avatar-optimization

[heady smelt]

wait what stencil portals?

[ancient crystal]

u add a stencil and it culls out objects according to the portal shader

[empty pier]

@ancient crystal Those people would just use Cubed's, Xiexe's, etc. and it would be up to the authors of those shaders to add support.

[heady smelt]

a stencil mask?

[ancient crystal]

or the person who adds a instruction or 2 to the shader

[halcyon vessel]

it would help out performance issue for hair lol

less people use bone more use shader

[ancient crystal]

yea but like

woulnt it only be for cloth-like objects then

[halcyon vessel]

plus people can disable shader

[ancient crystal]

and also i don't see what performance increase this could have over current cloth

yea u can also disable cloth if vrchat had a toggle for it

[halcyon vessel]

no one can disable bone

[ancient crystal]

along with lights possibly

u can disable dynamic bones and cloth by disabling them

with the property

[cursive matrix]

They could add the vertex bone stuff to their fallback shaders when they get blocked

and the functionality would still be there

[ancient crystal]

but vrchat not have toggles

vrchat could have like safety levels instead

[heady smelt]

oh btw: unity 2017 cloth has self collision and intercollision

supposedly

[ancient crystal]

like level 1 blocks lights level 2 blocks particles and lights level 3 blocks animations particles and lights

so on

ya intercollision sucks

its not inclusive like capsule colliders and stuff

[heady smelt]

lol, there must be nice settings 😉

[ancient crystal]

so if u have 2 cloths together they go crazy

[heady smelt]

I still wanna play with it

[ancient crystal]

i said it sucks cuz its not inclusive

but it also means that

2 people with cloth can collide with it

so if u got a sleeve and they got a skirt

both should interact

stuff like that

[heady smelt]

see, that sounds like interesting stuff already 🤔

[ancient crystal]

yea but its still kinda annoying

could at least be exclusive

in case i want cloth objects near eachother

without explosions

unity also still hasnt fixed bounding boxes

[heady smelt]

sure, I see what you mean, but I wasn't really thinking of clothes or capes etc on avatars, just to play around with in other effects

[ancient crystal]

for AABB

so if u create objects that are separate from the main mesh

[halcyon vessel]

problem clothe need seperate mesh

[ancient crystal]

like a hat

then the bounding box stays where the hat is in T-Pose

[empty pier]

@ancient crystal Replacing Dynamic Bone with a GPU based option would reduce the CPU load, and would have much better parallelism.

[ancient crystal]

u have to manually put the bone its supposed to follow

[heady smelt]

yes, I know it has to be a discrete mesh

[ancient crystal]

and its so annoying

how would u even replace it do u even have bone access

in a gpu based script

[heady smelt]

you can read all the rotations

with a lot of work

[ancient crystal]

yea but can it assign

[halcyon vessel]

wonder unity could program cloth like only effect material base mesh

on single mesh

[ancient crystal]

but like

cloth does AABB right

the AABB bounding box moves with the mesh

[empty pier]

You don't deal with "bones" on the GPU.

[ancient crystal]

but without cloth it stays where it is currently but relative to hip

[heady smelt]

if you do 'dynamic bones' on the gpu, no ordinary collisions

[empty pier]

You copy the data you need to the GPU and then run the compute shader to calculate the results.

[heady smelt]

unless you have access to compute shaders sure

[empty pier]

Really it isn't going to work well without them.

[heady smelt]

you can have a simple spring based thing going on the gpu, that's about it

without cs

in a lot of cases just smoothing motion will seem like physics too btw

merlin has that motion vector setup for the whole avatar's IK but doing real physics involving different chains of bones ... ugh

[cursive matrix]

👉 graphics.blit

please and thank you

[heady smelt]

yeah that would help

also virtual pets that have simple AI

[empty pier]

You'd have to do something like have a skinned mesh with a single vertex at each bone, some ID value in a vertex data field, and then output pixels with their position and rotation. Do a grab pass, use that combined with a camera loop render texture or custom render textures for state, calculate new bone positions (there's some issues to figure out with heirarchy and calculation order), then in your vertex shader do skinning based on bone IDs and weights stored in the extra UV channels.

[heady smelt]

yeah people have done the first half pretty much

[polar bolt]

Ugh, using UV or texture to store vertex weights 🤢

[empty pier]

The hierarchical structure adds some issues that GPU particles don't have.

[heady smelt]

or cloth

ye 😐

[empty pier]

Yeah

Cloth might be simpler because you only have to care about neighbors.

Allows you to get data from neighbors and then update each frame.

[heady smelt]

if physx is running in unity it'd be fun to have access to the buffers

or constraints directly

[empty pier]

I want to be able to run custom skinning shaders.

[ancient crystal]

cloth not that simple no

bc if you for example move the center

the whole thing has to be pulled up

if u only cared about neighbors

it would matter where u started calculating

that or u would go back

[empty pier]

There's root movement but that could be added separately.

[ancient crystal]

or u would use processes that solve for all the locations

thats not a root

like if u tug on any part of cloth

the rest of it has to follow

or it collides with something

etc

[empty pier]

You don't necessarily only do one iteration per frame.

[ancient crystal]

u can also use physics solvers

like systems of equation systems like PGS

where it solves for all locations by calculation given the equation for the collider

[distant forge]

@ancient crystal https://github.com/lyuma/LyumaShader/tree/skinning - this is my proof of concept code from november- needs a lot of work still. After the initial GrabPass, I want to actually run the skinning in a custom render texture instead of doing it per tri in the geometry shader

Also custom render textures (or graphics.blit) could allow some physics simulation

The huge drawbackis the need for a camera or grabpass

[heady smelt]

friends only camera, and some restrictions and overhead of cameras make them a pita

[ancient crystal]

cant you also like put all verts in a buffer and draw them out

as you edit them

or after every full pass

[cursive matrix]

why is T so hard to find in the emoji search

lol

[ancient crystal]

?

just type

_T

[cursive matrix]

it's still the last result

[ancient crystal]

l_t?

i forget what the full name for it is

is it like

regional_character_X

[heady smelt]

Has anyone figured out why audio sources on avatars aren't working with the new SDK?

[sudden jewel]

regional_indicator_X

@heady smelt Audio sources on avatars were not affected and still work the same they did in the previous SDK.

[heady smelt]

@sudden jewel ok, well here's what Im dealing with: I migrated an old project with multiple avatars into 2017.15f1, following the steps in the changelog docs. I also put seats on some of these, following the steps in the docs (I used cubes with disabled mesh renderers in place of empty game opjects, though). The chairs work in game but the audio is nonexistent. The audio clearly plays in the uploading process. I have the audio set to loop and play on awake, each audio file is Vorbis .ogg, and set to streaming with optimize bitrate in the import settings. 3 of these were updated avatars while 1 was a new upload. None of my previously uploaded avatars with music were affected. Only those uploaded or updated with the new sdk.
Might be worth noting these are all non-humanoid/generic rigged avatars.

[ancient crystal]

tupper do u like pupper

[heady smelt]

my settings

[ancient crystal]

also will having 40k poly avatars get me banned

bc i had those well before the increase

or no

[lethal shuttle]

I have an issue with one of my models, for some reason, i have a texture that sticks to a certain point it definitely is not supposed to. After testing for a while, i found out that it stays at the center of the world. I dont know why this happens, any ideas?

[mossy solar]

wulfe I wouldn't worry about it

[ancient crystal]

not a texture

a vertex

[mossy solar]

we had 100k+ poly avatars running around before the update

[ancient crystal]

yea ik

[mossy solar]

back when you would go over 65k it would split the mesh

[ancient crystal]

but it warns about like sdk mod and stuff

[mossy solar]

as long as you aren't malicious

[ancient crystal]

yea im not

i just used it cuz the limits were annoying

and even tho i would sometimes pass them nobody had any problems with them

so i assumed it was ok

freaking 500k poly avatars

in vrchat lol

[mossy solar]

there's more things to worry about than people running around with 40k poly avatars

my OC avatars range between 20-25k

[visual dock]

Mine ranged from 4k to 48K at best.
with good optimization, then you'd see those models that are like, 80k-900k 40-200 materials.... not including performance heavy shaders many of them used.

and whatever else was on them

[mossy solar]

dynamic bone abuse is a problem but we got crapton of avatars just like that

[visual dock]

yeah, when people used to show me screen caps where their entire arms were colliders... I couldn't even understand why.
If a female avatar i doubt you're arms would go near the bust all the time to move then or if using them with long hair to collide. Theres no real reason for 6-12 colliders.

