you for the input !

[obsidian lake]

i know vrc school has page that has test results for animator layer performance

https://vrc.school/docs/Other/Benchmarks#53522b80ca174b369736ba6ef73f63dd

[gloomy wharf]

ok so all these accessories i'm adding onto my avatar is really killing me, how can I trim down these abysmal numbers

i know the materials are probably caused by the accessories

i have those pins, plus a choker

and i still have to add a cellphone and eyeglasses

[cold yarrow]

is your goal to not be VeryPoor?

[gloomy wharf]

not entirely, but if there are some quick ways to lighten this avatar

[cold yarrow]

and "install fewer accessories" is not acceptable, I'm guessing? 🙂

[gloomy wharf]

correct XD

[cold yarrow]

well then delete parts of the body or something else

depends on which stat you want to work on

[gloomy wharf]

which one is the biggest culprit to get me blocked by performance ratings

[cold yarrow]

if it's polys, delete polys. If it's material slots, combine some. If it's skinned mesh renderers, merge mesh objects together. All of which mean blender (or similar)

none of those are really the first I'd work on, it's VRAM size, so texture sizes

though 17 always-on material slots is a lot

[gloomy wharf]

yeah...

[cold yarrow]

I aim for 2-3 🙂

[gloomy wharf]

maybe i can at least make all the pins one mesh?

[cold yarrow]

sure, that's a start

[gloomy wharf]

there's a lot of slot usage because i bashed 3 outfit sets together, plus pins, plus choker

[cold yarrow]

yep, that's usually how it happens

[gloomy wharf]

i'd still have to atlas the pins together right

[cold yarrow]

or something, yep

[gloomy wharf]

can you atlas emission maps too?

and normals?

[heavy knot]

anything that can go into a texture slot (that utilizes UVs) can

[cold yarrow]

not speaking about any specific tools, of course, it's just a technique that can be applied to any image type you want

[gloomy wharf]

oh

guh

[gloomy wharf]

so this means i trimmed it down to six skinned meshes from 12, yeah?

maybe i can join the hair with the body too...

[cold yarrow]

I usually do - nice work so far!

I usually keep stuff separate in Blender but merge when I export. In my project the body would be named Body and the hair Body-Hair then it's really obvious what to do when exporting

it occurs to me I haven't asked anyone else how they organize theirs

[obsidian lake]

that's pretty much what I do, i keep everything as separate objects and I also organize them ito a collection. This way I can duplicate the collection before merging in case i need the objects separated or in their original state (if made using a generative method like modifiers, geometry nodes, curves, etc)

[cold yarrow]

yup, that's what I do for world stuff

for avatars usually it's one collection per avatar, in a single blender file for the base model

[gloomy wharf]

every time i'm about to start on a big step, i just save a separate copy of the .blend

treat them like super undo buttons

[cold yarrow]

I use git for mine. It's not the best for binary files, but it does work

[gloomy wharf]

should I merge body and body_main too? body is just the head and all the expressions, body_main is anything under the neck

[cold yarrow]

I don't see much reason not to from here, but it's up to you

[gloomy wharf]

i'm just scared lol

years ago when i tried atlasing without knowing what i was doing, it fucked up the avatar's facial expression system

the transparencies were gone so eyelashes looked blocky, the blushes were square, etc

[proper grail]

you can always separate as easily as joining, but if you arent used to being mindful of not being on a shapekey while editing and being very liberal with swapping edit/object mode bunches than things can break yeah. Also keeping atlased materials separated by opaque/cutout/transparent is nice to do

[gloomy wharf]

is there an easy way to like, cut out stuff from a UV?
Like for example, I'm only using the shoes from this one outfit ensemble, and the UV from that encompasses the entire thing

so i would like to delete the unnecessary components and leave the shoes part in

[cold yarrow]

not really, but you can just shrink it to nothing and stick it into a corner

it won't do anything useful there though

[gloomy wharf]

yeah that won't do anything towards optimizing the texture load, would it

[proper grail]

there is always baking diffuse color from one uv to another. Blender button that basically takes what your model looks like currently and applies the texture to a selected uvmap to a selected material texture sample

[cold yarrow]

that's usually my method, if I'm not outright creating a new texture in Substance Painter

[gloomy wharf]

that's a lot of words i don't understand @_@

[cold yarrow]

diffuse = albedo = "base color"

[vapid bluff]

doing this in substance is also nice too

[cold yarrow]

sus

[vapid bluff]

requires at least 3 UVs tho to do, but its nice to have the atlased and original in the same spp project, able to edit either or if u ever need to

but i just go with marmoset instead 80% of the time

[fallow pendant]

they killed keep quads chat, no longer counts 1 quad as 1 poly..

[proper grail]

Damn, now my model will say its 69420 polys like designed instead of 44ksomethin

[native ridge]

Meshes with "Keep Quads" look like they count as 250% as many poly now instead of 70% so unchecking "Keep Quads" and letting Unity triangulate everything reduces poly count on avatar stats in-game by a lot

I wish we got a warning this was coming or some info explaining the change in patch notes

[round kelp]

For arms under a shirt, is it more performant to use a blendshape to shrink the arms or use a uv tile discard?

[proper grail]

tile discard, but since its shader and many people have custom shaders off but not animations off its best to do both.

shrink for eh good enough, discard for yeet

[round kelp]

Thanks. Is there a reason why? Might be technical but does UV tile discard cause the mesh not to render or something?

