avatar-optimization

[warm patio]

still not working

[gritty terrace]

is it a UV issue then?

[warm patio]

idk

😭

[gritty terrace]

Go to the UV editing tab and choose the atlas'd material, once its chosen enter edit mode and select all the faces on your model then see if you UV is messed up

it might be not overlapping the texture correctly or completely collapsed on itself

[warm patio]

theres no atlas material

oh wait u mean AFTER converting it okay

nope, theres no atlas, it uses the jacket as atlas i guess

[warm patio]

srry for the tag

[gritty terrace]

not sure what you mean by no atlas, like its not uv'd to the new atlas it made or it didnt generate one?

[warm patio]

it didnt generated an image for the atlas

and this is the up

it looks really messed up tho

wait i think i found it

the baked texture

[gritty terrace]

err im not too sure what the issue could be atp if the UV is like that...

maybe you attempted to merge too many images at once and it flubbed it up?

in my experience if it goes over 6 and the images used are too large canvas-wise it will struggle to generate (it'll also just deteriorate the image quality since vrchat cant use anything higher then 4k anyways iirc)

[warm patio]

it kinda has the shape

okay i made it work i think

YEAAA

finally...

t worked tysm yall for t

the help

[maiden rivet]

If I have a god damn lot of PC-exclusive things on an avi, can I make the mobile variant use animators, parameters and menus with that all cut out?

or do they need to be all identical

i know animators, especially huge one takes a lot of performance

[cold yarrow]

the avatar parameters should be the same list but other than that you can have a 100% different avatar if you want

So yeah, definitely cut things out.

[maiden rivet]

may aswell just keep the menus then

i thought I could cut back on network load for mobile users if i yeet stuff from the parameters

[cold yarrow]

well you can but the order matters, so if you arrange them so the last ones are the ones not in the quest list, that'd work

[maiden rivet]

i use VRCFT stuff so -no clue- how that ends up

so i rather not do that

I was just worried, because I already spam questies with full facial tracking that the entire rest of my PC-only shit would just pile on top and ruin quest performance

[cold yarrow]

yeah it's a bit of a mess with fury doing stuff, but I think they have a tool to make that work?

[spare goblet]

i asked once

they told me it's all automatic and will sync

but idk

i never tried

[maiden rivet]

well thanks for the help, pushed the updated variants so those should run as good as it gets now

sadly dont know any quest players to check so I have to go off of theory

[wet spindle]

if you have an android phone you can check there, it uses the same avatars

[cold yarrow]

oh I keep forgetting that, yeah

[wet spindle]

in fact i believe you can test on android before uploading, though there's some setup required

though i don't think it would help for checking cross-platform sync in particular

[maiden rivet]

Yeah, but I have a Fold 6, I am gonna run locked at 120FPS no matter what

even in power saving mode etc

[wet spindle]

ohhh you wanted to check performance, fair enough

[maiden rivet]

yeah i know the avi works and all, i test using the android app for function all the time. But i cant do -any- prediction on performance other than "yeah this version should run a little better"

sadly dont have my old quest 2 anymore, neither do i know people with one. That's probably the only place where you'd really feel animator culling

[cold yarrow]

once in a while I've launched my main in desktop to view stuff from the quest standalone

[maiden rivet]

would have done that, but yeah no more quest here

mine sadly bit the dust a year or so back

[cosmic wave]

I did it over 1000fps achived lesss gooo!
i know this channel aint meant for this but im happy about it

[spare goblet]

first, auto fix the read/write error, cause that's not an actual number of their polygons

my other advice is split this into 10 avatars, there's no need to have everything in one. Cause sure, you could merge materials and meshes, but that's not really gonna matter with those numbers.

Why does it need to be all in one avatar? Is there a specific reason for that?

lol, that's very inconvenient

I will never understand people who refuse to switch avatars. No need to have everything in one

but whatever

My advice: Make it me 10 avatars instead of one.

But...

Polygons: Use the Tuxedo plugin to bake your avatar in blender or decimate in blender or get rid of vertices under clothes in blender (if that's even possible with that many outfits) or get rid of vertices in some other way

Skinned Mesh Renderers: Ctrl J in Blender. But you'd need to keep toggles in mind when you do that, because if you really do have 70 different outfits then that advice is pointless

Material slots: combine materials in blender manually or with a plugin https://github.com/Grim-es/material-combiner-addon (what counts are material slots, so even if you combine everything into one that will be 70 material shots, each mesh has their own slots.

Physbones/Bones/Lights/Particles: remove some. If you need all of that, make it be 10 avatars (or even more from the mesh count)

[obsidian lake]

in a public world you will find many people on quest

i'm not quite sure how you wouldn't know anyone with a quest, or at least where to find them, since iirc it's the majority of the playerbase

just go to a quest compatible public world

[gray citrus]

Been a hot minute they were a good watch I think having seen topology examples I can see that there are ways people can optimize there mesh especially there face and arms

How memory consumption happens due to texture memory and the side of effects of verts translating those maps was very informative

Animators are indeed quite the black box haha

I didn't know you could decimate a skinned mesh , I presume it would always break the weight paint or did they patch that and do some normalizing math to blend it out?

[cold yarrow]

you can but often you have to be picky about how, and it's rarely the best option

[spring sun]

Itd kinda normalize the weight painting to the nearest decimated vertice

[gray citrus]

At that point It'd be better to just have a good topo from the get go

[spring sun]

Well yea

But people be stupid

[maiden rivet]

I mostly hang around with creators or dancers, so that usually means Lighthouse tracked headsets. Kind of naturally grew a friendgroup that's all PC nuts

Also yeah I did ask a few people in public if they can see my facetracking on quest, but kind of was too awkward to ask them to go in an empty lobby with me and toggle my avi on off to see how many frames i drop them down / or not

[heady quiver]

Would anyone be free to hop into a vc and help me get a model available to quest?

[solemn owl]

I Made a video that might help with the process
https://youtu.be/BBLJAif7SPg

[heady quiver]

Thanks a bunch!

[buoyant holly]

dissolving Edge Loops tends to be a safer option than the decimate modifier to reduce triangle count

[obsidian lake]

lmk if you need help testing in the future, i play on quest so i can always help out

[maiden rivet]

oh thats so so nice of you, for now I think my avatar is final and it's time to enjoy vrchat tho. I'm trying not get back into my old habit of 10 hours of avi work for 1 hour of playing xD

[lunar ginkgo]

I need some help with fixing up an avatar,

Could someone possibly talk to me in DM's abt it?

[spare goblet]

what issues are you facing?

don't ask for dms

very easy way to get scammers here

[cold yarrow]

if you do it in public, many people can contribute and also potentially learn from the conversation.

[lunar ginkgo]

I was trying to in the avatar help section

[spare goblet]

this as well

[lunar ginkgo]

But the issue is

It's kinda complex to explain over text

[spare goblet]

you can take screenshots

[cold yarrow]

it isn't really - you're over the uncompressed size

[lunar ginkgo]

But here's the thing

It should be like that

Cuz the avatar is pretty much the exact same as it has been

[cold yarrow]

"pretty much"

[lunar ginkgo]

But when upload it, no matter what chages I make

It stays the same

I'll send what I can in a sec

[cold yarrow]

possibly you aren't making the right changes, and also you have to do another build to see that stat updated

[lunar ginkgo]

I know abt that part

But it's like there's some specific factor that's contributing to it

And I've been testing it,

But from what I've seen it isn't the texture nor the models themselfs

Thus If @cold yarrow or @spare goblet would be willing for me to directly show ya,

It may help better explain what's going on

[cold yarrow]

I don't help in DM for free, sorry.

[spare goblet]

me too

[nova nimbus]

i can help out! theres a few really good plugins out there free that allow ya to view the build size of your avatar and such if your struggleing with that <3
and if still stuck meh dms are open ^o^
Sometimes it's just a matter of an FBX with too many blendshapes, or a texture imported with mitmaps on/wrong compression settings and things. should be a simple fix ^-^b

[regal basin]

anyone know of an automated way to cut all texture res by half? Preferably non-destructively. I have a "club" version of my avatar that I manually downscale all the textures on every time I upload (to prevent ripping and improve performance), but it gets pretty tedious to update.

[cold yarrow]

destructively: find . -type f -name \*.png -exec mogrify -resize 50% {} \;

... maybe you aren't a linux user though 🙂

[ivory sluice]

(lower texture resolution won't have any perf improvement btw)

[proper grail]

It do have the benefit of not crashing me if i turn around too fast tho

[heavy knot]

Pretty sure hai has a tool for this

https://docs.hai-vr.dev/docs/products/prefabulous/universal/replace-textures doesn’t automate the resize it seems

[regal basin]

spoken like someone whose never run out of vram before lol

[ivory sluice]

are your texes like 16k?

[heavy knot]

The addition of mip streaming did alleviate some of that performance impact

[buoyant holly]

a club world is going to have like 80 avatars in it

[radiant shadow]

wish sdk had it default, many forget to check

easy way to change resolution for smaller download size or compression for less vram use

[wintry laurel]

Hi, are there any tools to help optimize the final build / exclude redundant files? Or should you simply just prune the project

[cold yarrow]

IMO only put on the avatar (in the hierarchy) what you want to be uploaded.

[limpid frost]

Is this true? Lol

[heavy knot]

It's true until the game is VRAM limited

[regal basin]

which is always lol, unless you have like 32gb of vram, but even then it'll fill in a large instance

[ivory sluice]

the performance curve of texel fetching is not a smooth line as other stuff like GPU instruction count is, fetching texels from a 2048x texture will be as performant as fetching from a 32x texture

the location where the texels are fetched are another story, unless you decide to put your computer at max stress by enabling all avatars on 60+ user instances (but atp it's assumed you have enough memory to handle that) or upload content with unnecessarily large textures, texel fetching will only have microseconds of difference per frame depending on texture resolution.
it had been tested on a large world i worked on some weeks ago and the perf difference was nothing

[sweet ruin]

I guess check out https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer which offers such features. It can be added via VCC and then added into the project via "Manage Project". Then add dark avatar optimizer as a component to your avatar (where the descriptor sits)

As example:

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/Zf8qtiJQis3JyYp/preview

[limpid frost]

Thank you for explaining

[gritty needle]

if your avatar already has VRCFury could use it's built in optimizations but d4rk optimizer and fury don't work together great

[zealous wigeon]

d4rk optimizer and fury don't work together great
Really?
Been reliable for me, d4rk added support for running after vrcfury some time ago.