[ancient crystal]

ye but its like "do not mod sdk"

"or bean bean"

in "any way"

so i was confused

[visual dock]

you used to be cable to bypass that even without editing the sdk. I forget how though.
But yeah you weren't and shouldn't.

With the 70k limit there is no reason to do so.

[heady smelt]

aaaand I found the problem: I changed the audio import setting back to decompress on load, reuploaded and now it works

[ancient crystal]

before the update

[shut sequoia]

https://puu.sh/BTMHP/04356ffa9d.png this used to be my friend

[visual dock]

Yeah, i know, Wulfe.
Tbh i think the team was more worried about malicious modding vs a model being 25k tris

@shut sequoia I'm scared.

[heady smelt]

^

[shut sequoia]

I yelled at him (lovingly) and he fixed it

[visual dock]

I'm going to go have nightmares now.

[shut sequoia]

in his defense he didn't know, and that was my whole issue with the lack of "How To/Why you should" guides from VRChat until so late into post-boom, no one knew. But I don't wanna get into that since at least they're trying now

[visual dock]

yeah, at least they're learning and thats what matters.

for the longest time i avoided using dynamics back in 2017 and early 2018 until i understood them and how to limit my performance impact.

Seeing via stats i'm slightly into the poor category shows i needs some work still

[obtuse onyx]

so is there a way to count bones in blender without doing it by hand?

[shut sequoia]

https://github.com/rurre/PumkinsAvatarTools/releases/

You can use this. Has lots of good info. Be sure to actually read the documentation though

its useful and pretty necessary imo

and this is coming from someone who usually doesnt bother and jsut fucks up until he gets it right lol

[ancient crystal]

whats it for

[shut sequoia]

https://github.com/rurre/PumkinsAvatarTools/wiki

[visual dock]

its a good tool.

[ancient crystal]

ah ok

it just removes a bit of grunt work

good 2 know

[pine thicket]

you all better have excellent avatars

[patent leaf]

[fluid turret]

[shut sequoia]

I got 2 excellent, and like 8 good

[pine thicket]

good is not excellent 😡

[shut sequoia]

Optimize or be Vaporized

[sudden jewel]

im and that's good enough

[candid sedge]

[visual dock]

If i remove my dynamic bones from my models it goes to excellent/good.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[shut sequoia]

optimize my models for me tupper

[sudden jewel]

no im on "vacation"

[surreal topaz]

Just remove dynamic bone from your models, ez clap

[vocal river]

how do I make one material for my whole avatar? instead of having 8 xd

[still perch]

you create a texture atlas

[surreal topaz]

Texture atlasing, whether manual or automatic

[shut sequoia]

Oh, so once you're off "vacation" I can send those 20 .blends your way? :3

[sudden jewel]

@vocal river https://github.com/michaeldegroot/cats-blender-plugin auto atlasing tool

[still perch]

and asign everything to the same material.

yeah, cats has a tool for that build in

does all automatically

[surreal topaz]

Also when you say "vacation" in quotation marks, does that mean you're still fulfilling some odd tasks like running the optimization bot on public world requests?

[vocal river]

any good tutorials to optimize dynamic bones? can only find hour long videos

[shut sequoia]

;-; they're probably making him do all the stuff he normally has to do

#freetupper2018

[surreal topaz]

@vocal river collapse rows of skirt bones by selecting them and doing merge weights into parent

[vocal river]

what about hair

[surreal topaz]

Collapse columns by, for each row:

• Select the bones you want to collapse, select the bone you want to merge into last.
• merge weights into selected

I dunno about hair

I usually just merge every other hair bone and that gets me far enough

[vocal river]

will it make the hair look more bad btw?

[vocal river]

same happens to me ^

probably a bug

[plain orbit]

This seems kind of silly that having a snail marker makes my overall performance very poor, but it got me wondering, how much does the avatar's size actually affect performance?

I never knew the size could affect performance at all

[vocal river]

they should whitelist snail's marker

[fluid turret]

the mutes are oppressed this is so sad

[vocal river]

lmao

[shut sequoia]

@plain orbit From what I've learned, your bounds are what causes the game to cull you when offscreen

but if they're thicc, you'll render when you shouldn't be

and snail markers eff your bounds up because of reasons i dont remember, but they do lol

[plain orbit]

@shut sequoia I see, thank you

Yeah, the marker is always on, it's just floating way off in the distance when you aren't using it

[vocal river]

snail's marker thingy is z-100000 that's why I think

[sudden jewel]

Mic is correct

If your bounding box is huge, then you don't get culled

[shut sequoia]

Maybe there's some kind of workaround, but I've never once used a marker or even knew anything about them til today

[sudden jewel]

it sucks, but Snail's marker breaks your box

also yes, I am on "vacation" but I am still doing most of my daily work

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[shut sequoia]

bUt YoUrE jUsT cOmMuNiTy MaNaGeR

[vocal river]

would it work to hide the marker but activate it on ex. victory, then draw with fingerpoint?

[sudden jewel]

sure, play with it a bit

[surreal topaz]

Your mesh still gets culled though

Is this about the entire player object?

[shut sequoia]

if it needs to be always on, maybe you could just stick it in your head or something but have the settings while not doing your gesture not cause it to actually trail? not sure if that's even a thing tbh

[surreal topaz]

Because I noticed that lacking any sort of mesh or object makes your player position update less often

[sudden jewel]

your mesh does not get culled, the bounding box is for your whole avatar

its why even when someone is behind you playing huge effects like particles, you can still see them

[surreal topaz]

Makes sense

[shut sequoia]

Is there not a bounds limit? >_>

[surreal topaz]

Although skinned mesh renderers will generally no longer render if the mesh's own bounding box is not in view

There is a bounds limit but snail uses animators to get around it

[sudden jewel]

there's no bounds limit because we like letting people do fun things like flinging nukes off in the distance

there is one on the avatar at "default" state

which is what the SDK enforces

a lot of the things that mark you as very poor are still cool and fun and interesting

it doesn't mean that its BAD, it just means it makes perf worse

so be careful

[shut sequoia]

VRChat endorses nuclear warfare, good to know.

[sudden jewel]

as long as its virtual, its fine

[surreal topaz]

10k dynamic bone transforms is very cool

Lol

(joking)

[shut sequoia]

It can be tbh. my hair is hella cute but it's also 200 transforms and only like...26 bones

this message brought to you by 1 script per bone squad

[surreal topaz]

Oof

Ironically my scuffed meme avatars all ended up being a lot more optimized than my "real" ones

[vocal river]

which button do I click on the atlas thingy

[sudden jewel]

A few of them, in a specific order.

[vocal river]

this is like disarming a bomb for me xd

[shut sequoia]

I had no clue that happened until the Pumkin tool, and even after that. I didn't understand why my 26 bones were transforming like waaay more since I was always told transforms=bones affected

[sudden jewel]

There's lots of tutorials out there. I encourage that you find them and check them out 😃

[surreal topaz]

Cats exposes only the buttons you need

Just click generate material list and then create atlas or something

[shut sequoia]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPTQlILd2og

[surreal topaz]

My manual atlas tutorial came out first :^)

[vocal river]

ty

[shut sequoia]

Manual atlasing is a (still superior) thing of the past, old man!

[vocal river]

what's the difference between manual and automagic atlasing?