[cold yarrow]

usually tile discard happens pretty early in the shader

[round kelp]

Noted, ty!

[proper grail]

https://feedback.vrchat.com/bug-reports/p/keep-quads-multiplies-estimated-tri-count-by-3

[somber notch]

is there cases where using gpu instancing on partles is a bad idea?

[woven steeple]

Hello. JFYI I found a way to manually specify each and every fallback shader parameter but the process is a bit tricky.

1. Download standard shaders as described here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StandardShaderMakeYourOwn.html
2. Open Standard.shader file in text editor.
3. Look at "Properties" section in the file and copy those lines that correspond to parameters that you want to specify for a fallback shader.
4. Paste copied lines to the very end of Parameters section into file of a custom shader you use.
5. The parameters will be shown in Unity shader parameters menu. Specify them to your taste and their values will fallback into standard VRC shader.

Some warnings: there's significant chance that your custom shader has some of these parameters already declared in it's Parameters section. There're two possible cases:

1. You don't use this parameters in the custom shader and they're being excluded on locking the shader (you can check that by locking the shader and then opening generated shader file in text editor). Then everything is ok, the 5 steps above is all you need.
2. You use some of these parameters. If so then these parameters will fallback into Standard shader as is and if you OK with their values for the Standard shader then no further actions required. But if you want different values for these parameters to be specified for the custom and standard fallback shader then the only valid option is to manually rename these parameters in the custom shader and also replace all of usages of the parameters in the shader code. It not as hard as it sounds, just use a lot of searches in the custom shader file and keep your brain active. After renaming the parameters you can use the 5 steps above to specify fallback shader parameters value.

I've just tested it with poiyomi toon shader to provide fallback shader with Metallic texture and specify Smoothness. Works like a charm.

[lethal magnet]

would anyone here know the recomended polly count range for avatars? asking out of curosity on if i need to decrease it for my model

[spare goblet]

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

everything is here

[obsidian lake]

is there a benefit to using "keep quads" ? just curious

[proper grail]

None for normal people, it subdivides/tessellates better for renders

As far as i can tell, vrc triangulates anyways

[obsidian lake]

ah alright thank you

still useful information, though not something I'd use right now

[proper grail]

And if your model has a non quad, its only downsides in terms of meshes and materials. Unity will split and render them as if they are separate meshes

[real heron]

would anyone have a good video/website explaining skinned mesh renders and how to reduce them? somehow i have 9 ;-;

[spare goblet]

combine them in blender

but you'd need to think about what kind of toggles you want to have

[radiant pier]

what is happening lol💀

[modern osprey]

no textures for you.

[ivory sluice]

Ah yes the avatar stats for arduino platforms

[exotic socket]

the sheer agony of finding the single outfit you wanna add to your 30k polygon model and its a horror show of polycount

[hardy mist]

how bad is this?

[spare goblet]

very bad

you really don't need those bones

[vapid bluff]

oh god

[cold yarrow]

are they for hair that isn't present?

[modern osprey]

lots of bones for hair

[ivory sluice]

it's probably just the face rig
the model doesn't have hair and by default hair shouldn't have bones unless it's very long

[warm patio]

can someone help me optimize my avatar till its green?

i already deleted most of his body and somehow hes still very poor

[spare goblet]

show stats

in the sdk

it will tell you what needs to be optimized

[modern osprey]

hi eli

[spare goblet]

hi michstan

[solemn owl]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUeoWKNO6Tw

Works for PC too

[real heron]

question on optimization: im using the decimate modifier to reduce my tri's, but it wont let me apply the modifier if i have shapekeys on that mesh. complicating part is all my meshes have shapekeys so that i can make toggles with only one mesh (im planning on joining them into one before exporting). how would i reduce tri's if i cant use decimate on meshes with shapekeys?

[spare goblet]

bake the avatar with the tuxedo plug in?

it also changes your texture, so beware i you want to make texture changes

tuxedo also has a decimate thing that preserves shapekeys, but unfortunately it's broken right now

[real heron]

i have no idea what baking is or what it does, ill do some research on it

[spare goblet]

https://github.com/feilen/tuxedo-blender-plugin?tab=readme-ov-file

[cold yarrow]

I would not do polygon reduction with the decimate modifier, but this can be useful:
https://github.com/przemir/ApplyModifierForObjectWithShapeKeys

There's also decimation in blender without modifier now, if you want to try that.

[real heron]

is it in 4.1? bc thats what i run

[cold yarrow]

pretty sure

mesh -> cleanup -> decimate and such

(edit mode)

[real heron]

it doesnt do anything 😭

[cold yarrow]

does for me?

make sure you've selected parts you want to decimate, then tweak the ratio in the popup that comes up in the bottom left

[real heron]

bruh

i click mesh -> cleanup -> decimate geometry and it says it decimated geometry but the tri count doesnt go down

[cold yarrow]

FYI if you convert .mkv to .mp4 it embeds.
And you have to select some mesh for it to work on

[real heron]

I HAVE TO SELECT THEM of course i do duh

[cold yarrow]

hehe yep

[real heron]

😭

[cold yarrow]

definitely not obvious

[real heron]

welp it still didnt go down and i selected them this time

[cold yarrow]

you should be able to visibly see it reshape the polygons in real time as you tweak the threshold value