[gritty needle]

they do work together however if you read the warnings and know how it works, dark optimizer with fury is not nearly as effective as dark optimizer on its own cause it can't merge materials and mesh. look at that estimated optimization and then look at it in-game

haven't tried it myself but you can probably make an optimized bake before using vrcfury, then include parts that utilize fury, unless your avatar relys on fury to work (i.e. clothes toggles)

[zealous wigeon]

Sure, it is incorrect but not wrong, which is expected, D4rk doesn't know what is being toggled or not so can only bake things that aren't being toggled.

And tbf I only use the basic settings for d4rk (don't want stuff to appear wrong when shaders not shown and such).

With basic settings anyhow everything is just working

[gritty needle]

I was just saying it's not nearly as effective

[zealous wigeon]

You said it can't merge meshes and materials, but I can see for a fact that it is

At least with basic settings

Maybe it is different with shader toggles, would be weird if it was.

[gritty needle]

not in my experience

are you looking at in game stats?

[zealous wigeon]

Yeah I did.
I didn't count the stats, but considering it isn't a very featured avatar, I could tell D4rk was simply skipping over the meshes used in toggles, which is what I expected it to do on the basic setting.
The meshes not used in toggles were baked however, 7 skinned meshes in Unity, 3 skinned in game, which is what I expect.

[wintry laurel]

Did end up using d4rk for other reasons, alongside fury with no problems
But disabled most settings in the optimizer so not much can break

[balmy badger]

I need help converting this avatar for quest compatibility cuz it gives me this error when trying to build n publish

[spare goblet]

that's way too large for quest

you will need to optimise it by a lot

[sweet ruin]

You can probably drop the quality of a lot of textures there. That makes the download size smaller and i think vram better correct me if i am wrong.
For example the eyes don't need to be 4k. Mine are 512x512 and still have no quality drop (look at the avatar from a meter away and drop quality until you notice a visible change)

https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools i used this to calculate vram usage and changed compression and dropped textures that way

[cold yarrow]

4k eyes! wow.

[gray kelp]

anyone know what causes an avatar to take up almost 50mb worth of vram despite having appropriately sized textures?

one 2k texture shouldn't take up 50mb 🙏

i found the issue, the texture folder in one of my material packages was being registered

[trail pilot]

(because something on your avatar was referencing those textures)

[grave cradle]

did the new vrc update break your avatar performance rating too? my medium avatar is poor and medium at the same time now...

[loud vigil]

cant even upload a paid for avatar now all it gives is window security check failure

[cold yarrow]

feel free to paste errors in here.

[loud vigil]

they upload but then the website just says windows security check with a x

[grave cradle]

it shows poor above my head but the avatar is medium

how

[loud vigil]

They done broke the game and potentially years worth of creator content

[radiant shadow]

ingame thing , 3.7.1 behaves

might be the new multi upload component doing wierd things

many of these so called quest avatars people sell are WAY WAY over limits or old so they wont pass new limits , might want to check its stats in unity or could be multiple avatars in scene wich only one is for quest

tried it again now it got right rating - good again ( 3.8.1 )

for some reason overwriting a old blueprint id's get wrong rating, new dont

[trail pilot]

I've randomly seen inconsistent performance ratings

I'd only be worried if it stuck

[grave cradle]

even re uploading the avatar as new still shows it as poor when i use it. if i go in the avatar info the rating flashes from medium to poor

ingame it says i use 17 material slots even know its just 15

[cold yarrow]

don't forget to count particle system renderers

[grave cradle]

Yeah, but this avatar doesn't have particles. I now had to remove my AFK sign to make it show as medium again. Now I can never go AFK again.

[radiant shadow]

one of my old afk ways , detect afk / me not moving for x minutes , slowly change entire avatars hue to black & white then do some pose like you turned into a statue

afk signs can be just weightpainted to some bone and then moved up & rotate when afk , no need for a seperate mesh/material

[fleet lance]

Simple statement

VRChat fucked up.

[cold yarrow]

what's the context?

[grave cradle]

inflation

[fleet lance]

God bless American Capitalism… (or VRChat Optimism in this case lmao)

[spice rock]

very poor

good

[trail pilot]

snergal...

did it just need some decimating?

[spice rock]

decimating, mesh combining, material combining, combined armature for some things

no more togglable armour, I just have two seperate models one with and one without now

[spice rock]

wasn't able to have it be excellent with the armour due to having 5 material slots because the armour needed one, which pains me

[marble raven]

https://zoidberg656.gumroad.com/l/LCEmployee?layout=discover&recommended_by=search need help converting and optimizing

[marble raven]

for quest*🙏

[gritty terrace]

w/o seeing its stats there isnt much directing someone can do to help you, though it does list on its page its a Excellent rated model already

you may be able to just swap the shaders it uses and upload it like that

[marble raven]

Turns out being very poor

Let me go take a Pic of the stats

[marble raven]

I'm using vrcquesttools BTW

[cold yarrow]

So you added something to it

[marble raven]

Whay

What

[cold yarrow]

Guessing based on Lilipimpen's comment that it was Excellent from the creator but you added something and now you're over the limits

[marble raven]

I did nothing, just converted it for quest

[cold yarrow]

ahh, it wasn't excellent for quest originally? That'd make sense then

So those stats there ^ tell you what you need to reduce

[marble raven]

Yeah, and I have no idea how to it’s my first time working with the creator companion

Seems to just be polygons and material slots

[cold yarrow]

Creator Companion is just a launcher for Unity. But what you'd need to do here is take the model into Blender (or similar) and reduce the polygon count, and merge materials.

[marble raven]

Do you mind helping me

[cold yarrow]

there are many tutorials, I'm happy to answer questions but I can't be a teacher

[marble raven]

OK thanks

[marble raven]

How can I find what blender version I need?

[cold yarrow]

just use the latest

[marble raven]

K

[cold yarrow]

I'm using 4.4.3

[fleet lance]

If it makes you feel better Kazin, the full version of my avatar is almost 100 mb lol.

Sometimes, if you can’t optimize the main avatar, just make an alternative version without all the extra stuff and just the essential stuff you need.

At least that’s what I do.

My optimized one is medium at least without the extra crap.

[cold yarrow]

I aim for Medium if possible.

[fleet lance]

Fair enough, what avatar base are you using anyways? I might be able to help.

https://tenor.com/view/miyabi-zenless-zone-zero-thumbs-up-not-impressed-gif-13585573116058604889

[cold yarrow]

help with what?

[fleet lance]

Aren’t you having issues with optimization?

[cold yarrow]

no?

[fleet lance]

Oh, my apologies.

I misread lol.

[cold yarrow]

you may have been confusing the parties in this conversation 🙂

[fleet lance]

Most likely, gotta love my ADHD filled ass lmao.

https://tenor.com/view/out-the-window-toss-call-of-duty-gif-26200115

[marble raven]

I tried to import the FBX, but it does not have any textures

Any help

[cold yarrow]

you don't need the textures in blender, but yes, that's normal, you'd have to setup materials to use the texture images in your project

[marble raven]

Ok

[fleet lance]

Another random tip, idk if it will help much depending on what you need help with, but there is a Unity tool called Darks-optimizer or something (I forgor)

[marble raven]

already using that

[fleet lance]

Ah.

[marble raven]

for me it doesnt help any with materials or polygons

[fleet lance]

That sucks

[marble raven]

yup

[fleet lance]

Well sheet. I am not fully sure.

[marble raven]

lol

[fleet lance]

I am not great with optimization lol.

[marble raven]

same

[fleet lance]

https://tenor.com/view/bocchi-the-rock-hitori-gotou-gif-27023162

[marble raven]

say, what should i be using to convert to quest

[fleet lance]

I personally use various tools, but for switching to quest, make sure you have the Android Platform for Unity installed.

[marble raven]

yup

rn im using quest tools

[fleet lance]

I use VRCQuestTools.

[marble raven]

k

im legit so close to getting poor instead of very poor

[gritty terrace]

Manually doing it in blender is really the only method for fixing those two (to my knowledge), do some light decimation/remove some loops to the mesh to get the tri count down (though be careful with this as it will get messy quick, if it moves weird you'll have to mess with the weightpainting aswell) and merge some of the textures together onto a single sheet then merge your mat slots into a single 1 (or two)

[marble raven]

yeah im going to be real i have no idea how to do that

[gritty terrace]

lots of existing YT videos or explanations in this disc's chat history, dont have any good examples on hand to direct you to though

[marble raven]

k

i think im just going to keep it and make imposters

[velvet crow]

I've found that optimizing for quest is kind of difficult unless you have blender knowledge or something. Or unless the avatar is inherently optimized.

So yeah, impostors are good at least as a backup.

[worldly hull]

How you guys handle eyebrows and eyelashes , if your model uses transparent meshes but you want to upload it to quest?

In my case, I made the background of the eyebrows and eyelashes the same color like the skin from the face to have them still fully animated in shapekeys because drawing them directly on the face would make them static and not animated with shapekeys.

Or do you have a better solution than this?

My goal is a medium performance rank for Mobile Avatars.

[buoyant holly]

use the knife tool to cut it into geometry so you have no transparency

[worldly hull]

that messed it up.
Either you do propagate to shape and its static or you dont do propagate to shape and it glitches if a shapekey is played.

[buoyant holly]

are you doing your editing work from the Basis blend shape?

[worldly hull]

yes because I will not do it on my 100 shapekeys manually.

[buoyant holly]

very strange as I just tried cutting with the knife tool without it exploding

[worldly hull]

It will explode if you try to animate a shapekey that does have weight on it.

[buoyant holly]

okay strange I tried cutting it a second time and then it blew up

[proper grail]

If you dont tab out of edit mode and back in after adding or removing verts with a model with shapekeys, blender forgets what verticies go where due to the order changing

[waxen maple]

big optimization tip:
use DPID with Kaiser set on your textures.
Should reduce even mipmap texture and download size by 30% or so(for less than 4k). with improved visuals

[past dock]

Is it a bug that particle systems with no renderer/material still adds to the avatar material count?

[onyx harness]

As I understand it, because you can animate the renderer on/off, if it didn't count then you could cheese the system and upload with all renderers off and reduce material slot count just for an animation to set them all back on immediately upon loading in.
So I don't believe it's a bug.

[solemn owl]

I tried this on a PC avatar and it takes more for some reason

[elfin zodiac]

is there a benchmark, how the textures size now effects performance since the Mipmapping patch?