[sudden jewel]

manual you arrange the islands yourself, which can result in smaller resolutions for final atlases

[shut sequoia]

Also if you do end up looking at the bone portion of this video and not just skip to atlasing, the buttons have changed. One merges to a parent and one merges to whatever bone you have active (active being the most recent one to shift+click)

[sudden jewel]

automagic does as best as it can without packing islands

[surreal topaz]

Atlases automatically
Resulting texture is 5120x5120, is upscaled to 8k by Unity
Has tons of dead space, margins too small
Entire body texture is included three times

[sudden jewel]

it just packs textures, then moves UVs

yeah shotariya's does that sometimes

you have to futz with the textures on your model

[surreal topaz]

I stick to manual because it only takes me 15 minutes and I never have to go above 4k

A lot of my simpler models are 1k or 2k

I got lazy and did it automatically on an older model but there's ugly seams on the face and the tongue from far away

[karmic condor]

New shotariya’s does soon good compression. Makes it difficult to do edits of the atlas though

[marsh trail]

I guess it works best on fairly simpler models, if there was an option that actualy integrated different UV maps based on the total texture atlas size, (if reach certain size, divide into next atlas) i think that'd be neato

Probably a pain to code tho

[versed nest]

i just use the combiner to have everything lined up, after that i'll manually pack them in tighter

[shut sequoia]

Yeah, I try and do all my edits pre-atlas. My workflow is usually Import the model, texture edit (stencil, color adjusting, etc), yeet some materials I don't plan on even using, yeet geometry i dont plan on using (usually inside of the head stuff), make some edits to visemes if I need to, then just plan my atlasing based on what shader I want to use and where I want it

Atlasing is usually the last thing I do though

[surreal topaz]

Same, atlasing is best done last

I usually keep a copy of the model from right before I delete the old materials

Then I can go back and fix weight paints etc

[shut sequoia]

oh right, the "i better not mess this up" saves

[surreal topaz]

Weight painting gloves is a huge pain

[marsh trail]

What i tend to do for fairly simple textured models (after figuring out how UV maps work) is i generate an atlas with shotaryia's tool, then ctrl+z to get the old mats back, then i manually align them with the proper textures, avoiding odd seams

[surreal topaz]

You're the second person to mention that. I feel like we need a tool or button to do specifically that automatically.

Just line up the UV's on a new map

While preserving the original "real" size of the UV's

[marsh trail]

I could just make my own atlas with paintdotnet but my inner lazyness kicks in

Does unity's texture resolutions kinda align with that of a VTF perhaps?
256/512/1024/2048 etc

[surreal topaz]

Textures in general are powers of two

Unity doesn't like it if they are not

But that goes for practically any game engine. It's all powers of two.

[marsh trail]

So basicaly 1 / 2 / 4 / 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 / 128 / 256 / 512 / 1024 / 2048 / 4098 ...

[surreal topaz]

Yes

Unity supports non-POT but then the texture is either huge or doesn't have mipmapping

[marsh trail]

Aighty

I actually prefer to ignore mipmaps, when it comes to transparent textures specifically, as they can actually cause grainy textures

[vague hearth]

there's an option for power of 2 in combine panel
@surreal topaz what do you mean with "Just line up the UV's on a new map"? 🤔 split uv by different uv maps to the same place to avoid out of bounds?
also after i'll made mesh splitting faster theres will be also an option to cut model faces to avoid out of uv

[elfin thunder]

it would be cool if avatar file size was included in the rank system

[sudden jewel]

hi shotariya 😄

[vague hearth]

hello : )

[vocal river]

the sdk doesn't warn me about bounds size but it shows on the avatar details in-game O.o

[heady smelt]

do you have a marker on it?

/pen

[vocal river]

yes, it's just that they should add that we can see it on the sdk aswell

[heady smelt]

yes, it causes any avatar to go to very poor just by activating it

-__- rip mutes

[timber blaze]

mutes btfo

[vocal river]

rip drawing mustaches

[heady smelt]

I'm gonna look for alternatives way to get the trail to work like that but hmm

[vague hearth]

@vocal river i don't think they would add a checker if you are using 3d party marker 🤔 also any other disabled things that enables via animation etc may cause it and that will be hard to somehow predict that something will make your avatar have large bounds

[heady smelt]

well there is workarounds

[vocal river]

what marker is not 3rd party? currently using snail's marker

[heady smelt]

but you'd be cheating the system

yeah almost everyone uses snail's or noe's particle one afaik

[vague hearth]

@vocal river by 3d party i mean not provided by vrchat standard things

[heady smelt]

it isn't, and it's hacky

props to snail though, it works very well

and the install is pretty painless

[distant forge]

I usually use shotariya's once, the undo, open the png file and see which parts are too big (usually it's a 4096x4096 pantys texture) and scale those parts way down and do it again

[vocal river]

disabling the prefab trailposition on default but enabling it on ex. victory-gesture, then draw with ex. fingerpoint could work

[distant forge]

I'll try to resize them such that the final shape is a nice size. Some tools to preview the generated png file and control scaling might be useful. (I'm on a slightly old version so maybe it's better now)

[heady smelt]

they could whitelist snail's but I doubt that's the best idea when trying to get stuff optimised across the board

[vocal river]

I think hidden/disabled things doesn't count on the performance thingy

[heady smelt]

yeah there's workarounds but hmm

talking about that opens a can of worms of people using it for stupid things

[distant forge]

The issue with the snail marker specifically is you don't disable it by default because you want it to show up when you release the hand gesture

[vocal river]

that is true ^

[heady smelt]

yeah it has an animator state

it's easy to adjust the invisibility check in the shader, but it needs a hack for the trail renderer like snail's does

to be able to lift the pen

[vague hearth]

@distant forge there's an option in combiner to change each material width/height, in future i'll also add an information about material image width/height (if you are about this before)

[vocal river]

what could work is enabling the trailposition on every gesture, that could make it not disappear

[amber hemlock]

The SDK is ignoring my dynamic bone count and saying it's Excellent when it's not

is this a known bug? how do i fix it

[vocal river]

lucky^

[amber hemlock]

it isn't excellent in-game

[vocal river]

oh

not lucky*

[amber hemlock]

I just want the SDK to be accurate

[vague hearth]

is components with dynamic bones enabled while you uploading?

[amber hemlock]

yes

they're just being ignored

[vocal river]

re-import sdk? or restart unity?

[amber hemlock]

it's consistent across unity restarts

i'll try reimporting sdk

https://i.imgur.com/O2zXwhq.png

proof i'm not crazy

https://i.imgur.com/hrIptYx.png

[vocal river]

å, I was asking cause I need help xd

[amber hemlock]

oh, idle/relaxed hand is just called Idle, but you don't want to override it on humanoid avatars, it will break everything.

I think...

[primal citrus]

Performance goals

[vocal river]

polygons: 1 xd

[amber hemlock]

Ptch, you usd 3 verts just to make ONE polygon? wasteful

[primal citrus]

Truly shameful

[vocal river]

damn, overriding the default/idle gesture would be perfect to workaround the bound size problem with markers

[amber hemlock]

also getting custom animations in without a 2nd animator (throwing you out of Excellent)

But really, let's be real here

Do whatever you want. Nobody cares about your rank in-game.

No one. Nobody that matters.

[vocal river]

i know that, but it's just the OCD that kicks in when everything is excellent except the marker.. that throws me to very poor lol

[amber hemlock]

Just make a version without it for when you aren't using the marker 😮

but yeah i get it

I'm excellent except i want my tail wag

Trying everything in the book to get a custom animation avatar in as excellent

it would be possible if we still had legacy anims

[vocal river]

ya

[timber blaze]

wait why does a tail wag bring it out of excellent?

[distant forge]

You are only allowed the one required animator which doesn't let you replace the controller

In excellent category. Having no additional animators apparently allows unity to perform additional optimizatioms

[timber blaze]

oh ok, interesting

[distant forge]

But you could do tail wag if you override custom idle walk run and prone animations

[timber blaze]

would be nice if there were sample animations for those 😦

[amber hemlock]

Reimported SDK, still broken. Dynamic bone is official from asset store, not the pirated one that always goes around

[ancient crystal]

um no

why in the world woudl u use it for override

just use an animator with multiple layers

[amber hemlock]

Oh sorry the point was I'm trying to get an avatar with custom animations that is still rated "Excellent"

[distant forge]

If you want excellent rating you can't afford extra animators

[amber hemlock]

You can only have one animator if you are rated Excellent

and that animator can't have animations on it... or your IK doesn't happen

you'll just go into motor cycle pose in VRChat

so basically excellent can't have custom animations at all, unless someone figures something out

it was probably intentional, though

I'm more concenred why my SDK refuses to detect any dynamic bone or coliders at all

always reports 0

then i upload and get a Poor

[ancient crystal]

yea it can

u just create an animator

rotate the tail bone in an animation

put the animation in the animator

and ez

thats what i do

[amber hemlock]

Sorry I think there's some kind of misunderstanding happening here

[ancient crystal]

i have 3 animations on 1 animator in separate layers

1 tail wag and 2 ear twitches

[amber hemlock]

You can't have an avatar rating of "Excellent" if you have more than one animator.

[ancient crystal]

yea including rhe default

but does that really matter

[amber hemlock]

and you can't put animations in the default animator

[ancient crystal]

who cares about excellent as long as its not poor

[amber hemlock]

Well that was the point of the discussion

[ancient crystal]

besides the rating system still bad atm

[amber hemlock]

this is #avatar-optimization

[ancient crystal]

just 1 animator doesnt rlly matter just use it and dont complain xp

[amber hemlock]

not #animation

[karmic condor]

Good or excellent is still fantastic

[ancient crystal]

^^^

like legit why would u even

replace all the animations

makes no sense

u would have to make many more animations

[amber hemlock]

I'll give you one reason.