[real heron]

i dont get an option for threshold value

it just gives me the little action completed prompt in the bottom left

[cold yarrow]

sorry, "ratio" it says

[real heron]

i have to click it okay

i see

[cold yarrow]

er, open that Decimate Geometry dialog in the bottom

you get a bunch of options

[real heron]

got it to work 👍

[cold yarrow]

nice

careful what you select with these tools, they can make a mess of shape keys

[real heron]

yeah im not gonna decimate the body or face, really all i was worried about was the shapekeys i made to hide the toggle-able stuff

shouldnt affect those to bad right? its just shrinking and a little moving

[cold yarrow]

maybe? It's easy to check though

[real heron]

oh yeah no they're fine

[west beacon]

My hair asset has each strand of hair individually rigged. How can I merge the bones in blender for the hair to still work properly?

[radiant shadow]

Create a root bone then put every strand you want under it

[west beacon]

honestly I am kind of confused
I dont need every strand to move individually

this asset just has a lot of bones

[spare goblet]

if you don't want hair to have bones (or have only one) you can merge them using the cats plugin for example

[west beacon]

how do I do that (I already have cats)

[spare goblet]

select all hair bones > optimization > bones > merge weights > to parents

you can select multiple bones in edit mode with shift

and this will merge every hair bone to the head bone

[west beacon]

I still need some separated I just dont need/want so many

[spare goblet]

you can just merge the bottom bones, they will merge to the parent

you could for example have one bone per hair strand

same process, the bones you select will merge weights wit their parents

[west beacon]

Is it possible to join two bone "lines" together?

[spare goblet]

yes

[spare goblet]

click one, click the other with shift and select "to active" instead

btw this is unofficial cats for blender 4.2

idk if the one you're using has this function

#avatar-help message

like here for example

this shows fingers but hair bones will work the same

[west beacon]

yes makes sense my cats version doesnt have that function tho... I guess any newer one will work?

[spare goblet]

official is bugged if you're using it

any unofficial should have this function

[west beacon]

okay
tbh I dont know which version I have it's been a while

[spare goblet]

what blender do you have

?

if one before 3.6 you def have official cats

[west beacon]

there

[spare goblet]

yeahh

you should totally upgrade

[west beacon]

well then I will do that once I got time

[knotty cradle]

need help with this

i have 259/256 bits

but i know many people who have 300+ of 256 and they can upload just fine, how is it possible

[cold yarrow]

VRCFury has a thing to help compress these, but it has caveats. For you, I think I'd consider if you can make one int or float parameter non-synced

[knotty cradle]

i put all of them

literally

even using d4rkAvatarOptimizer

[cold yarrow]

"put all of them" what?

[knotty cradle]

all of vrcfury optmizers

[cold yarrow]

I meant this: https://vrcfury.com/components/other#parameter-compressor-beta

[knotty cradle]

i look nto it thx

[cosmic wave]

how come when i have Very poor and poor avatars blocked it still shows avatars that are poor from time to time these are the stats that take it to poor

[grizzled shard]

in some cases VRChat can strip certain perf categories and still show the avatar
for example, if lights/particles cause the avatar to be above your maximum perf setting, on your client it will strip those elements and show the rest of the avatar
can read more here: https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-performance-ranking-system/#minimum-displayed-performance-rank

[cosmic wave]

Yeah I get that it strips the components from the avatar but it's still poor rated regardless and should be hidden. Seems overly complicated

[cosmic wave]

Thank you tho for the detailed explanation, appreciate it

[mortal sphinx]

well, it makes sense right? there's no need to hide the avatar entirely if vrc can just remove the component that causes performance issues. if the issue is inherent to the avatars model or textures, then the avatar is hidden entirely. i think it's quite simple

[cosmic wave]

If the components are removed they shouldn't be readable on the stats, the avatar had a ranking of poor (when it's actually medium because of the removal) and the stats says the avi has these components.
I fully understand what's going on but it don't make sense to remove the actual components on the avi but not adjust the stat page and overall ranking.

[grizzled shard]

They are only removed for you, on your client, for rendering purposes. The avatar bundle itself still has those components, and someone with less restrictive settings would see them because they wouldn't be stripped on their end.

[cosmic wave]

I'm aware, it should still update it tho. The ranking system should always be accurate

Otherwise what's the point.

If people have VP blocked they'll see my fallback which is good rated, so in this case it should say medium because that's what being shown for me

I get it's a small thing.
But it would be neat to know that you're seeing an avi with removed components, like a little logo like the fallback or something and then the correct rank

[grizzled heath]

is reducing mat counts worth it?

[obsidian lake]

Absolutely, especially on quest. They eat up draw calls, which significantly contribute to frametime

[heavy knot]

Material slots and Animator Layers are the biggest performance killers

[late quiver]

Animator Layers really, is there a number to avoid?

[supple trout]

I think you cannot really put a "at this number its bad" on it, since its pretty much the general thing of "the less you have, the better" and it depends on what you are actually doing in them. There is some testing done where you can read in depth about it https://vrc.school/docs/Other/Benchmarks/#53522b80ca174b369736ba6ef73f63dd

That said, during some testing with friends I noticed that if one avatar clogs your cpu a lot, it almost doesnt matter if the other avatars are very high performant or not (in terms of animator performance), since you have to "wait" for that single avatars calculations anyways.