[frosty fern]

Texture size, or the amount of texture memory used? Because texture impact on performance is usually a cumulative issue. Remember, all textures displayed on your screen have to use the same limited pool of VRAM. So one badly optimized avatar using a lot of VRAM may not impact performance at all, if that's the only thing your computer is rendering, but once you put it in an environment surrounded by other avatars that all also need VRAM to be displayed, that's when your FPS begins to drop. This is why the ideal is to use as little VRAM as possible

[elfin zodiac]

there was a patchnote in the past, that avatars now should have proper mip map streaming. therefore, Textures should be streamed out and in memory as needed

[frosty fern]

Tools like that improve performance and can, under the right circumstances, allow for more detail, but don't negate the need for optimization altogether. In game development they have texture and polygon "budgets" where they figure out how much can be displayed at once while maintaining performance goals. From there they determine how much of the budget can be allocated to then environment, characters, etc. This is more difficult in vrchat since the environment and every avatar on screen is created by a different person with no communication between them, and the number of avatars on screen can vary wildly. so an avatar may be fine when it's you and a few friends, but awful for a public instance with 20+ people.

What I'm saying is, it's difficult to come up with a bench mark on textures versus performance without taking everything else into consideration.

[cosmic wave]

Not an avatar but avatar related
im making a tool to "bench" avatars and give them somewhat a more i dept review to properly check how optmized an avatar is and what can be done to further optimize it.
is there anything im missing that the sdk dont really report or something that is heavy and should be there

The tools main function is to check if the avatar will be a problem in 40 avatar lobbies and 80 avatar lobbies.

Also for some reason my drawcalls always match the shaderpasses is this correct ? i feel like its not

this tool also wont make you very poor if you just have that 1 polygon over the limit

[crisp matrix]

I have a greyscale texture that is around 70 kilobytes, when I import into unity it jumps to 1.3 megabytes, what settings do I use to minimize file size while preserving quality

[ivory sluice]

If you want to make the texture a single channel, go to the compression settings at the bottom, click the computer icon, and set the texture format from RGBA Compressed DXT5 or whatevs it says to R compreswed BC4

Keep in mind that unity converts all images to DDS/TGA, so no matter the format and size of the image you use, if it has the same import settings it will weight the same, its only difference will be that depending on the image's original format, it may appear too low quality, so try to not use overly compressed formats like jpg

[crisp matrix]

where does it say compression settings?

Oh I see

If I do that the text turns red and no way to make it transparent

[ivory sluice]

Yea that's why it's one channel, it's technically grayscale but the shader needs to read it as so, otherwise you'll have to set the format back to RGBA DXT1 or BC7

[languid brook]

hey so I just want to know, if my avatar's jacket has cloth, latex bits and metal parts, can I put it all on 1 material somehow without losing the special effects (like gloss for the latex) or do I have to separate them into 3?

[cold yarrow]

best answer without seeing detail is "it depends". In most cases yes, though when you start getting into transparency it can be difficult without that being a separate material.

[languid brook]

I see, that's good to know. Thanks 🙂

[split delta]

look up RGBA masking with poiyomi. it'll let you do what you want

[languid brook]

Ohh yeah forgot about that, thank you!

[silver spruce]

I wanted to know if this would work
So if I put everything that has the same texture on the same parts of my texture map or whatever it's called would that help my performance
Because if I don't do that my texture thing would be bigger wouldn't it
If I put everything that's the same in the same spots it could decrease it right

[silver spruce]

Also I thought of another thing what if I make it where my textures are like super low pixel count
Like they're like six pixels so I just make specific things specific colors so I can like easily switch between them I guess

[obsidian lake]

yeah both of these are common techniques used for optimization! reusing areas of textures and using small color swatches for solid colors. You can also use vertex colors for this if the shader you're using supports it.

[jaunty cypress]

how do you bring a mesh from unity into blender, decimate it and bring it back on an avatar without it breaking? everytime i try it just turns into a jumbled mess

[cold yarrow]

a) don't unpack your avatar prefab
b) export with the same settings every time. Ideally set "Apply scalings" to "FBX All"
c) if you make large changes to the armature, you'll need to redo the rig setup by switching it to generic, applying, then back to humanoid

[uneven mist]

anyone know how to make world constrants for quest

[cold yarrow]

same as for not-quest, using the VRC version of constraints rather than Unity's

[zealous wigeon]

What Kazin said, but should be specified that you should not even attempt exporting from Unity, you simply want to go into that Unity's projects asset folder, find the fbx file for what you want to decimate and import that into Blender.

Then when putting it back into Unity you can either overwrite the old fbx file or save it as a new file, you can then simply replace the mesh used in the mesh renderer component.

[jaunty cypress]

When I did that, the mesh broke completely

Like the verts were everywhere

[zealous wigeon]

That's what happens when you don't export it from Blender in the exact same way it was originally exported.

Are cases where you even need specific versions or other programs if they were exported there.
Like, normals are screwy with current blender (because of Unity tbf), while 4.0 is fine.

[cold yarrow]

This is fine though too - just drag a new copy of your avatar into the scene, copy stuff over to it.

[wicked lynx]

is there any way to remove texture backgrounds for quest within the shaders available

[weak wigeon]

Is there a faster way to merge the layer of clothing with the body? I'm doing it manually right now by connecting the parts where skin becomes visible like this and then deleting all the polygons that become inaccessible.

(pictured: the inside of the sleeve)

[cold yarrow]

you don't really need to connect those, but if you're going to, yeah that's pretty much how you do it

could select vertices then mesh -> cleanup -> merge by distance, but that might not be what you want either

[shy dirge]

Is there a meaningful or any sort of performance difference between version 1.0 and 1.1 for physbones?
I'm guessing probably not, especially if I'm not doing anything fancy with squishing of bones.

[obsidian lake]

afaik, no, but the force values affect the physbone movement differently. Most notably, gravity was completely reworked in 1.1

[shy dirge]

yea, I gathered that from a bit of googling. If it doesn't change performance, then I'll just leave my settings alone

[warm cloud]

does anyone have any tips when it comes to using less audio sources?

[spring sun]

Just use less of them?

[warm cloud]

that's the issue... i need them for emotes, they are very important

[spring sun]

They definitely arent

[warm cloud]

in my case, they are.

the emotes are entirely dependent on the audio.

[spring sun]

Then Ig you arent using less of them

[warm cloud]

i heard that there was a trick of including different audios in one audio source?

[spring sun]

That doesnt exist

[warm cloud]

i saw it, though

[spring sun]

You cant swap audios

[warm cloud]

then how exactly does it work?

[spring sun]

Multiple audio source components

Multiple sounds in a singular audio source considering its all one toggle so why toggle different audio sources in the same animation

[warm cloud]

thats what i meant

[spring sun]

Just make a singular audio?

[green bramble]

generally, i just close things like this, and then leave some excess for the other part to clip into what i closed.

if you were doing the sleeves for example, i'd close the sleeves, and only keep enough of the hand to make sure it shows fully.

[green bramble]

the only thing that comes to mind to what you are describing, is the following component in animators.

This only uses one audio source, and swaps the audio played according to what you ask it to play. The only issue is that you can't play two audios at the same time with one audio source. (I'm unsure if they still count as multiple audio sources doh, but i can do this with a single audio component)

[obsidian lake]

Yes, you can use the animator play audio state behavior to make an animation state play an audio clip in an audio source.

[obsidian lake]

Only counts as one audio source. Audio sources is the component

[green bramble]

ah cool, i knew correctly in that case, ty for clearing it up

[autumn knot]

hey can someone help

my avatar is rly unoptimized

[spare goblet]

alright

what part do you not know how to optimize? be more specific

or send a screenshot of the stats

[tribal ruin]

VRC Animator Play Audio state behavior...

[autumn knot]

@spare goblet

[spare goblet]

well first, you need to use a quest supported shader
and fix your rigging, click the fbx in your assets, go to rig and configure. Ensure everything is alright there, check for any errors

if the mapping for the rigging is okay, there may be issues with your parenting

[autumn knot]

okay

no errors or materials

idk

[spare goblet]

I highly recommend watching a basic avatar set up tutorial, cause for Quest you do need to change the shader of your material

and there are definitely issues with your rigging or mapping

[autumn knot]

ok

[plush trout]

How unoptimized are physbone components? I want to give a single physbone multiple components and have a toggle that turns on a specific one whilst the rest are turned off. This will total 12 additonal physbone components spread across 4 individual bones. I know that a lot of physbones themselves can be unoptimized. But i cant find anything on the component itself.

[green bramble]

https://vrc.school/docs/Other/Benchmarks/

it doesn't answer your question fully, but it seems like what matters the most is the animated transforms (someone else might give a better answer)

[barren belfry]

VRC docs shows the limits on physbone components depending on the performance rating and if its for a PC or a mobile avatar. So as long as you stick to the guidelines it will work fine.
https://creators.vrchat.com/avatars/avatar-performance-ranking-system/#pc-limits

[open pier]

this is a bit scary because now the body is part of the clothing and you won’t be able to easily add new clothing later, usually it’s better to just keep them seperated

[weak wigeon]

Intentional. I don't plan on ever adding new clothing to this model

The use case was already niche enough that it barely matters what I do with it because it's an oc that me and like five other people know about that basically one friend cares about. And that friend doesn't Play vrchat

[open pier]

Well either way it would still be faster to just merge them into a point

and those other benefits usually are there too

[obsidian lake]

trying to get down to 10k so i can add outlines and not by very poor on quest 🤞

i'm so close but so far

ideally I'd want it down to 7.5k so it can be medium instead of poor but I don't think I'm gonna be able to do that without noticable loss in fidelity

it was at like 35k before so i'm doing good

[heady smelt]

Delete the entire backside of it and just always face people when speaking to them. Medium instantly
but good work even if you wont

[obsidian lake]

Unfortunately I would remove the body inside the shirt but the shirt is a toggle 😔

I will just remove the backside instead though thank you very much 👍

[obsidian lake]

getting closer!!

[livid wharf]

Anyone have some good plugins or similar for Blender LTS to atlas textures?

I know Tuxedo exists but it seems to only do the colour texture and not any of the others?

[heady smelt]

Cats. Get a fork, not the official one. Tuxedo happened because some furry coder pulled out the actual atlas section of cats and appropriated it for that game, then the actual atlas was hidden in old Cats.
https://cats.neoneko.xyz/ might have it, otherwise find a fork on Github that suits your need (there are some for 3.9 LTS, others too). Could join the cats Discord and ask.

[cold yarrow]

cats just uses this: https://github.com/Grim-es/material-combiner-addon

[proud urchin]

You also dont need a plugin to atlas materials and can do it yourself with native blender features, it just might take a bit more time

[quartz hill]

any ideas on what i can do to reduce the download size?

[spare goblet]

delete blendshapes that you don't use

lower texture size

[hybrid mulch]

@heady smelt You're posting links too fast.

[molten adder]

I'd like to show thanks to Tupper for the 100 verts of cloth on medium avatars, it's not much but i'm thankfull every day for it.