[ancient crystal]

and they get masked out too

[karmic condor]

Have your cake

[amber hemlock]

My reason is

[ancient crystal]

u cant even make tails wag in idle noob

[timber blaze]

Excellent reason

[ancient crystal]

its masked out

or at least some of the other anims too

and again

u gonna make many more animations

than 3

so it wont rlly work

animator best way 2 do it unless u wanna waste time doing something that just make it worse

and u still only do 1 animator multiple layers so its not that bad

[karmic condor]

I finally figured out how to not make my avatar sink into the ground when animating. To be fair I only tried like twice before

[ancient crystal]

i think if everything else excellent it might be averaged to excellent anyways

[timber blaze]

brb gonna go make a tail wag using only shaders for shits and giggles

[ancient crystal]

n000b

[timber blaze]

scrub can't even shader wag

[ancient crystal]

my tail is shader wag get b0rkd

jk

https://giphy.com/gifs/puppy-gZ0GEz2HefV4s

[amber hemlock]

@timber blaze Toss it my way if you're successful.

[timber blaze]

kk

[steady abyss]

A bit off-topic, but would someone here would happen to have the red ! emoji?

[halcyon vessel]

huh

[steady abyss]

The "Not optimized" exclamation point

[amber hemlock]

@steady abyss

[steady abyss]

Awesome, cheers.

[uncut maple]

:VeryPoor:

[worn lantern]

Ooph

Actually when can these be actual emotes for this server?

W ell

[vague hearth]

@steady abyss you can also hit ctrl+shift+i at discord and come to his message to get links to this pngs

[worn lantern]

Actually I want the 2017 emote back

[steady abyss]

Oh thanks, didn't know that

[worn lantern]

Update the Mimi emote

[amber hemlock]

(Sorry)

[worn lantern]

You just might

Probably would've been better in random chat

[amber hemlock]

I'll put them there instead

[vague hearth]

you can put their links inside of `
that will not post images

[timber blaze]

@amber hemlock proof of concept

[amber hemlock]

Man I wish i knew shader code.

How easy is it to pick up? I know only C++ and Java.

nothing about rendering

[timber blaze]

i started from nothing back in like may or june i think

and kept a list of dumb ideas and made them whenever i felt like it

[amber hemlock]

That's very encouraging, thank you

[timber blaze]

if you're already good at programming, should be pretty ez, my background is also java and c++, mostly java

shadertoy is really nice for finding functions to play with

[primal citrus]

[versed nest]

i ask this everytime i see that character, but whats the name of the robot in your pfp?

[primal citrus]

Voidoll :D

[versed nest]

thank you so much, i'll try to remember this time

[primal citrus]

Np 👍

[crystal rose]

Hello, it seems I cannot edit materials in Unity, is there any way to fix this?

[marsh trail]

Select the model -> Inspector -> Materials -> Change from internal materials to external (legacy)

[crystal rose]

Thank you

[distant forge]

@timber blaze oh nice!! (Insert Excellent rating emote) How did you tell the shader how much tail displacement you want on each vertex?

[timber blaze]

i was thinking about hardcoding it into the model using vertex colors, but i decided to be lazy and just go with the distance from the tail origin as the factor for each vertex

here's how the model looks in blender

vertex colors are still a nice way to do it if you want a bit more control over the movement, but they're a pain in the ass to assign

[distant forge]

Ah but then it has to be a different mesh (though not a skinned mesh so it's ok performance wise)

[timber blaze]

yup, all you need is a regular mesh

which is fine since it was going to be a different material anyway, so i think it still comes out to the same number of draw calls?

[distant forge]

That's a cool way of doing it. injecting this type of effect into surface shaders such as Xiexe is doable, so in theory you could add options for tail wag together with the whole mesh in one material.

[timber blaze]

the real winner method is throwing it into existing fur shaders

[distant forge]

Haha well xsfur maybe. Trying to do a minor animator performance improvement on a 25 drawcall fur shader would be a joke

[timber blaze]

lmao

i mean the shader performance would be the same as whatever it originally was

vertex displacement is pretty cheap

[distant forge]

Well a thing the performance system doesn't account for (but actually could do) is the number of shader passes and grabpasses etc

[timber blaze]

yeah i feel like there should definitely be some way of just profiling the shader at runtime and displaying that as a stat

but i'm no unity wizard

[distant forge]

But then you get a shader doing insane things in one pass so it won't profile gpu

But it should be possible to see how many drawcalls a given material or shader will use

[timber blaze]

yeah but like

record the average amount of time that each pass takes

and throw that up into the performance

[distant forge]

In terms of cpu usage yes if unity provides the right profiling hooks to count each thing for the avatar it came from

Might be a cool ingame stat to get a sorted list of avatars in the room by time

And world authors could also be useful for game objects or some subset of top level objects by cpu time

[timber blaze]

yeah idk what unity provides in terms of profiling, but if they have anything like that, i would love to see that implemented into the performance system

added a geometry step for fun just to show the fur idea btw

here's the displacement function i'm applying to the vertex in model space btw in case anyone wants to play with it

        float3 wagtail(float3 p) {
            float wagfactor = length(p);
            float time = _Time.y * _TailSpeed;

            float3 displacement = float3(sin(time) * wagfactor, ((cos(time * .5) * .5 + .5)) * wagfactor * _TailDampener, .1 * cos(time));

            return p + wagfactor * displacement * _TailDampener;
        }```

[uncut maple]

im horrible with math xd

[distant forge]

Oh nice and short. Cool. I wonder how such an idea could be applied more generally to other things we currently use animators and dynbones for

[timber blaze]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[halcyon vessel]

@timber blaze so it move with shader

[timber blaze]

yup, the tail wag is done entirely with that shader

no animator required

[halcyon vessel]

that cool

[timber blaze]

some might call it Excellent

:^)

[halcyon vessel]

@distant forge some people able to make hair phsyic shader

[timber blaze]

you could definitely add stuff like hair sway like this, but gravity would probably be tricky

[halcyon vessel]

yea but shader pro maybe figure it out

they could make alot money just make them to work for vrchat

lol

[timber blaze]

lol

[halcyon vessel]

i think it really good enough people would pay it

[distant forge]

Well part of the point of working for optimization practices is that everyone would use similar techniques. If only that one guy who paid for his avatar has the perf improvement it won't really make a difference

[halcyon vessel]

people in vrchat would have to change to make better performance for vrchat

like this guy said lol https://youtu.be/45diS4xgUyI

[shut sequoia]

"they can do the nametags"

[halcyon vessel]

@shut sequoia that part of vrchat

but avatar and world is not

[timber blaze]

to think that someday we might have nametags with less than 30 materials

[halcyon vessel]

could they make shader turn off icon

without need to be material

[timber blaze]

that would be possible

but probably messy?

[vague hearth]

something like a list of polygons for each icon on the nameplate mesh, and changing this polygons uv coordinates by editor property to render an icon from image with all icons or empty space?
know a shader that move uv coordinates

[timber blaze]

that'd probably work

moving uv coordinates is ez, the part that i think would be a pain is specifying how they should move

although there might be some easy way to just edit the UV coords via script at runtime, which would probably be a nice way to do it

[distant forge]

Well one simple way to do uv coordinate animating on a static rectangle with shape keys is swap it so the vertex position is in uv and the uv position as a vertex then you can effectively morph uvs.

But probably an effective way is expose each sprite as a parameter then animate parameters for each part of the rectangle.

Or make it one number and use something like snail's digital display with a different texture per digit

[wanton veldt]

ok i barely express opinions atall and always been a observer but now i really wish to express my point of view about that avatar stats system

this ruined communities and public engagements , the system isnt accurate ATALL and ppls judge based only on that and it made soo much drama ever since

says i have 30 materials when i only have 3 texture 3 materials

this thing was a HUGE mistake

that is all , back to private worlds

[heady smelt]

Yeah, I got shredded about the amount of materials that was showing on me, though it caused no drop in frames whatsoever.