[vapid bluff]

DBTs ❤️

[silver venture]

Thanks for all the information you share 🫂

[civic totem]

I tried searching and didn't see an answer. I've added Integral Camera to my Medium avatar which includes 1 dynamic light. When I go to full nightclubs does the dynamic light penalty always apply or is it only if I enable the camera/light in my menu?

[gritty terrace]

always applies on the avatar's performance rank, it wont actually effect users if they have your model fully shown and you dont have it toggled on though

you should avoid using performance heavy stuff like that in public worlds though

[civic totem]

that's what I was hoping, I'd rather not maintain two copies of my avatar just for a camera add-on. I'll just avoid using it in crowded instances. (It would work very poorly anyway, it's a long-exposure camera that would blur heavily in a crowd)

[narrow lake]

does someone know what 2 do

[cold yarrow]

look in the console for error messages

[rocky gull]

anyone know what shaders work with the new VRC update? As most avatars looks like pixels to me all of a sudden.

or is this a VRC issue?

[stable juniper]

I think they are impostors which seems like pixelated.
If you don't want to see them and want to see old style fallback, set Use impostor as fallback false in settings menu in VRChat

[waxen maple]

you can combine skinned meshes manually(that turn on/off together) with AAO avatar optimizer component "merge skinned meshes" further if you just care about fake optimization. having 100 or 40 skinned meshes with same number of materials made no fps difference when I last tested it.
if on the merge skinned meshes 2+ meshes use the same material(and there's no vrcfury material property toggle) or anything to make VRCF rename/duplicate it, it will get merged again

altho that is already a well enough performing avatar

[waxen maple]

In any lobby you'll run at the lowest performing avatar's fps due to their FX layer count, even if you see them or not.
FX layers run on your CPU whatever you do, as a fix for write default.
It's also why disabling custom animators in shield settings is so huge

[waxen maple]

As much as reducing FX/playable layer count and lowering textures from 4k to 2k/1k, biggest fps thing you can do.

[mortal glade]

I don't have VRCF installed

[waxen maple]

Nope, never personally seen anyone figure out motion time in blend trees; I did try once with an empty and a float, the animation ran ONCE at the speed set in the blend tree

[waxen maple]

Then AAO would be enough, but then you need NDMF installed; but you should probably add vrcf to your project, it has a bunch of built in tools for performance

Like automatically converting simple fx layers into blendtrees, baking unanimated blendshapes into the mesh

except when more animation bigger blendtree fps minus minus minus -- as it still runs on your CPU

[cold yarrow]

not really the point I was making, but sure, they can affect frame rate.

[waxen maple]

Did my best with AtlasTextureTool, couldnt figure it out.

Even if I did or did not combine stuff couldnt see a fps difference, in play mode whatever number of draw calls I see don't change and in game i was hitting 240 fps(desktop)

Took like 2 hours to even figure out what can and cannot be combined before losing quality...
And due to me modifying a lot on the avatar adding/removing stuff modularly, it was hard keeping track of which where was being used as 1 texture..

For some clothes animations would bug out or look like a quest avatar due to other addons or 2 different shaders being used so it wouldn't do actually anything

[proper grail]

If the skinnedmesh renderer doesnt hit its varies by cpu limit of around 500 draw calls between meshes and materials its not gonna be the fps bottleneck. Problem gets into a room of 80 people and a world that 500 can get stretched real thin to keep 8.3ms processing time

[round kelp]

Edit- Never mind? It looks like it isnt that big of a deal according to the documentation.
https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-dynamics/physbones

Kinda quirky question but is it more performant to have one physbone component that controls 8 bones, for example on an ear root with 4 bones on each ear, or 2 components that control 4 bones each?
The only difference I've seen is that you can only grab one ear at a time since its one component and apparently the physics are slightly different but I haven't tested fully.

[supple trout]

thats true, but didnt they mention in a patchnote within the last two months that culled avatars by their Avatar Culling System (the one where you can define range or count) stops the animators again as well?

[waxen maple]

real world is more painful

you still run their FX layers as long as their avatar is in the lobby

you dont lose 50 fps because of networking

what they did add is another attempt at this with the new bool "isAnimatorEnabled" that even turns off blendtrees for avatars you don't see but...

[supple trout]

i will keep that in mind, i personally arent loosing much due to a beasty 7950x3d xD

[waxen maple]

when i last went to a 70-people instance in the Pug, i had 11 avatars shown and was consistently 25-30 fps(and I am aware of the VR overhead, so probably like 50-90 desktop). I know with the same group of people if we went to a new instance it'd be on VR about 50-60 fps.

so in the lobby someone's FX layer was literally 140 fx layers to get me there;
(I'm running a 7900x)

[supple trout]

well uh.. ppl didnt know and avis are packed to the brim with functions x.X first thing i do is like yeet 50% and slap vrcfury blendtree optimizer on it when im too lazy to do it myself xD

[somber notch]

Is there a reason why big avatar sellers don't use blend trees?