[cold yarrow]

I disagree, I'd much rather they give us Magica Cloth instead 🙂

[vital quiver]

So I have tried so many times to upload an avi for my wife, but everytime I do, the game keeps saying that the security check fail;s, despite me making the model. What can i do about this

[cold yarrow]

is it very very poor? sometimes the in-SDK checks aren't as thorough as the server-side checks are

[vital quiver]

no, its green lit

[cold yarrow]

huh weird then, you might try making a support request

[vital quiver]

Where can i put one down

[weak wigeon]

does anyone else go a little bit insane with eliminating polygons?

at what point does it go too far

apologies for the angle change

[cold yarrow]

when it looks bad 🙂

[weak wigeon]

true but subjective, thank you

[cold yarrow]

best answer I've got really

[green bramble]

when you start getting rid of topology needed for weight painting

or, when you start losing too much detail, depending on what you're going for.

[silver spruce]

So I'm a little confused I only have two materials for my avatar
but but it's saying I have too many material slots
Is there any information on how to fix this because the website for some reason won't load for me

And it's also saying I'm using the wrong shader but I ain't got no clue how to change them

[cold yarrow]

materials != material slots

Each mesh object * material slot = total slots

[silver spruce]

How would I optimize that because I have a lot of meshes that I want to turn off with toggles but I ain't got no clue how to do that

[cold yarrow]

You'd need to join the meshes, no way around that.

[silver spruce]

So how would I still hide them then?

[cold yarrow]

shrink with blendshapes possibly

[silver spruce]

😭, time to figure out how to do that

[cold yarrow]

I assume you're making a quest-compatible avatar?

[silver spruce]

Also having issues with shaders because I have no clue how to change them

[cold yarrow]

And you want to make toggable outfit parts or something?

probably break that up into multiple avatars, it'd be way more efficient and easy to deal with.

re: the shaders, there's a dropdown at the top of the materials, change that to a shader that's compatible with quest.

[silver spruce]

Do you know which one makes it look like it's one color
-# like no shadows I think

[cold yarrow]

you can do that with any

your options are in the docs: https://creators.vrchat.com/platforms/android/quest-content-limitations#shaders

[silver spruce]

Thank you, I'm going to go disintegrate and try to figure out how the fuck to fix this

[cold yarrow]

I'm weight painting. Not sure which one has the more annoying job 🙂

I should probably try sleeping though.

[wet spindle]

go into blender, make a new Shape Key, select it, shrink away all the clothing (ideally to a single point if it's attached to one bone, e.g. a hat, otherwise inside the body such that it's invisible), bend the relevant bones a bit to make sure it doesn't clip through, rinse and repeat
this does mean that you'll have to have the blendshape on to turn the clothing off, unfortunately despite having flipped blendshapes several times i still don't know how to do it reliably

alternatively, d4rkavataroptimizer can merge toggleable meshes for you if you enable NaNimation Toggles, with the caveat that some shaders (e.g. ambient occlusion, x-ray) will act as if all your clothing is on at once

[amber hemlock]

Are the requirements for Android different than iOS? My avatar is Medium in unity, and I'm uploading the same blueprint to both Android and iOS, but Android calls it poor.

[radiant shadow]

i dont trust that thing, seen some wierd thing same avatar using a old blueprint = very poor, new blueprint = good ( im not using constraints ,vrcfury , gogoloco / ect )

( tested again on 3.8.2 beta.1 )

[amber hemlock]

yeah it shows medium in both on the website

issue is the in game one says poor and i get filtered to poor by android users

so even if it's wrong i need to fix it somehow

guess i'll see what it does on a totally new blueprint

[split delta]

Try check your vram usage. I heard that some places on the site/in-game go off of everything but vram, whereas the website and one place in-game takes vram usage into account.

[radiant shadow]

its the same avatar - so same stats , surprise one is very poor cause its using a old blueprint id

tend to check thry for texture compression befrore upload (sometime forget to set one) - both same

(vrchat ignore fbx vram size)

webpage both same

[silver spruce]

I don't know if anyone's done this in the past but I found a way to make all of my hats have a 32x32 texture because I can just line them up to have a good texture

[regal solstice]

Finally got a version of my avi down to medium performance 🫠. Had to ditch my suit and go for a hoodie instead, it was just too many polys :/

[merry ether]

is there someone who knows how to resolve all these problems. I'm new to the VR world and I wasn't excepting this to be so hard, any advises? 😭

[cold yarrow]

the top one is the one that's blocking you, that shader can't be used for quest avatars. Most of the quest setup tutorials should cover how to fix it

[devout holly]

anyone have any tips on reducing the texture memory usage?

[cold yarrow]

put way less stuff (assets, clothing parts, etc) on your avatar.
Fewer textures would be ideal, smaller ones can work too.

[devout holly]

alrighty

[sweet ruin]

Jesus Christ.
500MB?! god damn

Otherwise, you can also downscale textures. For example my avatar had 4k eyes. Thats like 15MB.
I scaled it to 256, and you can't see any difference from 1m away, but its only a few kb now in size.

[steady oak]

how do i fix this?

[olive monolith]

2 ways. Spend more time in game (not afk/idle). Or, get vrc+ for 1 month. Basically you just need new user iirc.

[steady oak]

how mutch time do u need to spend ingame?

[olive monolith]

No clue. It's never specified because it could lead to the system being abused.
It's thought that it's linked to game time, friends, interactions and whatnot. Basically, play the game as it was intended to be played. Shouldn't take too long if you go that route.

[steady oak]

thx

[oblique ingot]

im still pretty new to making avatars could i just stick a hood on a vroid character since the hair is very resource intensive

or just any tips on how to make it more optimised without sacrificing significant quality

[spare goblet]

vroid hair? when exporting you can click the top box in the first section, it's something about hair. Usually gets rid of a lot of polygons and the hair looks like 99% the same

you can also delete the scalp hair if it's not visible in your hairstyle

[oblique ingot]

seems like someone's been hacked 🤔

poof 💨

[devout holly]

i have no idea how it's this high i'm optimizing from a bought avatar & somehow it has less texture memory than i do??

[devout holly]

all of my textures are 2k. when i scale them down to 512 or under, i just save on 2-4 mb.... i have no idea why it is so high

[sweet ruin]

lol

I suggest thry's vram caluclator :)

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/dmytGBeJFBopEgs/preview embed test

ah i have embed perms here yey

it shows you what uses most and recommends changes

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/AqpgHKT8EpGcXkp/preview

[devout holly]

is that the same thing as thry's avatar performance tools? or a separate plugin?

[cold yarrow]

look under avatar

oh - yes, that is the same thing

[devout holly]

ah i see it, thank you guys so much!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/869991107344367727.gif?size=96&quality=lossless

[devout holly]

that did the job & my avatar runs well

[cosmic wave]

how many textures on a material is too many for an avatar where its intended for events 30+ people (optimized is very important)

[obsidian lake]

the amount of textures isn't really what matters, nor their distribution per-material (although material slots do matter a LOT). What's important is texture memory

[cosmic wave]

ah gotcha appreciate the reply, im in the process of making a tool for unity that scans the avi and gives warnings about performance. so im trying to balance it out atm. but seems like i can leave that one out

[edgy linden]

Query- the 70k limit on tris applies to all skinned meshes, correct? Even if they are not currently visible?

[obsidian lake]

all meshes (not just skinned meshes) except for mesh particles (those have a different stat for tris)

[edgy linden]

Thank you!

[sturdy jay]

down to 400mb texture memory usage from over 800mb im from a much simpler time

[buoyant holly]

definitely a big Improvement but 400 megabytes is still too much

[cosmic wave]

Does anyone know why my avatar becomes the error robot when i set cast shadows to off ?
its a pc avatar and uses vertex colors that could mabey be relevant ?
I can see the avatar myself just fine, just people around me cant

[sweet ruin]

Man, idk where else i can get the poly count down. This is the quest nardo model which already has some optimization.

PC:
https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/RQTAxATASGWmXXt/preview

Quest:
https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/gA6y5PgsAqpxtiP/preview

I even removed the female mesh inside as i do not need it, to save polygons

This is probably as low poly as the model can get

Maybe i can shave off like another 500 on the entire avatar without it looking bad, but thats about it

I think rn its right above 19k (19,412)

[obsidian lake]

Why are there a bunch of mini copies of the vrc robot?

[sweet ruin]

https://spacejackal.gumroad.com/l/jackalseatsystem

they are deleted on upload

they are just there for visualization in unity.

[obsidian lake]

Ohh I see. Well I would look at the most dense areas and start working there. Also try and target areas that aren't super important and don't bend a lot. Looks to me like you could lose a few polys in the toes/claws and the tip of the ears

[sweet ruin]

i guess, welp

[proud urchin]

Also, I know its seen as sacrilege but if you want to decimate certain parts of the body then theres nothing wrong with it. Fluff for example is a good candidate in my opinion, decimate can reduce the poly count while keeping the original shape much better than you can by deleting edge loops. Just keep a backup in case the deformation looks bad lol

[sweet ruin]

Its pretty much already decimated https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/2dRBMFcByNWPbe8/preview

Maybe there can be some work here and there but tbh idk if i can get it below 15k

i am at 19.4k rn

and tbh i don't see it getting 4.4k less

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/snTggRczwHy6FC7/preview

I mean something i did do is combine all materials and create an atlas as the quest avi only has one shader anyways.

But thats not poly related
it did help with performance goals though

[proud urchin]

Ah. Yeah getting it below 15k can be tough sometimes. The fact that you're optimizing for quest to begin with is a great step forward :)

[sweet ruin]

Trying to do this

On mobile, The Minimum Displayed Performance Rank is "Medium" by default. This means users can't see any avatars ranked as "Poor" or "Very Poor".

And thats why i want to get it to at least medium

[harsh pasture]

note: you can disable minimum rank on oculus, but not on android/ios

aka mobile can see poor but not very poor

[sweet ruin]

This means that people do not have to show me anymore if they set it to poor and i am poor, right?

[harsh pasture]

meant to say "set to very poor", my bad ^^'

[sweet ruin]

At what point do people have to force show you to see your full avi?

[harsh pasture]

i'm not that good at avi making, but assuming best is at loosely optimized

you can't display very poor avis on phone at all, from what i know?

[sweet ruin]

Also whats sad is that my pc avi is poor. But only because i got 1 local light (none synced & playerlocal layer xray light for depth) which others can't even see lol

Otherwise its medium xd

[harsh pasture]

i'd suggest removing local light and doing some optimizations, not a lot but some cleanup

[sweet ruin]

On phone its funny. But pn android (quest) and stuff i mean

[sweet ruin]

I can't remove that light. Then my wireframe is broken

[harsh pasture]

or looking into alternates for local light?