[vague hearth]

@wanton veldt do you have separated meshes? each material for each mesh counts individual because it makes individual draw calls 🤔

[shut sequoia]

depends how many mats you have

[drowsy marlin]

Is someone able to help me with a texture problem on my avatar?
It's nothing to do with errors or anything, I just need someone to make the pattern on the character darker than lighter

[polar bolt]

Yes, material count is overboard but this is witch-hunting, we should encourage the optimization instead of posting names with stats

[heady smelt]

We are going to be lynched, the lot of us.

[shut sequoia]

isnt this their avatar

its a menu screenshot

[heady smelt]

But how long though?

[polar bolt]

Except you cant avoid clipping with dynbones so hanging with them would fail

[heady smelt]

XD Also, I got berated for the amount of materials I had

I got kicked for the result

Who knew?

[grave crystal]

I've got you on that one, animated particles away!

[heady smelt]

Alot of it

The polygons have forsaken us

And yes, it's retarded

Not witch hunting anybody, i just think its funny to screenshot and post pic of avatars i see in void club that ppl tell me they find in avatar worlds

Meanwhile i have 2 materials like lul

[tender timber]

its funny to witch hunt people and put them on blast in the Discord, yeah real nice guy you are

If you see an avatar that isnt optimized in a world then report it to the devs, stop looking for attention

[heady smelt]

Im not here to make friends

Im not here to gain attention

Keep scrolling

[tender timber]

then wind your neck in

[heady smelt]

70+ materials is beyond unoptomization

Its just gross

[tender timber]

Whats more gross is the amount of elitist pricks in this Discord that make it apart of their life to sit here 16 hours a day and whine and flame people and you are just adding to it so move on yeah

[timber blaze]

but it takes literally 2 button clicks to not be sad

[heady smelt]

^^^

Okay to call me a elitist prick is a bit much

Im honestly just elite

[tender timber]

you guys are wishful thinking if you think every single person in vrchat is going to abide by the rules lmao

wasnt calling you an elitist prick i meant in general

[shut sequoia]

no one thinks that

but all ignoring it does is lead to hard limits

[tender timber]

Well witch hunting people isnt the way to go right?

[shut sequoia]

no, informing is. sadly people have been so misinformed they shun new info

which frustrates others to hell

[tender timber]

But you should be informing the devs through Email not slandering people through General chat

[shut sequoia]

they only want to moderate pubworld avatars

[tender timber]

Moderation.. yeah, going into Larens worlds to clip screenshots of her badly optimized avatars to post screenshots in the Discord to flame her.. very cool 👏

Obviously don't agree with those avatars but at the same time you should be mature enough to E-mail the devs and sort it out through there instead of witch hunting people, pretty sure that should be in the rules, this community is really fucking toxic for reasons like this alone

[shut sequoia]

flaming someone knowingly breaking rules and creating garbage lag machines?

theyre part of why the game has reached this state of unoptimization

[tender timber]

No, the reason why the game has reached this state of unoptimization is because it's only been recently they started to really stress about dynamic bones and materials, 8 months ago, maybe a few % of the community knew it was the reason but you're forgetting people dont have past unity/blender experiences, they've only watched Tupper's video which doesnt even go into optimization at all If I remember correctly

[shut sequoia]

you dont

i rewatched it, he does

[tender timber]

Does it cover dynamic bone counts and materials

[shut sequoia]

yep, and merging

and atlasing

and bone weight merging

[tender timber]

https://youtu.be/7P0ljQ6hU0A?t=4636 might want to rewatch it again

he actually says you can add colliders to hair to stop it from clipping too

[shut sequoia]

he does

[heady smelt]

Crap, so all this time, I'm putting colliders in the wrong place

Facepalm

[shut sequoia]

he doesnt say use 16

with 2500 vcolisions

whats larens excuse?

[tender timber]

he doesnt atlas

i just watched it on 2x speed lmao

[shut sequoia]

he has a video for it

[tender timber]

he put 2 colliders in his hands and said you can put them in the hair to stop it from clipping too

it's a 270k video

90% of the community watched this to learn how to make avatars

so if you really want to blame vrchat for being this much of an unoptimized mess you should blame the devs

[shut sequoia]

theyre at fault too

but whats the excuse for those circumventing world rules?

[tender timber]

No excuse which is why you email the devs and stop putting everyone you see on blast

[shut sequoia]

for worlds i mean

i use them as examples

[tender timber]

Examples for what? Everyone knows there's going to be a side of the community that says fuck the rules, it's like that in every game

[shut sequoia]

for whats bad and how real an issue it is

again, no excuse to be in 5.6 now and still be bypassing with id swaps

[tender timber]

But you're creating another issue simultaneously even if you don't see it

[shut sequoia]

yup

[vocal river]

where do I find mix weights in cats plugin ?

[wary relic]

@heady smelt Users can also make a guide like that though (even though i fully approve of a Staff made one)
And it wont amaze me if someone is slowly working on one

Its the same that Sai and I are making one for the support stuff within this discord and rumors of Vrchat. If the staff doesnt do it- We will do it instead 👏

[heady smelt]

"Mix weights" is now called Merge Weights @vocal river

[vocal river]

ty

[simple violet]

Hello everybody! 😋 Does somebody know how to fix clipping feet in the floor .. i tried position 0,0,1 not working 0,0.5,1 .. its looks like nothing changes .. idk how to fix it :/

[wary relic]

The mega tutorial got mode before Tupper was an admin even so 👀

[agile gust]

anyone know how to fix bound box in game issue. in unity my bound boxes are fine and avatar is going to be good rating. gets into game bound box is huge now for some reason and im back to very poor

[karmic condor]

Do you have a snail trail/marker on it?

[ancient crystal]

snail is shader so eveything it draw has to be placed in larger bounding box

otherwise no one can see it

[agile gust]

yeah so in other words if i want marker i have to just settle for very poor?

[karmic condor]

Yeah. If you have good or excellent in all other categories than 👌

Bounding box is a weird and I have specific criticism on how it’s rating can effect the overall rating.

[unique pebble]

It is weird, but its a very important thing for culling

[karmic condor]

Yeah exactly

[unique pebble]

most of the issues from that stem from people using a pen to draw that increases bounding box to be so big that culling might no longer work on their avatar

There needs to be an alternative to that and the bounding box issues 99% of people have will be solved

it's pretty cool that people can find these problems now

[heady smelt]

@sudden jewel wrld_baf41682-9838-4477-bfeb-1a40eb5588b7 check what I have left to optimize and send me the pic through dm's

more than 200 avtrs btw

[safe swift]

you can get snails avatar profiler and check it in descriptor @heady smelt https://github.com/theepicsnail/AvatarProfiler

[heady smelt]

oh really?

[safe swift]

yes

[regal spire]

The dynamic bone count in snails differs from the SDK iirc

[heady smelt]

thank you

[regal spire]

The SDK also counts materials used in particle systems, but I think snails skips that

[safe swift]

u only care about active by default when uploading public world

[simple violet]

holy this feet clipping in ground is driving me crazy 😄

[earnest bay]

Quick question, are worlds denied if you hit Very Poor, or just Poor performance on the new ranking system?

[karmic condor]

Depends on what aspects they are very poor in

[rancid fulcrum]

Excuse me, I'm getting a traceback error when trying to atlas using shotaryias' add-on tool. What does this mean?

[karmic condor]

They look for how many separate materials, meshes, skinned meshes, dynamic bones, and dynamic bone colliders

[earnest bay]

Ah

That helps, thanks! Have several dozen avatars to cull before re-uploading 😦

RIP old stuff!

[karmic condor]

If you want to salvage the old stuff I recommend using google sheets to log your progress

[earnest bay]

I'm just using the in-game performance measure now and going from newest to oldest, either fixing avatars or removing them from the world. I've been putting it off for a while

[amber hemlock]

@rancid fulcrum try the CATs plugin discord

[odd cove]

I'm having this problem with my textures. This happened to me before but I don't remember how I fixed it and it might be because VRChat is utilizing a new version of Unity.

[polar bolt]

Invert normals back in modeling software

[amber hemlock]

If your shader allows you to flip normals, try it otherwise I think you might need to remove the transparency in the texture inspector

Can’t tell if reversed normals or z layer transparency

[odd cove]

y'alls just saved me hours of poking around trying to fix this thing. thanks!

[sweet mason]

could be the next level of optimization to have the normal map an emission on the same texture 🤔

[polar bolt]

I'm using alpha channel of main atlas to control emission already 😂

[surreal topaz]

Alloy has "packed maps"

Sorta like metallic maps but every channel out of the four they have does something else

[heady smelt]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/487005925299847170/526555722272604210/image0-95.png

[rancid fulcrum]

@amber hemlock Thanks, sorry about that.