[cold yarrow]

I think to keep things simple for the end user who hasn't watched a basic tutorial video at all, nevermind one on advanced topics

[spare goblet]

yeah, could be it

[vapid bluff]

from seeing the behind the scenes works on alot of avi creators stuff, most genuinely dont even know what blendtrees are, especially DBTs

the unfortunate #1 reason

[solemn owl]

Also lot of creators are not that technical to be into blendtrees

It can be quite intimidating for a lot of people

[cold yarrow]

Start here! https://vrc.school/docs/Other/DBT-Combining/

[solemn owl]

I made two videos about blendtrees

https://youtu.be/W3YQQ4rxeug

https://youtu.be/_At596jLi3k

[frozen grove]

anyone know how to optimize stuff in blender?

[solemn owl]

un-subdivide in the decimation modifier ?

If it does not work, just remesh oof

[frozen grove]

remeshing isn't the option I really want

since that will ruin the legs.

[frozen grove]

how tf do I use it

it crashes blender for no reason

[cold yarrow]

I'd probably remesh

well, retopologize anyway.

[frozen grove]

but that will ruin the legsssssssssssss

[cold yarrow]

how so?

[cold yarrow]

?

[frozen grove]

inbetween that thing happens

[cold yarrow]

I have no idea what you did here though

[frozen grove]

remesh??

[cold yarrow]

Exactly what does that mean in this case?

[frozen grove]

I don

t know???

[cold yarrow]

I'm not sure how to help if you don't know what you did

[frozen grove]

I remeshed bruh I just told you??

[cold yarrow]

what does that mean?

[frozen grove]

I went into scuplt mode clicked the remesh set to 0.05 and this happened

[frozen grove]

That I remeshed???

[cold yarrow]

ahh, now we're getting useful info. That's not at all what we meant.

[frozen grove]

what other thing could it mean???

[cold yarrow]

you want to retopologize it

[frozen grove]

how to do that

[cold yarrow]

you'll need to do that in order to make it flex nicely around joints and such.

There are lots of video tutorials. And lots of tools for it also.

retopoflow and polyquilt, for example

[frozen grove]

so I just need to retopologize it

thats all?

[cold yarrow]

I'm not going to say that's all, just that that's a thing typically done after sculpting

[frozen grove]

so to optimize it I need to retopologize it then what after

[cold yarrow]

probably rig & weight paint?

[frozen grove]

whats rigging

and weight paint?

[cold yarrow]

oh boy

[frozen grove]

what do they do exactly

[cold yarrow]

you probably want to watch a tutorial on the whole process of building an avatar

the idea is to make an armature of bones that move the mesh parts like a body should work.

[frozen grove]

I watched like 5 there were no mentions of these stuffs

[cold yarrow]

not good tutorials then

[spare goblet]

yeah

[cold yarrow]

rigging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRLR8SGVK0

[spare goblet]

weight painting is necessary

[cold yarrow]

(you want this ^ one plus the next two in the series. But probably watch it all)

[frozen grove]

im currently watching it for 2 minutes now- like I found another video that sent me here

[cold yarrow]

FYI redo the topology before you do this though

having good topology around joints is critical for making them bend naturally

[frozen grove]

how do I extrude more bones???

[cold yarrow]

'e' to extrude

[frozen grove]

she says to do it with e

but im holding , pressing , clicking e

nothing happen

[cold yarrow]

are you in edit mode on the armature object?

[frozen grove]

nope, thanks

[cold yarrow]

blender keystrokes are all context-sensitive

[frozen grove]

bro shes so quiet I can't understand her

[radiant shadow]

and blender LOVE to change shortcuts depending on version you use

[cold yarrow]

turn on captions.

[cold yarrow]

ugh, yes

[frozen grove]

I can

cant

click connected in control p

why the hell can't I make it parent thing

[spare goblet]

its so annoying

[frozen grove]

bro the head and spine rig bone thing doesn't want to fucking connect

[cold yarrow]

you can also edit a bone's parent in the bone properties box

[frozen grove]

bro these tutorials are shit

like I can't do nun

Bro.

[cold yarrow]

I'm not sure what we're supposed to see here.

[frozen grove]

the bones are inside of each other

why

[cold yarrow]

move them where you want them?

[frozen grove]

I parented them together like the tutorial said

[frozen grove]

the tutorial says to click on the headbone, ctrl click bone below

But I can't click the headbone.

[cold yarrow]

this works for me

[frozen grove]

well it doesn't for me

wtf am I doing wrong bro

[cold yarrow]

you have just one armature, and you're in edit mode, right?

[frozen grove]

I don't have just one

[cold yarrow]

why would you have more than one armature?

[frozen grove]

because the tutorial says to make the head armature ok I did that nicely

then I went below

to add more like she said to do

[cold yarrow]

oh weird, okay. Well you can't parent bones across armatures.

[frozen grove]

from the pelvis to the neck extrude it

[frozen grove]

I extruded it

and NOW

i can't

Do

Nothing

click the head bone then ctrl click the bone below it

and I can't click the headbone like it tells me to

[cold yarrow]

if those bones are not in the same armature, that won't work

[frozen grove]

how the hell do I make em same armature???

[spare goblet]

ctrl j

[cold yarrow]

you could ctrl+j them in object mode, but I'm not sure why you'd have two here in the first place.

[spare goblet]

select both of the armatures in the outliner and click ctrl j

[cold yarrow]

I haven't watched this tutorial series though.

[frozen grove]

what

[spare goblet]

the outliner is blender hierarchy

[frozen grove]

I did ctrl j on them both

that joined them together

what now

[spare goblet]

connect the bones?