[sweet ruin]

I need something that replicates the depth then.

The wireframe is based on shaders (not player cam)

[harsh pasture]

i'm not good at making avatars i'm afraid :(

[sweet ruin]

Cam would be nice, but it bobs when i move plus its slightly off

https://ikeiwa.gumroad.com/

[harsh pasture]

maybe look into toon? good luck though

[sweet ruin]

No worries, the hud & xray is for pc only anyways (due to shader limits).
I won't need it on quest / android

but yea, i still wanna get my avi on quest down to medium hehe

Lemme see what i can decimate i guess

Not much left i can do but stuff like this is still possible

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/Sqr6KDdEFwpzRST/preview

[sweet ruin]

Ok now i am confused-

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/m4zfXJJiiAbHSno/preview

This is the model i exported

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/qQeKg5WJQpZofjd/preview

and this is how it looks in unity??

huh???

Am i tripping?

Ah, because it is rendered in triangles, right

[tropic prism]

Hey I need help, I just optimized an avi but idk how to switch the avi FBX

[sweet ruin]

What i did, when exporting the avi, i set up the entire same settings for the fbx, and then copied lots of the stuff via FACS. I suggest you experiment around a bit, what can be copied and what breaks, but this makes sure, that the transforms and bones are attached to the right avatar

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/kAnjxeJDPfDxnoQ/preview

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/kLM9jSqC62KGyt6/preview

https://github.com/FACS01-01/FACS_Utilities/releases

I suggest you do not copy the animator and set that up yourself again for your avatar

and some of the "All" (select all) buttons do not work there, so you gotta click stuff manually or check

But otherwise, this helps me re-assigning all transforms and armatures

[tropic prism]

could you explain me more in detail? I never did this shit before

[sweet ruin]

If you want i can screen share if you are comfortable, that would make it the easiest i guess

[tropic prism]

yeah sure

[sweet ruin]

One moment, jumping to pc

wtf there aren't any voice channels here lol. Imma call you in dm xd

[spare goblet]

cause they're harder to monitor

[cosmic wave]

Trying to figure out what some good numbers are for statemachine, specifically the ones mentined in the picture,

what would be the max number of each category for a medium performant avatar ?

[obsidian lake]

There's no max, these aren't taken into consideration when calculating performance rank, it's just up to you if you belive it is well optimized.

[cosmic wave]

i see, thanks for the response 🙂

[cosmic wave]

but isnt there some limit ?
i know the sdk dont count thats why im asking
making a tool and i want to know when it needs to fire off warnings

[obsidian lake]

Well not for performance ranking; it's not even counted in-game. If you want statistics on it though, look at vrcschool

https://vrc.school/

[exotic bluff]

Hey

Elliot

When u dropping the new vid for quest👀

I’m kinda having issues with blocky hands after baking

[spare goblet]

there's only one L

so bake to less polygons or get rid of polygons manually, plugins can't do everything

[gusty cosmos]

Do triangles or quads more lead to lower download sizes?

[proper grail]

dont matter, if you have a mix of quads and tris it will increase size but otherwise keep quads is a shader thing

[ivory sluice]

in case your mesh doesn't generate any triangle strips (for example: all tris are flat shaded) then yeah, using quads will probably reduce a couple of bytes or kb out of your mesh, but in most avatars, since they are smooth shaded on most of the mesh, the difference will be little to none

[obsidian lake]

I think you're generally supposed to keep "keep quads" disabled unless you need it for tessellation/LoDs

[fathom birch]

So what you have selected those have some n-gons. Unity engine will to its "best ability" to triangulate any n-gons and quads.

quads will have a better outcomes majority of the time. N-gons...its triangle roulette.

[spring sun]

splits a 5 point n-gon to a tri and quad then splits the quad into tris

the uv after that? nonexistant

[delicate dust]

Any good tools that exist that makes optimization a bit easier with file size viewers?

[sweet ruin]

https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRC-Avatar-Performance-Tools
This one has some tools i guess including vram (which is not file size) but it helps with compression and showing what texture is what resolution.

[leaden steppe]

Are crashers

Alwloed

[fleet laurel]

I feel that just answered itself....

No

[warm cloud]

no

absolutely not

[red heron]

how would i quickly lower the texure detail for quest?

[sweet ruin]

You can enable overrides for android if you click the texture itself and then select the ratio / size

For example on pc you use 4k and on quest 2k

[red heron]

Yea I found it

[cold yarrow]

(don't use 4k if you can help it)

[cold yarrow]

hello scammer

why did you @ me then?

no

take this to #vrchat-general-1

[cyan zenith]

Hi, I'm trying to learn to use Blender to optimize. Should I install the latest version or old 2.8 so I can use the official Cats plugin?

[cold yarrow]

there's no reason to not use the latest.

a) you don't need cats at all
b) you can get cats to work with it here: https://catsblenderplugin.xyz/

[cyan zenith]

Thank you

That's good. I was hoping that's the case because using more than a few versions old software would be irresponsible in my opinion.

[cold yarrow]

Yeah, there's been so much progress since

[cyan zenith]

I thought I could just delete meshes for things I don't want. When I export the fbx back into my Unity project with the avatar already loaded, it's a jumbled mess.

[cold yarrow]

looks like the materials got scrambled somehow

[cyan zenith]

The picture was before I delete anything, I thought that's normal to have all the meshes scrambled like that, and that Unity/VRC just shows the user what they have toggled on

[cold yarrow]

ohh I see, it's just overlapping meshes, okay

So when you export the FBX you have to use the same settings as were previously used. Probably it's "Apply scalings" - set that to "FBX All" unless you know it should be otherwise, and see if that fixes it.
Also uncheck the option about leaf bones under "Armature"

[cyan zenith]

I assume this particular assest isn't well made but it's by far my favorite avatar and I wanted to make it Quest compatible as well as more optimized. It's not a complicated looking avatar

[cold yarrow]

AND if you unpacked your avatar prefab in Unity, none of this will work, you'll need to redo some stuff

(don't unpack)

[cyan zenith]

The size is ridiculous big in Unity when I export. how do I not apply scaling? This is an avatar I bought not one I made btw

[cold yarrow]

it's not a matter of applying scaling or not

set that setting as I said and see if it worked

[cyan zenith]

ok thx, I'll try it

[cold yarrow]

size in unity should be the same as in blender with this, assuming you have all transforms applied in blender. if you don't, you should.

[cyan zenith]

so here? I think it was set to FBX all already, I'm gonna try again though cause I just reinstalled Blender 4.2 with the correct cats plugin. Should I even use Cats?

[silver venture]

hello anyone?

[cold yarrow]

that is good, yes.

[cyan zenith]

I didn't delete anything and this is what happened using export from Cats

Maybe my avatar is too old (it's from 2023)

[cold yarrow]

having never seen your model, I have no idea what to say about this image

also I don't know what cats does for this either.

[cyan zenith]

one sec

[cold yarrow]

but it looks like mismatched scaling settings or maybe your prefab is unpacked?

[cyan zenith]

This is what the model should look like with the original fbx

I didn't unpack, should I?

[cold yarrow]

no

[cyan zenith]

I'm just opening the fbx file from the FBX folder in the avatar package, that's the way to do this right?

[cold yarrow]

by opening, you mean importing it into blender?

[cyan zenith]

yes

[cold yarrow]

yep, that's right

meeting, back in a bit.

[cyan zenith]

Thanks again. I think playing around with the scaling setting on the export worked. I'll experiment more.

[silver venture]

[cold yarrow]

oh good!

[wind heath]

The answer to what you're lookin for is eye tracking. The "eye look" in vrc isn't precise like that.
Optionally poiyomi pro has an option to make something always be facing what it can see which might also do the job.

[silver venture]

thanks but I only have poyomi poor aint no look at constraint doing the job or I saw stuff supposed to be in VRC avatar description that do the job but there is nothing like that

[graceful condor]

don't use export from cats

just do a normal blender fbx export. when you're exporting set the scale to fbx all iirc

and i usually disable leaf bones as well while im there

[cold yarrow]

definitely

[graceful condor]

also i only export visible

[cold yarrow]

yeah usually that's what I do, but sometimes selected.

[sweet ruin]

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/99WeFacnaENSzzY/preview

Had to remove the

• eyepoke
• cheese system
• fluff physbones
  And optimized
• Fbx mesh (fluff, claws, eyes, beans, horns, teeth by 20% decimating), removing the female breasts
• Material merging and texture atlasing in blender
  for the quest avatar

From the nardoragon

[cyan zenith]

thanks but for that avatar (Liam by: Morgues) exporting, I found using the local all option or whatever it's called actually worked perfect. using the default FBX All scaling option on export 100% always made a weird mess of the avatar. I was able to delete objects and it exported fine and was able to be uploaded to VRChat. What I don't understand is that even though Blender correctly reports that after deleting stuff off the avi and the polygon count is cut in half, I don't see that reflected in either Unity or VRChat performance stats. Is there more to do other than deleting the meshes/objects on the hierarchy for Blender?

[cold yarrow]

Yeah - some models use different standards, and it's really about using the same settings as you previously used.

as for deleting stuff from Blender, that ought to work, assuming you've updated the right model file of course.

[molten holly]

sorry to reply / ping u with this. my friend is having an issue with poly counts and i think this comment might help them (but they are bad at looking for past comments ....hence the reply)

[spare goblet]

if your friend's on 4.4 they should use the unofficial Tuxedo

the official has some bugs

https://github.com/teamneoneko/Unofficial-Tuxedo-Blender-Plugin/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

[exotic bluff]

Ok I watched Video but it didn’t really go over weight painting

[molten holly]

"oooOOOooh! thank you!!!" --my friend / me coz im also test making an avatar... poorly but still

[mellow scroll]

So quick question as I am trying to develop some avatar limits for a server I help run. We can't easily say green or red. But I was trying to determine what in avatars most kills others performance?

[cold yarrow]

IMO just block Very Poor - VRChat already handled this for you

[radiant shadow]

very poor avs and watch the vram use , run into people that lags badly i ask them to check vram use - many times its 99%~ and there is your reason, under 16gb will run out fast in larger rooms

[cold yarrow]

Yeah my next biggest thing to look at is definitely vram

[mellow scroll]

Thanks for the advice

[green bramble]

follow-up question on this.

Isn't un-packed download size what gets stored in your Vram? I never managed to find the answer to what your Vram actually stores of an avatar.