[sweet mason]

😣

[pine coral]

Help, I want to add chair

[surreal topaz]

Update SDK

This is not an optimization question

[pine coral]

k

[shrewd haven]

Hey I was wondering, if I merged the side bangs with the sideburns, would they still flow decently with dyn bones? Could cut out 2-4 bones easy that way. Just wondering if someone has tried it.

[distant forge]

I'm interested in this line of thinking too...basically one or two sets of bones to compute all the short hairs

Weight painting can cause a bit of stretching for big motion if they are far away but small motion shouldn't cause noticeable artifacts here. I've done some playing with multiple models on one armature and some things can work decently with the wrong bones

[shrewd haven]

Yeah that was my understanding too. I've generally merged tips and stuff that were so close together anyway, but bangs/sideburns are just that tad more out that I'm unsure of how they'd react. and currently don't have a VR to test it myself properly.

[distant forge]

You can test in unity play mode by shaking or rotating the head back/forth or rapidly

[heady smelt]

im going to release my old unoptimized male avatar within the week

😏

[heady smelt]

It would, yes

Are the components turned on?

[rain ivy]

the sdk not showing dynamic bones is a known issue

[heady smelt]

Ah, well there you go

[fading leaf]

Be nice if there scoring was consistent

[shut sequoia]

yeah, the scan needs a fix

materials havebeen consistently wrong even ingame

[pine flame]

Need to extinguish those useless keywords :l

[late sorrel]

lol, yup. @shut sequoia
specially when it double counts particles as two materials.

or somehow, my sephiroth model has 24 materials out of nowhere.
when he only has 5 on his body, and 3 external items with each 1 materials.

It's just weird.

🤷

I just ignore it now.
And just hope we get an update.

[safe swift]

same, I don't give a crap about this sytem in current state which misrepresents the avatar completely, all i care for is following public world avatar rules.. well, because I have to

[late sorrel]

All i have noticed is.
Particles are being counted as materials(and being counted more than 1 time).

Certain particles causes a problem, and will say you have 16k+ particle mesh when you don't
(if you use like a cylinder for a mesh particle)

Dynamic bones are set way too low(it's set to 0, and if you have more than 8 bones, you're insta poor).

And sometimes, The body mesh count is wrong(will sometimes say you have 3 separate body meshes when you only have 1).

This is all i have encountered with my models.

It just needs some updates and changes.

[shut sequoia]

I wonder if there's a reason for this, or if it's a mistake. I wasn't aware of the multiplicative (i really am starting to hate that word) effect on dynamic bones when using more than one script per chain until just recentl

So there could very well be a reason this happens.

[tired badger]

This is just the first version of the system. The system does need to exist, just sucks it has issues right now. Their world scanner is much more accurate. Hopefully they can just compile a list of avatars via the world scanner and cross check down the road.

[sweet mason]

If your mesh is not active, the system dont count it and so on for the other thing

[late sorrel]

For teleport animations(that i have lines coming down, when i spawn).
It does count them(it's less than a second particle animation, and only 1 particle).

yet, it does what i said above.

[stable star]

@worn lantern I'll see about getting it updated :p

The one on here was when I used a neptunia avatar...

[simple violet]

Hello, so i finished my animation effect and wanted to publish and its says: The following component types are found on the avatar and will be removed by the client: SimpleObjectMake, DelayObjectMake ..... well idk what is wrong it doesnt let me publish https://imgur.com/a/QNrg3YC

Okay i know i figure it out all of my particle effect was objects-_- okay rip 3 hours

[distant forge]

@stable star is cutout really that bad perf wise? Especially if you keep transparent areas to a minimum--it will avoid discarding most pixels...those you do discard just assume they are going to double fill.

[stable star]

the entire the material covers can still cause over draw, even if you cant see through it at all. I know cutout does something different thats not as bas as transparent, but, its still not a good idea to do that

[distant forge]

I had the understanding cutout shaders generally use ztest and zwrite just adds a call to clip(out.a-.5) ... if clip fires maybe it will require extra backtracking or overhead.

I've seen some that have cutout but for some reason are on the transparent queue. Also for transparent there is the AlphaToMask option that uses multi sampling to apply a nice dither to transparent pixels (though that does have some issues with z buffer)

[stable star]

this is something I dont know too much about. I just know it's what ive been told about not cheating the render queue to be performant. because it might be ok now, but, someday everyone will be overdrawing on top of each other over and over again making things worse then if everyone just did it properly now. @empty pier can probably explain it better (again, I do remember something was better about cutout, but it still wasnt good to do)

@distant forge

[distant forge]

Ok cool, i often put my whole avatars on cutout even if there are only a few transparent bits so I can save a material on little fringy bits or eye stars etc

[stable star]

this is why you get 4 and still excellent. not because they are being generous, but because it's better to not cheat :P in the long run it will be

[distant forge]

How is that cheating? I was under the impression that saving a drawcall is still preferable to using the extra drawcall but saving a discard that almost never runs

But two materials is still well within acceptable and I might consider using two for most avatars to avoid cutout

[halcyon vessel]

4 is enough for material

just need make sure all cutout on same material

[tender sundial]

@heady smelt dynamic bones counting as zero is https://vrchat.canny.io/bug-reports/p/sdk-avatar-performance-reports-always-report-dynamic-bone-counts-as-0

the bounds thing I'm considering filing but not sure of a good way to describe it without just handing over the avatar

[karmic condor]

Thanks upvoted that. I’ve yet to see it count any

[distant forge]

you could probably get really weird bounds behavior by putting various weird things on some bones like a fixed joint going nowhere to lock a bone at spawn

[tender sundial]

I have something like that going on but I'm not using any bones

[distant forge]

people already do the tricks to have a curled up dragon tail and wings that unfolds to become huge

[tender sundial]

but it essentially does seem to be counting world 0,0,0

it's funny because I can literally move the avatar a few metres backwards and go from excellent to very poor in-game lol

[distant forge]

I thought the ingame ones don't count disabled stuff (don't recompute)

[tender sundial]

it definitely recomputes every time you open it, for at least your own avatar

[distant forge]

could it be a world particle system you left enabled? Those have center 0,0,0 and probably no bounds so whatever function they call to get the bounds might return radius 0

[tender sundial]

nup 😄

I have: The avatar node, with just VRC_AvatarDescriptor and PipelineManager, then one child node with just Mesh Filter and Mesh Renderer

I think that if your only mesh renderer isn't a skinned mesh renderer, the behaviour of the bounds checking code is questionable

I'm currently inserting a bunch of debug logging to dump how it's getting the results

basic summary:

• at start, bounds = Center: (3.0, 0.0, 0.0), Extents: (0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
  (Seems correct)
• adding renderer r = Child object (UnityEngine.MeshRenderer):
  r.bounds = Center: (0.0, 0.0, 0.0), Extents: (0.0, 0.0, 0.0)
  new bounds = Center: (1.5, 0.0, 0.0), Extents: (1.5, 0.0, 0.0)
  (Seems incorrect - r.bounds is relative to the model, but the bounds which were initialised were in world coordinates - that's the bug I think?)
• after subtracting go.transform.position:
  bounds = Center: (-1.5, 0.0, 0.0), Extents: (1.5, 0.0, 0.0)
• Result AABB = Center: (-1.5, 0.0, 0.0), Extents: (1.5, 0.0, 0.0)
• AABB.size = (3.0, 0.0, 0.0)
• Correct result: (0.0, 1.0, 0.0)

canny's lack of markup or even sensible formatting of text without markup continues to disappoint

[distant forge]

no markup really? would expect at least in the original post

that's super weird. could see a bug with non-skinned mesh renderers though if not due to lack of testing

skinned mesh renderers ignore their heirarchy when computing position and bounds I believe - they are relative to the Root Bone so the code probably has a special case for that

[tender sundial]

literally the first sort of thing I started thinking about was "how small a value can I get for each check"

so I made an avatar with zero bounds, but it was misreported as being whatever my current coordinates were in world space :/

I've since changed the real avatar I was doing it to so that it doesn't have zero bounds anymore, and the problem somehow doesn't happen with that

https://vrchat.canny.io/bug-reports/p/bounds-calculation-includes-world-coordinates-resulting-in-incorrect-computed-bo

skinned mesh renderers having explicitly-set bounds seems like it just dodges the issue entirely

what I was actually trying to do is get a mesh with zero triangles though, and I wasn't able to convince Unity to pass it to my shader

[polar bolt]

0 triangles or 0 vertices? Cant call draw without any vertex data because... There is nothing to shade...