[cold yarrow]

IMO still retopologize 🙂

[spare goblet]

the thing that wouldn't work with multiple armatures?

[cold yarrow]

definitely do that before you try to weight paint.

[spare goblet]

yeah

def do that first

[cold yarrow]

but yeah, pick back up to whatever bone parenting you were attempting.

[frozen grove]

a video abt that scared me away

and I couldn't do anything there too

[cold yarrow]

If you don't do it, this model is going to be really unoptimized and also flex badly at the joints, but it's certainly an option

[spare goblet]

if you upload that to VRChat it's gonna crash a lot and lag everyone out, because of the amount of polygons

[frozen grove]

is there another way to optimize avatars better???

[spare goblet]

I'd highly recommend retopologize it first

[frozen grove]

that seems time consuming in the video I watched

[cold yarrow]

it is

[spare goblet]

for yours currently topology is the only thing that needs fixing

[cold yarrow]

very much so 🙂

[spare goblet]

making avatars is time consuming

[frozen grove]

well yeah but this much???

[spare goblet]

that's why they're expensive to buy 😭

[cold yarrow]

yup

[frozen grove]

back to this

they are connected into 1 rig thing

I click the headbone

and I can't ctrl click the bone below

[cold yarrow]

again you can also parent bones in the bone properties box, I usually find that easier.

Also you can select things in the outliner if you can't easily do that in the 3D view.

[frozen grove]

okay

[frozen grove]

wtf is the outlinerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[cold yarrow]

upper-right hierarchy-looking thing

well in the default layout anyway.

[frozen grove]

this thing?

[cold yarrow]

you clipped that so much I have no idea what it is

[frozen grove]

I don't think thats it

[cold yarrow]

we mean the window with the the tree view list of all the objects in your scene

[frozen grove]

nvm I see outliner

what do I do with it

[cold yarrow]

I was saying you can select stuff in there, sometimes that's easier than trying to select in the 3D view.

[frozen grove]

ok now I ruined my whole shit

nvm fixed it

[frozen grove]

theres nothing

let me do the entire rig over again

[cold yarrow]

I'm really not sure what you're doing here, so I don't know what that means

[frozen grove]

so how do I make another armarent thing

in the same one

[cold yarrow]

?

[frozen grove]

like

how do I make head with spine bone thing be in the same thing without using ctrl j

[cold yarrow]

you make an armature and edit it?

[frozen grove]

now I can't move it

im pressing g and it doesn't wanna budge a bit it just rotates

it scales when I click g

bruh

what is wrong with this shit like bro

[radiant shadow]

can also throw it into mixamo, but its bound to glue the legs abit

[frozen grove]

I have this

I press shift a

it makes another one of these

I press g

and z for the axis

but nope it doesn't wanna go down it just scales itself big or small

[cold yarrow]

did you select the whole bone or just the head or tail?

[frozen grove]

never mind I fixed that issue

[frozen grove]

the head of it was selected Im stupid

now again this does not wanna ctrl click the bottom part

I might just remodel everything in the model rn

just open my torso save file

and start working on that

because this shit is lowkey annoying me with the rigging

[frozen grove]

sorry for ping but can u tell me do I need my body parts seperately? like in the tutorial head is dif than everything else?

[cold yarrow]

you don't. That's an outdated technique.

or good when you want to do head swaps like a lot of the asian/booth avatars do

[frozen grove]

okay I guess, so weight paint is like red = places that shouldn't bend and green is places there bones should bend?

[cold yarrow]

dark blue = no weight

[frozen grove]

and what is weight in blender mean exactly?

[cold yarrow]

watch tutorials, read.

more weight = more movement with that bone

[frozen grove]

so if I paint my character like this for example

the dark blue parts will make it able to bend?

[cold yarrow]

I don't know why you would paint all those parts to whatever bone that is.

which bone is it?

[frozen grove]

its just an example

[cold yarrow]

it's kind of meaningless without knowing the bone you want that to move with

[frozen grove]

just take for example the arm bones

[cold yarrow]

you would not paint all of that to move with the same bone

[frozen grove]

I don't really understand u rn

[spare goblet]

there should be separate bones for the arms

3 bones per arm

upper arm, lower arm, wrist

[cold yarrow]

yeah you really need to watch basic tutorials on weight painting, you are asking questions that make no sense at all because you don't have the fundamental knowledge.

[spare goblet]

mirrored on both sides

[frozen grove]

well duh I know that seperate the bones ( waist - head ) ( arm - hand ) ( leg - toes )

but I wanna know how weight painting works

[spare goblet]

so why are you weight painting everything to one bone?

[frozen grove]

like what does the red colour mean what does the dark blue mean

[frozen grove]

wdym 1 bone

there are no bones shown

[cold yarrow]

blue -> red shows how much a given vertex moves along with the bone it's weighted to.

you can't weight paint without bones

it's meaningless without bones

[frozen grove]

can u give me a more simple explanation?

[spare goblet]

vertex groups (green triangle) - you select one that represents a bone and weight paint stuff to it

[cold yarrow]

I can tell you again that there are lots of tutorials on this and you should read/watch one.

[frozen grove]

bruh

[spare goblet]

for example when selecting the right upper arm vertex group only the right upper arm should be weight painted (aka red)

[cold yarrow]

the visuals especially on a video will help here.

[spare goblet]

you should definitely research more and watch tutorials

[cold yarrow]

and I'm going to have lunch, bbl.