[cold yarrow]

it stores the textures mostly

so it's not exactly unpacked size - you can check Thry's Avatar Tools to get a good idea of how much VRAM you'd be using, and can compare that to download size to see what the rest is (meshes, mostly)

[green bramble]

so if texture Vram is like, 80mb, and download size is 100mb, then i roughly know that i'm using 100mb VRAM, of which 20mb is everything else that's not a texture?

[cold yarrow]

the math checks out, so I'd say "roughly yeah"

[green bramble]

Good to know. It's surprising how little effort someone needs to put to make sure everyone doesn't explode.

[cold yarrow]

and yet, few actually do it.

[green bramble]

sadly

I always tought it was un-packed download size, but now that i know this, i'll be even more mindful than i was already

[cold yarrow]

I mostly block bad avatars based on download and unpacked size 🙂

it's quite effective.

[green bramble]

Yea likewise. It doesn''t help that quest and your own PC already take most of that VRAM to begin with

[cold yarrow]

not so here, I've got a lot 🙂

(it's still a problem of course)

[green bramble]

by default i'm at 10gb, but i think last time i checked, simply getting in vrchat already set it to something like 5gb (in VR)

[silver venture]

can someone help me optimise my gaze by looking at camera or nearby player plsssss

its like day i cant even count them anymore of trying to achieve this plssss

[cold yarrow]

not sure how this is an optimization question.

[silver venture]

optimizing gaze?

[supple reef]

That's not what optimization means in this case, it's to make avatars smaller in file/load size (fast and badly explained)

[lean wedge]

Isn’t that just turning on eyelook?

[cold yarrow]

They want more than that, but it's not really a thing you can do outside a shader, and that's just...okay

[supple reef]

They could make an eye puppet I guess

[cold yarrow]

yeah, that's probably the best bet.

[jolly hearth]

hey is anyone online? if so im in need of a ton of help uploading an avatar. please dm

https://tenor.com/view/angai313-spongebob-sad-spongebob-crying-gif-21679826

[sweet ruin]

Ask here, thats what the server is for :)
If people know more specific details, someone might even help you in dm then

[jolly hearth]

ok, well im trying to port an avatar i got and ive got ported into its pc format, but im trying to optimize it for quest. right now ive only got one issue to resolve but i have no clue how to fix it

i know its a toon shader that isnt compatible with quest, i just need to find where it is; however, ive look in just about every folder and inspected every material sphere i could and im still not sure what the issue is

[sweet ruin]

The select button doesn't take you to which material it is?

[jolly hearth]

not at all, atleast it doesnt seem to

[sweet ruin]

Hmm, do you have much added to your avatar?
I suggest moving everything out of the avatar and checking again. Then slowly add stuff back and see when it appears.
Remember to click into the vrchat sdk control panel from time to time or flip to another avatar and back so it updates

[jolly hearth]

it is a rather hefty avatar, but i can see what i can do

and just in case if it helps any

[sweet ruin]

The materials are usually on the "Body"

When you drag an Fbx into the scene it will usually have the Armature and the Body.
The body should have the materials in question which also have shaders.
They may not be called "Body" in your project, but usually is.

[jolly hearth]

ill check it out, thanks

[cold yarrow]

@jolly hearth specifically which issue?

[jolly hearth]

the issue right above black wolf's last message. im having trouble finding a material thats unsupported

[cold yarrow]

ah, yeah finding the bad material is difficult sometimes. I assume "select" doesn't bring you to something useful?

[jolly hearth]

nope, just the same page shown in the video

[cold yarrow]

annoying.

[jolly hearth]

yep...

[jolly hearth]

so you got no clue too?

[cold yarrow]

nope, there's no way I can find a material in your project remotely

[jolly hearth]

oh yeah lol, i understand, well thanks for the help

[jolly hearth]

ok, the main issue is resolved.

[soft coral]

My avatar is rated medium in the editor and within game.

But the Performance breakdown shows it as a Very poor avatar, I don't think it does anything but I had a user complain my wasn't able to be shown because of their settings. "Hide Very Poor". Got any Ideas?

And yes everything is in the green or yellow medium range.

[gritty terrace]

Are you adding anything during upload with VRCFury or MA? sometimes certain things wont show in the panel even if showing an already uploaded model

[soft coral]

Got it taken care of

A wise ol bunny showed me the way

[steep timber]

[frail sedge]

I need assistance in lowering download size

[sweet ruin]

You can drop the texture quality, which will also lower download size

Your eyes as example don't need to be 8k or 4k.
Try 1k or even 512

[frail sedge]

Its more of asset sizes instead of texture

I already lowered all my textures to about 1k for main points and even lower for clothing but like the body itself is insanely high

[sweet ruin]

The fbx plays into effect a lot and the textures from what i understand.
Are there any other parts which eat up download size a lot?

[frail sedge]

Like 105k polygons

[sweet ruin]

105 👀

Damn

[frail sedge]

Its the rex, its all one mesh :c

[frail sedge]

I had to merge a muzzle onto it for it to work and redo the entire avi

[sweet ruin]

I recently played around with my quest nardo and got it to 14.8k

That was rough

[frail sedge]

Damn

But got any tips or anything?

[sweet ruin]

For the file size, less triangles/quads/n-gons
Drop textures so vram and download size go down and yea, thats about it

[cold yarrow]

Blendshapes take up lots of space too

[sweet ruin]

Then removing all unused blendshapes should be a good idea. I can recommend dark avatar optimizer for that then i guess

it has a keep MMD blendshape options too.

https://blackwolfwoof.com/s/AEBFgk9BpStnHNL/preview

[frail sedge]

Okay thank you

[livid skiff]

Any idea why the avatar is rated Good but when scrolling down it shows Medium rated ?

[radiant shadow]

still have no idea why also does that, tested this on a avatar, newer blueprint magically it says its good, old very poor

only seen a few with the same issue

[frigid badger]

desync between serverside scanning for performance and the client's performance ranks! both scan slightly differently, so things like lights on particles or material swaps might cause performance ranks to change
the new open beta should fetch performance ranks from the server, so try checking your avatar on it

[radiant shadow]

open beta made mine behave now - was never very poor to begin with i dont use matswaps/vrcfury/ectect and my vram is usually below 50mb , only thing that made it very poor was cause it was a old blueprint since a new one would have a totally different performance breakdown

[frigid badger]

what a wonderfully weird system!

well, what matters is it now works, id guess?

[somber notch]

Cause vrchat security performance check put its performance as medium because of how it performed in there check

But I think it's because there testing an overall performance check instead of using comps like before but you see it like that here because they haven't fully implemented it

I saw this same thing on the website as well where in games its green but in website it medium

[cosmic wave]

Does anyone here know how to remove the highlighted selection on my avatar ?
i dont use Modular avatar components at all on my avatar so i dont really understand why its there
(I do however use Modular avatar on other avatars in the project tho)
Appreciate any feedback!

[neon rose]

I think switching the inspector to Debug mod and removing the hidden Modular Avatar component, and delete the Generated folder in the nadena.dev.ndmf package would solve the problem but I'm still not sure

[cosmic wave]

I solved it by disabling "Apply on build" on the NDF Framework

[neon rose]

okay

[smoky mirage]

guys does anybody know how to optimize those problems? its my first time using unity and i want to upload the avatar that i bought. i'm using the version that VRchat made me download.

[spare goblet]

double check the unity version. It looks to me wrong

and look in the console for errors, you'll probably need to delete some things from the avatar

[novel dagger]

What are some easy ways i could go about optimizing my avatar im working on? cause ive just had the poly count shoot up to like 500k after some stuff ive added

[gritty terrace]

seperate some of the toggles onto different avatars rather then just one

[cold yarrow]

delete the stuff you added

the easy way is to simply have less stuff.

[forest pebble]

https://github.com/d4rkc0d3r/d4rkAvatarOptimizer at a minimum

[steady spindle]

are these statistics too high or?

just wanna know before i end up messing up with trying to optimise

[steady spindle]

another question: what causes an avatar to have bad performance?

aside from a large ammoount of tri's and verts

nevermind, figured that out myself

[spare goblet]

that's very low

in terms of tris

wow

[obsidian lake]

Too many objects. Merge them together if possible. Best to only have 1 or 2 objects

But otherwise you are actually doing great

5k is half the max for excellent rank on quest

[steady spindle]

i suppose i just merge most if not all the limbs in blender?

[cold yarrow]

there's not much reason to keep them separate

[steady spindle]

fair enough

only things i left un-combined was the mask, chest machine thingie and the tool belt
gonna make these toggles later

perchance even add alternative masks

[tall vigil]

does anyone know what is up with this

vrhat sck says 34 materials, d4rkoptimizer says it will drop it to 16, vrchat says it has 21

all of the things are different than what they say they are

I was hoping i could just quickly optimize it instead of destroying peoples frames but this is quite annoying

[neon rose]

it's an error for using more material then usually allowed
Best way is to remove any unused clothing or toggles first, then run D4rkOptimizer but double check what it combines so nothing breaks. If it still has too many materials, use a material combiner or just make a lighter version of the avatar for worlds.

[tall vigil]

ive only got 2 pairs of clothing and 1 toggle with material. everything else is gogo loco and other non object toggles

and a second hair style i guess

i use them all

[neon rose]

there might be some unused materials have you checked them?

[tall vigil]

theres materials in the assets folder that im not using but i do not think theyre are any on the actual avatar. Like dragged into the heirarchy

[neon rose]

if they aren't assigned they won't count

[night inlet]

the create optimize copy button on my ui looks greyed out. this means you have either vrcfury or modular avatar stuff on there. there should be a warning above the button telling you that the preview is probably wrong because the preview doesn't know about those things yet.

[tall vigil]

is there a way to make it so it can understand those things without adding everything manually (without vrcfury/modular). Or should i just ignore the warning and upload anyways and let it do what it can?

[night inlet]

1. no 2. yes

[tall vigil]

K thx :), also thanks for making cool shit ❤️

[gray citrus]

Very optimized in game dev less then 30k is great and for pc and 7.5k and under is the normal for mobile dev so what you got is a very good model

But the amount of objects needs to be merged 4 for pc and 1 for mobile

Same with your materials !

[gray citrus]

A few things if your asking from vrchat sdk it would be materials slots, audio , tris , particle

Audio loads and saves in memory same as materials and tris from meshes that aren't rendered this eats up process and although we have optimizations like culling its not a catch all and doesn't stop artificates like mp4s from being saved in the scene

There's so many things! But I know a person posted some vids from furality about the issues the vids with Tucker and a furry (forgot his name) were great

[runic latch]

I have genuinely never felt so stupid in my life

[gray citrus]

Ok im doing a little upskilling specifically learning to make toggles:
Is the best optimized approach to use blendshapes that are part of the mesh

Sidenote: is vrcfury optimised what are some considerations i should account for when making toggles?