[tender sundial]

0 tris

AFAIK you can have a geometry shader which accepts a single vertex as input, and can produce anything it would usually produce

[distant forge]

You set your mesh renderer primitive type to points? You have still a 0 in your indices array right?

I recall somewhere that something forces things back to tris. I wanted to try getting a quads mesh so I could have an extra bone position passed into my geom shader

[tender sundial]

hmm, I haven't set anything on the mesh renderer because I can't see anything to set

[distant forge]

You need to do it from a script. Xsboner is a good example of a (skinned) mesh renderer generator. I also have some in my github but you would have to modify a bit to change the indices type

[tender sundial]

I guess having one vertex at 0,0,0 is still going to wreck my bounds anyway so I might have to have multiple points at least

ok, I think I see the missing piece

mesh.SetIndices(new int[] { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 }, MeshTopology.Points, 0);

so now I have 8 points, no tris, although Unity says 8 tris

and then the SDK barfs "Failed getting triangles. Submesh topology is lines or points. UnityEngine.Mesh:GetTriangles(Int32)"

I guess it must then silently return 0 because otherwise the whole check should have failed

in any case it does render and I get Polygons: 0

so uploading lel

I better check the logs to see whether I'm spamming them with this error though

[distant forge]

haha well rip

if that works I kind of want to try quads again. I had something I wanted to try with those

[tender sundial]

it works but it's laggier to render

[distant forge]

is it actually laggier though if you pass it through a geom shader that generates tris?

[tender sundial]

yes

I will try lines

[bold tapir]

I have an avatar with 4 textures on each material, can the automatic atlas, atlas those extra textures somehow? so i get an atlas normal map too

[gilded sapphire]

I can help with that if u want @bold tapir

but I do manual atlasing.. cause cats has blender version issues

[bold tapir]

I tried to do it with cats, by putting the normal map at the top of each material but they did not get put in the right place

[gilded sapphire]

uhm did u convert the tex into a normal map or does it already have a existing n map

[bold tapir]

It has normal maps already

[gilded sapphire]

owh ... then put it in the normal map slot. n if it ask to fix it click yes

uhmm

hmm I guess do it like its a normal texture

like do the actual texture. save.. then do the normals

[bold tapir]

Oops fail pic sorry

https://i.imgur.com/rdgg1mS.png

[gilded sapphire]

wait..

u trying to atlas does?

[bold tapir]

No that's just one material

[gilded sapphire]

yeah 1 material its good.

[bold tapir]

I'm trying to atlas each d n s e texture

https://i.imgur.com/FafMVp3.png

[gilded sapphire]

so u have 4 materials all 4 have dnse textures?

[bold tapir]

All of those have a D, N, S, E texture

[gilded sapphire]

can cats do it?

I can teach u how to do it manually but idk how the textures will react ..

[bold tapir]

so i'm trying to atlas all D maps to one picture same with all N, S,E

[gilded sapphire]

@bold tapir wana screen share?

[bold tapir]

Not done with avatar yet but can i add you and talk to you later?

[gilded sapphire]

ya sure

[bold tapir]

Thanks, need to get the polys down abit first

[gilded sapphire]

this my recent model .. was playing with shader.. cant really test in game cauese of lopping

@bold tapir

^ model poly was originally 68k was targeting 31.9k poly then I realised nah..

[bold tapir]

My model is from a game so it's very optimize already, like each material is already atlast i just trying to make them one material and trying to find polys i can remove

[gilded sapphire]

ah ok good luck.I just recently learn how to atlas manually from a friend

[bold tapir]

I tried that 2 times long time ago and i failed so hard lol

[gilded sapphire]

I use photoshop to make my emission tex.. and use a free Normal converter to get my normals.

https://gyazo.com/78f41a6651f2134877441a5cb1383eb4 @bold tapir this is how currently it looks.. but I dont know how well it look in maps...

[safe swift]

u can keep marker, but use two gestures to draw with it, with first you enable the marker, then with 2nd u do -10000 to 0

[bold tapir]

Is there a picture file typ that is good quality but is also have small file size when i use 4k?

[safe swift]

use crunch compression @bold tapir

for n ormal quality 4k it's usually 5mb?

high quality 10-20mb

[dark forge]

question: what's an optimized avatar and why is it so important to have one?

[shut sequoia]

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-performance-ranking-system

[dark forge]

thank you 👍

[shut sequoia]

These two bits of documentation cover a lot of what it is. Basically it's making an avatar that doesn't require tons of gpu performance to have onscreen, but different things impact it differently which is why you can't rely on the ranking symbols completely.

For example, bound size doesn't matter as much as dynamic bones, but they both make your rank poorly.

[dark forge]

oh, okay!! thank you!!

[sudden jewel]

@shut sequoia Bounds size potentially means even more than Dynamic Bones, depending on how big your bounds box is, and if you have DB on your model. It affects culling.

It scales depending on how bad the rest of your model is, basically

[shut sequoia]

Yeah bound size can be extremely important depending on the avatar but I mean if you're excellent in every other regard it still knocks you down to Very Poor

Would the 20 meter culling for DB technically start farther away if your bounding size was bigger since it wouldn't count it until the box itself was far? as opposed to a properly sized one being 20 meters away

[polar bolt]

The script does not run at all when culled - thats why when fast turning you can see skirts with gravity or affected by colliders or hair doing rapid motion until settling

[sudden jewel]

Exactly. I believe the distance measurement for DB is based on the location of the root bone.

However 20m is pretty far, so.

[polar bolt]

Its less than 20m. In my world can see it deactivating at around 15 but haven't tested exact distance

Long hair going stiff is quite noticeable because image from cameras is enlarged 😄

[heady smelt]

@sudden jewel do blocked avatars have performance impact of their original avatar or the defualt grey ones?

i would assume the default grey ones but my frames are droping with 20+ of them in a lobby

hmm

maybe my pc just acting up

srry for the ping i just dont really know who else would answer this question

[sudden jewel]

Nope, if an avatar is blocked it only has the impact of the gray guy and the IK required for that gray guy.

That does mean that crowded rooms (as in, 40+ people) will have a decent amount of lag no matter how many you hide/block.

The network IK update will fix that a bit, as well as some other optimizations we'll get on soon.

[heady smelt]

i figured was abot 30 of em

thx for the info

also if i show avatars on safety hidden avatars the are still infinite loading

but i assume this already known bug

[shut sequoia]

i want custom grayman

so i can set them to generic backgroun anime guy

[spice drum]

Gave it some more thought after @sudden jewel posted about how my new avatar could be more optimized and figured to just go ahead and go all the way. 💚

Losing dynamic bones honestly isn't the worst thing. Facial gestures is really where a lot of the charm is.

She still dances well too. :3

[short cave]

is there any way to combine materials in unity, I have some props that are not from the model so I cant just do it in blender

also i keep going animator count of 2 where are there other animators at? Can i remove that ones thats there by default on the model?

[sudden jewel]

No, you cannot. That is the root animator, and is required.

You also cannot combine materials in Unity by default, but there are some addons you can get that do it. None of them do it as well as simply importing your props in Blender and atlasing that way. You can leave them as separate meshes if you like in Blender, but make sure you set the meshes that do not have internal rigging to Static Renderers manually.

[short cave]

so i import the props into the avatars blender project?

[spice drum]

@short cave Yeah, unfortunately a lot more prop work has to be done in Blender if you want to get the material count lower.

[gilded sapphire]

@spice drum since db is not good for optimization... u could spend the time to animate the bones like how people make ears and tail

[spice drum]

Oh totally, there's definitely a lot of work-arounds to emulate the feel of dynamic bones.

[gilded sapphire]

yep

also puting those into idles.

[spice drum]

yup yup

[median mantle]

Hi guys, anyone has any ideas on why the bounding box could get bigger on avatar spawn? When it's in menu it shows correct values like on upload but as soon as I change to it the bounding box gets to silly size

[surreal topaz]

@median mantle do you have something like snail marker on it?