[frozen grove]

I still don't understand shit

[spare goblet]

so watch a tutorial

[frozen grove]

im watching this

and it looks like red just means that it will move

bend

or whatever

and dark blue is stay

[spare goblet]

here are two examples of what weight painting and vertex groups look like

[frozen grove]

thats the group of the bone

okay

[spare goblet]

I'm gonna go shopping now, bye bye

[frozen grove]

so vertex groups are just limb groups

[spare goblet]

basically

[frozen grove]

parts of fingers n stuf

Imma just quit blender for a week because this is just hurting my head already

[spare goblet]

that's what blender did to me at first too

[unborn isle]

yes, red is the weight assigned to by this bone, blue is not affected

vertex group is just the red area of a bone

[cold yarrow]

remember that you're going to have to redo the weight painting entirely when you retopologize this 🙂

[frozen grove]

It was just a example, are u even reading what I text here???

[cold yarrow]

I guess I didn't read that, but also it's a good reminder for everyone.

[frozen grove]

im leaving blender for a week or less then coming back making new legs

new arms

because the arms look very weird

and legs are just stubs

[frozen grove]

this is how I feel blender is treating me:

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

[cursive oyster]

Is there a downside to using modular avatar in unity for performance of the avatar? I can't seem to make an avatar that isn't graded with low performance ; - ; !

[spare goblet]

I'd assume so

it adds meshes

more meshes - worse performance

[cursive oyster]

Is your last step then joining all meshes in blender? I always fear doing that because it feels so permanent. But I guess you can always seperate by material if need be.. \ . /

[heavy knot]

Modular Avatar doesn't do anything on it's own, it's just a non destructive tool

same goes with VRCFury

[spare goblet]

I mean, if I need to switch between one shirt and a different shirt, I keep them separate. But if I'm just attaching one shirt to stay, I merge it. I also atlas my textures so it's only one XD

I also make back ups

if I ever need to edit something

backup before texture atlas

[cursive oyster]

But the armature it adds seems like its not the same in blender of where everything becomes one armature/set when I rig an outfit to my body, with modular avatar it seems like it adds additional sets of armatures / bones that are not needed? (( I am probably wrong))

[cursive oyster]

I should do that ;3; but then when everything is one uv map its so annoying to fix a texture / edit for me \ . /

[spare goblet]

if you use stuff like modular or vrcf that's what it does. It takes your armature, the clothing armature and parents one to the other. If using those addons, both armatures are needed. If you don't want them, you will need to merge them in blender.

[heavy knot]

It's the prefabs that use Modular Avatar, not the script itself

[cursive oyster]

Yea ;3; I've been using prefabs / modular avatar and unity-- before I would import FBX of outfits/hair and rig it in blender, but I guess I'm finding it easier to navigate unity especially when all the face expressions are already set up of the unity base I'm using. D:

[spare goblet]

if the clothing is made for your base there's no need to rig it in blender

and merging armatures is just one click using the cats plug in 🤷

[heavy knot]

it shouldn't dupe your armature, unless it's using an outdated mode

both MA and VRCFury have a reskin meshes feature and doesn't reparent

[spare goblet]

huh, I thought it worked differently. Oh well, don't listen to me

i can tell you blender xd

[cold yarrow]

or you can just make backups of the source objects. This is what I do, I stick them in a collection called "source-whatever" and turn it off. Then later when I realize I do actually need to go back to that, there they are 🙂

[spare goblet]

good idea, I'm gonna steal it

🤭

[cold yarrow]

yeah my avatar projects are basically collections of separate objects which get merged together when I export, usually resulting in one body and one clothing mesh.
World projects tend to have collections of source objects which get merged (then merge overlapping vertices) and then I export the merged stuff.

for an avatar each base is its own project but each variant of that base (outfit, gadgets, whatever) is its own collection.

[granite needle]

So what's the easiest way to reduce triangles on an avatar? Mine is perfect in all areas but has 110k triangles

[spare goblet]

i bake mine with the tuxedo plugin

some people bake theirs manually

[granite needle]

Well now I need to know what that means lol

Eh Im not worried about it. I see a lot of very poor avatars around, it just would be nice to be better in quality because a few groups that I run with doesn't allow very poor avatars in actual games

But I've always preferred just hanging out with other people

[spare goblet]

makes your avatar less poly whilst losing little quality
tuxedo changes your textures a bit too (putting it all on one atlas for example)

[granite needle]

I see

So its pretty much a sacrifice of quailty for performance

[spare goblet]

yeah, but it looks way better than decimating (another way to reduce poly count)

[granite needle]

Can I do this on unity or do I need blender for this kind of stuff

[spare goblet]

there's a unity tool, but it's paid

and I never used it, so I can't speak on how good it is

[granite needle]

That sucks

Looks like I'll eventually need to learn more about it

Im kinda too tired to tinker rn

But I am happy with how my avatar is turning out

[spare goblet]

that's what matters :)

[lavish pebble]

What's the difference between having Empty animation clip and no animation?
Was told it's better for performance to not leave states with no animations but is that really true?

[radiant shadow]

none = loops forever , empty animation run once

vrcfury like to remove any animation that doesnt do anything if it doesnt point to a gameobject/blend/whatever that doesnt exsist

[fallow oak]

Does anyone know how to like...properly reduce the or even lower the [123]MB in the SDK on the both warnings on the VRCSDK UNITY?