[obsidian lake]

"Optimized" is relative, but to be technical, bone-based toggles are more optimized than blendshapes since they incur the same skinning calculations, but aren't stored in memory. The difference is negligible though. In most cases, both of these methods are much better than using a separate object, since the extra material slot causes an extra draw call, which is really bad for quest performance.

[ivory sluice]

object toggles are more performant than shape keys since the hidden object is not processed if it's turned off
it's recommended to keep the shape key count low because for every active one unity will do a mesh skinning call (which still makes me wonder why do people still do face tracking with a trillion shape keys when they could just rig the face bones)

[obsidian lake]

Also vrcfury, while it can optimize things for you, isn't really a specific method of the end result existing, but more a method of creating. Basically, it does something for you that you could've done just the same by yourself

I personally recommend that you learn how to do things manually first

[gray citrus]

Right!! I figured as much so vrcfury is just a UX friendly experience for making toggles and of course the meshes il be creating would be less then 100 tris so yeah nothing to intensive haha

[obsidian lake]

And this is exactly why I say it's relative. You have the exact opposite answer as me for equally valid reasons

It really depends what you're trying to do

[gray citrus]

Just something small like a toggle for a low poly top hat being displayed

so i was thinking of having it be zero and then scaled to 100% when the toggle is enabled via a blendshape

[obsidian lake]

Well it's not really the poly count that matters to extra meshes (although it does matter to blendshape toggle, since the less verts moved, the lower amount of memory and the less verts need an extra skinning call)

[gray citrus]

just because ive never made a toggle before so i like the idea of trying something basic, but i always want to keep the mobile limitations in mind since thats what i use as my reference at all times

[obsidian lake]

I always aim for keeping the draw call count as low as possible

Basically total material slots (across all meshes) will be your draw call count

[gray citrus]

I never use more then 1 material slot so that wont be a problem 😉

and my materials are usually only .5mb

but is there a performance difference from if i were to use vrcfury vs using the standard unity sdk?

[obsidian lake]

Vrcfury does not modify the SDK and is not a modified version of the SDK, those are against the ToS though

Vrcfury is just a tool that automates processes you could do manually, as well as giving you the tools for a non-destructive workflow

Again, for your personal benefit I would learn how to do things manually first, since relying on an automatic tool will result in not understanding what's going on under the hood

It will make it harder to create complex setups and to understand what may be going wrong if something breaks

[gray citrus]

Mhmm cant fault that logic especially if its building of a 1.0 workflow

[runic latch]

my wifi went out but fuck it we ball, i need help optimizing her in blender

[sweet ruin]

It looks pretty good already. Only thing you probably need to work on is merge some meshes and optimize the topology.

You can probably select and delete some loops and or decimate some areas

[runic latch]

can you show me how to do that? this is my first time using blender. It says the avatar is very poor in vr chat so i wanted to fix that

[sweet ruin]

Oh boi,
The first thing in blender i did, is figure out the flying camera keybind.
You can use it to position your view anywhere, and it just makes it easier to fly around your model and edit it, than to scroll and rotate.

Anyways, you can shift and control select stuff. You have selection tools in edit mode and CTRL + L selects everything that is attached to it.
CTRL + X and limited dissolve it is called i think can decimate it a bit.
I strongly suggest starting small though. Get used to what shortcuts and things exist in blender and then what you need to set up for a vrchat avi in blender.

I am in no way a blender expert myself. I recommend you start out with something like the donut tutorial, after that one you should know the basics

[runic latch]

should i prioritize the material slots, skinned meshes or triangles. what would be the biggest problem you imagine?

[sweet ruin]

If you have lots of clothing, then the material slots. You'd have to create blendshapes to toggle them, otherwise they will all be seperate meshes in unity, which will all be counted towards your performance ofc

[cold yarrow]

texture size, material slots, triangles. skinned meshes is trivial and doesn't get you much unless you have like, 20

(there are lots of opinions here 🙂 )

[runic latch]

yeah im gonna try to see if the material slots are the culprit

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

would this help maybe?

[cold yarrow]

in some cases, it can. it's a bit limited though

[runic latch]

ill give it a shot

[runic latch]

not this again

shes pink again

[cold yarrow]

broken material / missing shader, etc.

[runic latch]

in theory could i just pay someone to do this instead

[cold yarrow]

of course

[sweet ruin]

@runic latch Since you cobined the materials, you will need to create a new material which needs a shader, which needs your atlas texture

[jaunty rapids]

Hi everyone, this isnt my Avi, just a public one, but these stats arent great are they? for PC only im referring to

[radiant shadow]

trash tier made in unity or extremely lazy kitbash

very poors should never been allowed to be set as a public model (saying that again) , still nowhere near the terrible ones (vram is the scary part for me)

fine when you start out stats will be awkward , mine wasnt very good either but we have more tools to optimize now and so so many tutorials

[cold yarrow]

the texture memory on that is lower than I'd expect for how bad the other stats are

but no, that is not even remotely good

[warm cloud]

i would not recommend wearing that avatar in public lobbies. unless you want people to block you or hide your avatar 💀

[jaunty rapids]

yeahhh i thought so

haha thank you, what would be acceptable Triangles and MB? like genuine average for PC?

[radiant shadow]

250k + is where id look at people avatar funny , prefer <70k cause its not hard to make a good/medium rank , materials <8 meshes 4 max (dont see a need for more) , physbone <128 , vram 50~ but 100 wont kill me , theres also download size if you keep adding animations audio it bloats , 150+ i wont ever download it

you dont want to make an avatar, you'd need a insane pc 'runs fine for me' dont help others

[cold yarrow]

Same, I also block by download size, I think I have it at 80 compressed and 150 uncompressed.

I think I start looking at you funny over 175k though 🙂

I personally would never use anything past a Medium in any sort of public or semi-public setting (group event, club, etc.) unless the reason it is such is by default disabled.

[jaunty rapids]

80 mb? you talking about?

[cold yarrow]

yes, 80MB

[jaunty rapids]

that i understand for sure 175k tris is high

okay

[cold yarrow]

I was speaking of the download size limiter in-game.

[jaunty rapids]

so for the picture i posted, the MB is 45 or so but the tris is way too high

[cold yarrow]

highly suggest using it.

[jaunty rapids]

yes for sure i get you

[runic latch]

I might just give someone nitro to do ts for me 😭

[runic latch]

👀

[grand palm]

what's the best tool in blender for decimating while preserving shape keys. cost is not of concern

[cold yarrow]

the one that's in the "mesh" menu, but honestly I'd start with edge loop dissolving instead of decimation

[twilit kraken]

Decimation can produce some hilarious results, but seconds Kazin on honestly do edge loop dissolving and maybe some removal of other parts you dont need like bodyparts under clothes if the clothes never get toggled off etc.

[radiant shadow]

lazy me 'eh' close enough pretty old now, on quest avs i tend to chop off feet / arms or make them go bald (put on a hoodie/hat something)

[spring sun]

good god all of those tris

[buoyant holly]

and that's a problem how it's not exactly like we're going to be subdividing the model?

[spring sun]

I was talking about the first image of the quads being turned into tris

[buoyant holly]

okay I'm still failing to see where the problem is

as that kind of using a triangle to do a 1 to 2 increase of density like that's decently comment on game models

[silver spruce]

I was going to have an optimized avatar, but I want a lot Phybones so I guess to the Very poor Rank I go

[cobalt fern]

Is 66 thousand triangles optimiszed

[lusty pagoda]

try 84k... 😭

[cobalt fern]

Well last avatar I made had about 114k triangles

Now the one I’m making has about 66k

[cobalt fern]

R chat said it’s performance is very poor

[cold yarrow]

66k is under the 70k limit so you could be Medium...

[trail pilot]

"optimization" is a very nebulous idea

[worthy mural]

And the max Tri count for Medium is the exact same for Good, which is weird. Why is there no Medium range for Tris?

[cold yarrow]

and have poor bumped up higher to 100k, for example? There have been many discussions of this in #feature-requests

[worthy mural]

Its just weird that 70001 Tris puts an avi at Very Poor

[cold yarrow]

but as it is, there are other thresholds to look at

[sweet ruin]

Yea, you can have a very poor avi with 70,000 poly's which has better performance than a medium avatar, which has all colliders, particles and etc maxed out to stay on medium

Something that was suggested before on the feedback page

An overall score based on weight would be neat. If weight is higher than x, set this performance rank.

[trail pilot]

it's a very rough estimate of performance impact, and I'm not sure you could come up with meaningful weights

[cosmic wave]

is there any reason the SDK dont count polygons from outlines ?

[trail pilot]

It only cares about polygons in the meshes that your renderers are using.

Using a multi-pass shader to draw the same mesh several times doesn't count.

[spring sun]

doesnt track if a shader decides it wants to render the mesh multiple times

[cosmic wave]

i know it dont track it im just wondering why

[trail pilot]

You can't reliably decide if that happens or not

animations can switch which shader is being used by a renderer

if you assume the worst case scenario (the worst shader on every renderer), you'll dramatically over-count the triangle count

[cosmic wave]

but cant we already switch a skinned mesh off effectively not render those polygons

[trail pilot]

This is not factored into the calculation either.

[cosmic wave]

i know

vrchat calculate the polygons from mesh "worst case" but completly ignores every polygon added shaderwise

a polygon is a polygon

mabey they have a reason i just cant figure it out

[trail pilot]

because they can't reasonably decide what shaders will be used by your avatar at runtime, yes

they could measure many different things, but they've chosen to do something pretty simple: the sum of the number of triangles in every submesh that your avatar could render

[cosmic wave]

assume the worst case accurate numbers because that's what it has the potential to do

[unreal eagle]

The system also just uses static analysis of the avatar's assets, there's no way to really know how many triangles are going to be added by a shader without actually running it under all of the different possible property combinations, which would be really time- and resource-intensive

[trail pilot]

you'd need to compile and inspect every single shader variant (:

although, can subshaders/passes be excluded in any way?

other than by being disabled by the material itself

geometry shaders would take you straight into the Halting Problem, of course

[cosmic wave]

yeah that makes sense

[novel cradle]

Isn't baked lighting supposed to be less heavy? Because now my avatar is considered Poor just because of one single light.

[cold yarrow]

baked lighting is not a thing on avatars, that'll be realtime.

[novel cradle]

Oh

[cold yarrow]

(and thus, expensive for you and everyone who it affects)

[novel cradle]

So if I leave it as is, the spotlight simply won't work?

[cold yarrow]

as long as this isn't android/iOS, it can work

[novel cradle]

The SDK auto-removes it when I make the Quest version, so I guess thats what you mean?