Bounds calculation appears to be very broken

It can also change depending on where you are in the world relative to the world origin

I don't think you can fix any bounds issues as long as your bounds are fine

[median mantle]

The only thing that comes to my mind is the particle system but it's really tiny and with very short lifetime/duration

No snail marker, nothing abnormal, some dynamic bones with force pulling down and particle system, that's about it

Didn't notice it on other avatars, this one shoots up to millions in xyz

[surreal topaz]

Could be the particle system, sometimes it can be prevented from being culled if it's "unpredictable"

You could turn it on 0.5 seconds after load using an Animator

[median mantle]

Hmm, yeah I'll try uploading avatar without it

It's an otherwise Good avatar ._.

Thanks

[amber hemlock]

Is there someway to add custom animations to the default animator so we don’t have to create a second animator

[surreal topaz]

@amber hemlock add it to idle

Other than that, nope

Generic avatars can have their own animators though, so you can just add another layer to the controller

[amber hemlock]

When I added it to idle my avatar went into motorcycle pose

[surreal topaz]

@amber hemlock yeah

You need to have an entire idle animation

Including the whole body

And then add it into that

The idle animation is always on (unless you're prone)

[amber hemlock]

What if I disable write defaults will the ik show through

[polar bolt]

Nope, find the default idle animation that animates the entire body and add to it

[amber hemlock]

But then I won’t have arms anymore ? Or am I missing something

[polar bolt]

No You will still have them, because the animator has blending and masking. Also #animation

[sweet mason]

Anime girl, its time to have an haircut i think

[sweet mason]

Why not having an option to dissable dynamic bone in the option

If its that hard on hardware

[spark bison]

not a game dev myself but I assume it may be hard to implement?

[heady smelt]

the main reason it wasn't implemented is because the toggles were part of a security feature, not a performance feature

[polar bolt]

It's not hard and the actual answer is here: https://vrchat.canny.io/feature-requests/p/toggle-dynamic-bones-option-1

[karmic condor]

Considering I was in a game map and most people decided to not switch out of their laggy dB intense avatars despite literally everyone experiencing lots of lag. I’m down

[simple violet]

Does somebody has idea whats wrong ? none of my overides working , i am blinking only with one eye and i cant crouch when i crouch i go under model ?

[solar urchin]

So i have a question about this optimization thing.

Why the model i have is Green (Good) in terms of optimization,but my friends see it as Orange(medium) instead of Green?

[simple violet]

Solved: I didnt rigged hands 😃

[spark bison]

do you use dynamic bones @solar urchin cause unity does not calculate that in the editor i don't think

[solar urchin]

Yes i use dynamic bones,the weird thing is,it sees 17 transforms(that puts me on orange) for my friends while on my screen it sees 16 which keeps me in the green

[thorn ginkgo]

Pumkin's Avatar Tools found at the bottom of the linked doc should give you an idea of how many transforms your avatar has. I haven't yet checked if it provides exactly the same count but it ought to be approximately correct.
https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips

[solar urchin]

hmm,ill check with that,but is still weird how it reports different values for different people

[bold tapir]

Why do atlasing turn the white part of my texture green?

[surreal topaz]

@bold tapir is it an XPS/XNALara model?

[bold tapir]

Yes

[surreal topaz]

Set all the material colors to white and bake the texture again

XPS Tools gives weird colors to every material

[bold tapir]

oof okey

Hmm, they are already all white

[surreal topaz]

So they're white before the atlasing?

Do you have a screenshot?

[bold tapir]

https://i.imgur.com/Q5jIsPZ.png all of them have same color

[sweet mason]

Re import the new atlased texture in the scene

[bold tapir]

Do you mean re import to unity? Beacuse i notice it's unity turning them green

[surreal topaz]

You can set the diffuse color to white maybe

If it's normal in Blender

Just set it to white in Unity

[bold tapir]

https://i.imgur.com/LZUnlOU.png this is how it looks

[surreal topaz]

Oh, you can probably ignore that. Tick "Alpha is transparency" on the textures @bold tapir

That should fix it

[bold tapir]

Thanks

I don't know why it happens one day they just started to turn green

[sweet mason]

Why having 2 controler make it good?

[obtuse raptor]

Same here, just a few minutes ago my atlus had that green too, and it was offset a tiny bit by default. Confused the heck outta' me

[sweet mason]

Since i use 2d viseme for my blinking its kind of bad to loose the perfect mark

[karmic condor]

its green because the alpha is on a 8-bit color texture.

Not a thing to worry about

[spring citrus]

Hello! I’ve been busy this Christmas and have not kept up in the recent updates until now. I was wondering if the Public Avatar standards for worlds have changed in light of the new update or are the same as they have been. Thanks!

[karmic condor]

The public avatar standards are the same as they were when they were introduced a month and a half ago (I think its been that long)

[spring citrus]

Okay, thank you! I’d like to go back and make sure none of them are “very poor” rating, just don’t wanna reupload my world and have them deny it because of a couple being that rank (but still following the public avatar standard).

[karmic condor]

Some may still get the very poor ranking, but the world may still be approved. Things such as bounding box can cause that ranking to occur.

[spring citrus]

Right, thanks for the tips. I’d like to make my current avatars at the least poor, then all my new to be at least medium or whatever it’s called.

[safe swift]

I don't think they are checking for poor/very poor, as that system is not representing the avatar accurately and is still work in progress

if you get under 50dyn bones, 15 materials, 3 skinned meshes, 2 colliders, not too high poly count - you're good

[amber hemlock]

They want under 10 materials

10 or under

[safe swift]

no, 15 is still yellow

yellow = is okish , red = must be fixed, and at 15 materials the cell is still yellow

[amber hemlock]

Huh interesting it actually got more lenient then. I still don’t understand the need to have more than 5 materials in the absolute worst case scenario

1 material per unique shader parameter setup

Same shader and identical parameters = should be part of same UV

[ancient crystal]

mine poor for whatever reason lol

good in unity just not in game

y'know if it actually was 'an average' then why is like 2 poor thing bringing it down to poor

i have handful of excellents and goods

so should at least be medium

[marsh trail]

It works in absolutes, if even a single var goes over a limit, it categorizes it as such

[ancient crystal]

ugly xddd

imo it should be weighted average where

lower values get slightly more weight

bc that way say ur character is 50k polygon and dynamic bones

and say another is like 200k

both will rank very close to eachother even if everything else excellent

when in reality the 50k should probably be good/med

not poor

[marsh trail]

Ehh, isn't 50k still in the good region?

[ancient crystal]

yea

but dynamic bones easy to make poor

which is kinda dumb

like every avatar i have if it has 3 or more dynamic bone scripts gets to poor

[amber hemlock]

The SDK currently gives you excellent on all the dynamic bone categories because it is not detecting them

Client does not have that issue

[ancient crystal]

and it kinda unfair

ye

like for example u can still use average and it be accurate

bc if someone is over the dynamic bone limit drag them down more

if they are way over then drag them down a lot

[marsh trail]

I mean you could have a literal blank avatar with a large bounding box and you're very poor so i'm all up for actual weighted values instead of optimized absolutes

[ancient crystal]

shouldnt be directly categorizing me to poor

[amber hemlock]

Dynamic bones are fine just don’t use colliders they act like multipliers for how many dynbones you have

[ancient crystal]

no but not just weighted values but like

the further from the excellent it is, the more influence it has

which keeps limit breaking avatars at very poor

[marsh trail]

Sounds reasonable

[ancient crystal]

and keeps ok-ish avatars at good/med

[amber hemlock]

Like 35 dyn bones with 1 collider acts like 70 dyn bones, two colliders acts like 105

[ancient crystal]

yea ik the collider thing kinda annoying tho

if u just put left and right hand colliders

[amber hemlock]

It’s based on real lag though

[marsh trail]

No kiddin'

[ancient crystal]

and put em on ur tails and ears whatever

i dont see any difference in performance and i havent seen any complaint

but im still ranked as much as this dude that lags a bunch

[amber hemlock]

They lag even when not colliding because they constantly need to check if they have

[ancient crystal]

because also say for example

an avatar has everything in the poor

they should be categorized very poor

not poor

bc that makes a lot more sense

again if poor had more weight in an average then that would happen

[amber hemlock]

It’s more like a specification

[ancient crystal]

yea

[amber hemlock]

Medium avatar needs to meet these requirements etc

[ancient crystal]

yea and thats y i dont like it

essentially u could average like

excellent is 1

good is .75

med is .25

poor is -0.5

and very poor is -1.5

then when u average it the weights will modify the value

[amber hemlock]

Well it’s intentional, a medium avatar has restrictions, a good avatar has these restrictions, if an avatar is excellent/good/medium you can know exactly why

[ancient crystal]

and u can use range between 0 and 1

yea ik that but