[spare goblet]

lower texture size

[fallow oak]

how tho?

[spring sun]

use smaller images

[lavish pebble]

Go to where your textures are located, click on in and in Inspector window you'll see Max Size. Lower that.
If you want to go a bit deeper you can select PC icon and turn on Override For Windows. There you can lower your texture size and select texture format. It's recommended to use BC7 or DXT5 for textures with alpha or textures with a lot of detail (intricate patterns, gradients etc.) . And DXT1 for textures without alpha.
BC7 and DXT5 have the same vram size. BC7 is higher quality while DXT5 is smaller in download size.

[wise flare]

Sup guys- I just imported the first avatar that I made from VRoid (quite new to this), and I'm noticing a bunch of issues.
While walking, the avatar sort of sinks to the ground haha. I don't know what's causing that.
The arms positioned in an unnatural way, and the eyes are looking around and I'd like to disable that

[spare goblet]

1. Sinking I don't know
2. Are the arms like that while using a headset? Or desktop?
3. For eyes just disable eye look the the inspector

and if you used a unity converter to convert the avatar to fbx, dont

do it with blender instead

unity causes a lot of issues

blender method tutorial
https://youtu.be/6ITTI5KwC3o?si=39Y5xxuHnv15dQJW

[wise flare]

The arms are like that with desktop.
Yes, I converted it using the VRM converter thing for Unity.
Downloading Blender rn, and will try your tutorial, thank you

[spare goblet]

let us if the problems are still there
we'll try to figure it out

[wise flare]

the tutorial worked perfectly. thank you so much

Fixing the shaders was a bit of a creative process but I managed to get a result I liked

Only issue I'm having now is that for some reason, whenever I set up this plugin, the guitar is super big.
When I did this with VRM converter, I wasn't having this issue. Maybe it has to do with the fact this is the Blender method?

Here's the tutorial video of the plugin I'm trying to install at around like 0:50, the guitar is normal sized when he clicks it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl9HNyNj0P0&feature=youtu.be

When I click Start Setup, this is what it looks like:

[spare goblet]

I've never used that guitar thing so idk what's going on with it.

im pretty sure you can just size it to fit though

i also don't understand Japanese so I have no idea what's going on in that tutorial

[solemn owl]

Did you upload while previewing an animation ? That causes the sinking

[wise flare]

Might be, but thanks to Eli I've fixed the issues, no more sinking now.

[wise flare]

Yup! and that worked

[spare goblet]

great!

[wise flare]

Only thing I'm wondering about now is this shader

Not sure why the back is the same

As the front

[spare goblet]

did you check UV maps in blender? maybe they overlap

[wise flare]

oh, it says here it's a unity package, and I can only open it there. I can't seem to import them in blender

Anyway I just decided to leave it as is

Thanks very much @spare goblet!

[spare goblet]

if it's a unity package it probably has an FBX you can import to blender. It should show up in unity assets

but if I'm being honest I like the sign better when it's on both sides

that way people from the back can see it as well

[spare goblet]

and no problem, I'm glad it worked out for you (almost)

[slender rover]

first time trying to get an avatar down to green rank and I am struggling 😭 went down from 200k to 84k but that last stretch to below 70k is rough

[obsidian lake]

yeah the lower you try to get the poly count the harder it gets

my advice is:

• look for areas with low deformation
• look for edges that don't contribute heavily to the silhouette
• look for areas that aren't very visible
• don't be afraid of triangles, just use them wisely
• try zooming out in edit mode to find high-density geometry (it will look darker since there's more lines)

@slender rover

[slender rover]

Thank you! I managed to get it down!

[buoyant holly]

https://bsky.app/profile/scoutartz.bsky.social/post/3lkf7odrxik25

ScoutArtz (@scoutartz.bsky.social)

I love weighting topology around areas that affect the silhouette.

694 tri's per ear.

Bluesky · Mar 15, 2025, 3:47 AM

an example of how triangles are used to keep the silhouette nice but lower poly

[brave sail]

Would having multiple FBXs, compared to putting all the meshes in one blend file, exporting that all as one FBX, help with performance at all?

Im assuming it would be less draw calls, so mildly better performance?

[cold yarrow]

more material slots = more draw calls = worse

so ideally combining things into the same mesh object and material is best

[ivory sluice]

It won't have any difference, it will still be the same meshes and objects, just on a single file instead of various

[weary ice]

It’s more like it will have an affect but it should be negligible in the grand scheme

[obsidian lake]

not true, draw calls are really expensive, especially on mobile devices (which inclues quest standalone)

you want to reduce draw calls as much as possible on any platform

[proper grail]

yes but the question was oddly worded.

[livid tendon]

Heya, I'm making an avatar base edit for a friend, optimizing the hell out of it.
Is it worse to have an extra material for a tiny blush mesh as the only transparent part of the avatar, or is it better to use an alpha map?
Idk, maybe a seperate material is better here so it doesn't have to consider transparency everywhere for that one small part?

[radiant shadow]

pc ? use a decal

[trail pilot]

This is less about optimization, but transparent rendering sucks in general

I'd try to avoid making my entire body transparent

[ivory sluice]

Don't combine transparent materials with opaque materials unless you know what you're doing with its shader
Keep it separate