[cold yarrow]

yes, quest can't have lights at all

[novel cradle]

Fair

I kinda wish there was an alternative to the Spotlight that wouldn't make the avatar considered Poor, but I guess that requires a LOT of tweaking and stuff.

[cold yarrow]

Yeah there's really not a way to do that otherwise

you can kinda fake it with a cone and transparency but it wouldn't actually cast light onto other surfaces

[novel cradle]

I heard about that, but I have no clue how to do that, so...

I guess Poor-rated avatar it is -w-"

[zinc sparrow]

Hello, good evening, I need some insight into a problem I'm having...
My model is optimized... a mesh/material/below 70,000 poly.
The goal is good rank .
Here are the stats in Unity... Except that once it gets to VRC, it becomes VERY POOR?!
The uncompressed texture EXPLODES... Why!?

Btw i already try some modification etc etc ...

[radiant shadow]

use something like Avatar Performance Tools and see all the texture ram active/not active (mapswaps ect) if you use vrcfury/ect sdk also dont tell you right number

[dense karma]

Its the new vrchat update for models things like matswaps are included in the texture memory now

[zinc sparrow]

Thanks you Very Much for your answer

[edgy quest]

How do I optimize my avatar

[cold yarrow]

Start by looking at the pinned messages.

[edgy quest]

Thx

[restive yarrow]

I made sure my model was below 70k (nomad says 46.7k) but after rigging him in blender and importing his texture into unity hes being labeled as low quality. :|

Is there anything else that would be dragging him down?

[cold yarrow]

it will show you clearly in the build window

[restive yarrow]

Ill check again tomorrow since its too late to go back now

[vestal igloo]

Howdy, I just finished forcing a new avatar I bought to fit onto quest with the quest optimizer tool, but it’s still super unoptimized. (Pc version also could be way more optimized). I’m looking to learn how to get into decimation and like material combining and stuff

Are there any good guides or tools that people recommend for someone completely new?

I can back port the model into blender which is currently the plan, I just have no idea where to start with that

I just know that the amount of tris the avatar has right now is a lot and probably more than I need to look fine

Ideally I make it poor on quest instead of very poor but that is probably a pipe dream

I’ve looked very briefly into polytool but not sure if it’s worth it compared to learning blender

TLDR, I’d like to learn to optimize and just wondering where to start and what good tools/tutorials there are or any general tips

[gusty cosmos]

For material combination I would recommend this blender add on, it helped me get my avatar down from 10 materials to 3 on the base body, body, fluff, misc.
https://github.com/Grim-es/material-combiner-addon

Here's the video that I watched to help me get into it
https://youtu.be/8ZnSO3BnoIM?si=GaGFr9NI7fJWyg4d

This video gives a bunch of good all around tips for optimization that isn't to complex
https://youtu.be/v7UVyMMP1ww?si=NRMgw7LsTLaftru-

[warm patio]

could someone teach me how to decimate an avatar correctly??

im having troubles due to blendshapes

[buoyant holly]

dissolving Edge Loops tends to be a less messy method to do it

[zealous wigeon]

First, don't use the decimate modifier, instead use decimate in edit mode, but, the good way of lowering your poly count is to instead alt+click, press delete and dissolve edge loops, as Rainwolf says.

[warm patio]

yeah i alcready solved it with CATS ty anyway

[silk tinsel]

Hi, I´m trying to learn how to upload my own avatar but now that I´m trying to add more clothes to it I´m having problems with the toggles and stuff (arms gettin like spaguetti), is there anyone who can guide a little bit in this regard? Have a good day or night everyone 😄

[floral bough]

this is probably a very stupid question but can you compress an avatar kinda like how you can compress a computer file

[radiant shadow]

upload already do that, if you check build size it tells you %

[sweet ruin]

You an turn on some crunch compression to reduce the download size a bit more and drop textures as example. So no need for your eyes to be 8k or 4k. For my avatar 512 or 1k is enough.

[white lintel]

Hello, i'm trying to optimize this Noelle avatar, yet when trying to use the vr chat mobile toon lit shader, I get pitch dark eyes, there is no eye alpha geometry on the eyes that is blocking it, and when I try changing the normals it still has the same issue, this also effects the iris and pupils and the eye gloss geometry

[radiant shadow]

remove vertex colors / color attributes (blender likes to rename things)

[white lintel]

Ahh, okay that seemed to fix it tysm

[thin crown]

would anyone be willing to hop in vc with me and give me a hand with blender?

[kind tapir]

so.... did they just not think to update the SDK with the performance calculation changes?

in Unity vs on site

[kind tapir]

seriously it's stupid that I have to go in-game to check if the texture memory is still too high

[radiant shadow]

sdk overall performance not reliable if you using vrcfury/whatever other scripts to add before build/matswaps

[trail pilot]

Thry's VRAM checker can help here

It can recognize that materials are being swapped by animations and include their textures

[kind tapir]

that's the thing though. this avatar isn't using those. the only issue with the avatar was the texture memory

I had to basically cut the resolution of every texture in half to get the avatar below the 70mb limit for Good

[trail pilot]

that means that you had several 4K textures or a lot of 2K textures

[icy crypt]

hey, im optimizing a model i bought, when it comes to optimizing skinned mesh renderers, what would be the best way to do this?

my avatar has 3 different tops and the idea i have is to merge them into one model and just use shapekeys to shrink all but the desired one down in game. as far as i can tell this would help with how vrc determines performance, but would this actually be any better for performance as opposed to just toggling multiple meshes in unity?

i dont really know the technical side of things, but with the blendshape method i assume that technically its all still being rendered, even if all but the desire top is scaled to zero. i assume something so small its basically non existent would have no performance impact?

[cold yarrow]

simply join them together in Blender.

Though ideally you'd want to combine materials too, you don't gain much otherwise

[icy crypt]

i have joined them together in blender but its different tops

i dont want them all visible at the same time theyd just clip with eachother

[cold yarrow]

I guess I misunderstood what you meant by "optimizing"

[icy crypt]

reducing skinned mesh renderers in unity

[cold yarrow]

I tend to join my entire set of clothes into one mesh object and use UV tile discard to hide parts, if any.

[icy crypt]

one of the metrics of optimization that vrc judges avatar quality on

[cold yarrow]

So yeah, if it's just reducing mesh renderers, what I said.

[icy crypt]

not familiar with uv tile discard i will look into this

[cold yarrow]

a good primer on it: https://www.poiyomi.com/special-fx/uv-tile-discard

(this won't work with Quest shaders)

[icy crypt]

i personally could not care less about quest lmao

the sacrifices to make stuff work is not worth

[cold yarrow]

I understand that 🙂

[icy crypt]

blendshape method seemed like a good idea, but crumbles apart when the armature moves and all the verticies move wildly creating large triangles. tried to look at uv tile discard but blender didnt have the udim grid option in the uv editor, dont know if im missing an addon or smth but ill try more tmrw, ty for pointers

[indigo linden]

Blender does have that, u can make a grid of any size including 4x4. I use it for uv discard. Its somewhere on the top of the uv editor

[radiant shadow]

blender 4.5 , older have it in n / view i think

[icy crypt]

im on the latest blender ver ill check there thank u

[icy crypt]

there it is ty! will update if i have any issues

[cold yarrow]

I set this up so long ago I totally forgot how to do it

[bold wharf]

You don't even need the grid. It's purely for visuals.

[cold yarrow]

yep

[icy crypt]

was able to setup the blender stuff, but my models poiyomi shaders are v7 and there doesnt seem to be an easy way to upgrade it.. guess ill be doing that for a while lol

might be a good opportunity to merge some materials

[cold yarrow]

https://www.poiyomi.com/general/upgrade/v7-upgrade

[gray yew]

Is it better to have one/few 4k materials/textures or more of smaller (1k, 2k) ones?

[cold yarrow]

it's better to have no 4k materials

but this is a fun balance, more materials = more draw calls, larger textures = uses vram

[warm cloud]

pick your poison lol

😅

[cold yarrow]

pretty much

[cosmic wave]

For blendtree should I use WD on or wd off ?

[cold yarrow]

on

generally.

https://vrc.school/docs/Other/DBT-Combining/#af9b08d723fb47698407a8c0dde577dc

If you aren't doing a direct blend tree probably still.

[cosmic wave]

So is that still better than having the normal setup with WD off compared to blendtress with WD on ?

Performance wise

[heavy knot]

WD off/on isn't really a performance thing, you'd be more focused on animator layers instead

you should be using WD on anyway as you're doing way less work for the same results

[spring sun]

yesn't

[heady smelt]

For some reason a material I combined with some others turned white, this happens with lots of other materials too. Someone please help.

[cold yarrow]

what method of combining are you using?

[indigo linden]

Make sure scale is applied
Make sure uv maps are named the same for each model
That’s my problem usually

[cold yarrow]

yeah that was what I was thinking too

[crystal cargo]

A few scatter questions I had. And Not sure if these should be split in more specific channels but figure it all focuses on optimization so;

~~1. Let's say an outfit I want to use has a UV texture with 5 items, But I only really want to use One of those and it takes up 1/4th the texture. How can I cut that texture down and "refit" it to match that singular mesh object? The purpose is avoiding just compressing textures and losing quality. ~~
~~2. As a normie is there a good way to measure performance of my models in unity without uploading? My current method is to use 1's optimized box and uncap my framerate and measure the difference between an invisible avatar and the model I made. ~~
3. Is the performance of avatars difference between a Live Server-side version and a Local built test?
~~4. Thry's VRAM and avatar performance plugins are fine for VRAM but Is there a way to see the total build size of my model? Thry's doesn't seem to take into account animations, or menu icons. ~~
5. Any general sins to avoid like cloth physics? I've at least been told cloth stuff has been notoriously horrible in the past.
6. I know generally most people are likely to use Poiyomi and all but for shaders is there a comparison chart for performance, features, functions etc; ?
7. When making toggles for clothes and functions is it better to combine them into radials if possible or have nested folders of individual toggles?
~~8. Tying in with 7, Does parameter count do anything for performance of a model? Between facetracking and syncing a lot of toggles I've gone as high as 400~ parameters before needing to use the parameter compressor from vrcfury. ~~

I know that's a LOT of questions I apologize. Thank you for any assistance / help with any of this. 💟

[cold yarrow]

7. probably irrelevant
8. it's not about parameter count, it's about how many bytes get synced - you get a max of 256. Have as many un-synced as you like

2. probably irrelevant in most cases if you aren't Very Poor. If you are, try to not be. Decent idea otherwise though, if you can pull it off accurately

[crystal cargo]

I know the limit synced is 256, But beyond that does it have any performance impact?