avatar-optimization

[wicked arrow]

Basically yes... Get ready for 1.000.000 tris per Avatar ayyyyy

[dark storm]

lul

[still perch]

The limit of 70k now is very generous. There is zero reason to up it again.

If you can't fulfill the limit, stop making avatars.

Even Auto decimate should never have a problem getting to that count, that is of the Polys are above that in the first place.

[wicked arrow]

Yeah I agree. To be more specific, Unity needs to up its limit for other reasons (archviz, surgery models, tech demos, etc)

But VRC should really stay still at 70k (which I believe it's still too much)

[still perch]

Definitely too much for me to

[main horizon]

32k is generous too! Especially compared to 20k!

[wicked arrow]

Quest's 5k is the real deal tho 🔥

[still perch]

Yes

[heady smelt]

just upload plane with texture saying PC exclusive 🤷

[timber blaze]

unity doesn't split meshes at 65535 anymore, that's one of the things that changed when we switched to unity 2017

[wicked arrow]

Was it on the 2017 already?

[timber blaze]

yeah it was in the changelog

[wicked arrow]

Oh well that's why I couldn't find the blog post about it... It's older than I thought!

[timber blaze]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ob0G6IYJdUZuLGkV6SUherQJmiLkNICqMdc7LXtis5A/edit yeah here's the main list of stuff that changed

^ main thing that's relevant here

[wicked arrow]

Nice

[marsh trail]

The previous limit was 20k, it was assumed (by a vast portion of the community actually) that polygons caused lag, even at such low values, whereas the split limit was at 65535 due to the 16bit indices limitation that was present in unity 5.6.3p1 (the unity version used back then), even avatars at a larger scale than that shouldn't cause issues, but really low end systems might suffer if too many users with that amount (100k+) are present at any one time, as those values stack up

So the current limit stands at 70k

[surreal topaz]

The 70k limit is actually designed with the Oculus guidelines in mind, seemingly.

Something like 2-3 million 1-2 million polys per scene, max

25 people at 70k tris is 1.75 million already

Which leaves 250k for the world

If anything they were being generous by still ranking you "good" at 70k.

Because in reality 70k is probably "poor" instead, unless all those polys are on a non-skinned mesh renderer.

[marsh trail]

Yeah that does make sense, i'm relatively unaware of the limitations of the oculus, or well, any vr equipment for that matter, i assume the quest has a vastly more limiting situation (iirc the limit for quest avatars is 5k)

[wicked arrow]

Well Quest has a mobile chipset so limits are more tight

[coarse summit]

Well the quest is basically a glorified smartphone, so yeah

[marsh trail]

Possibly a dumb question, but does the rift s support custom set lenses like the normal rift did? (asking essentially if the interior has been changed aside hardware)

One of the drawing points i had regarding the rift was the custom prescription lens adapters somebody had designed

[amber hemlock]

The only difference I’m aware of is the Rift S has no lens separation slider like the Rift has so hopefully your eyes are very close to human average or you’re screwed

Can’t imagine why prescription lenses couldn’t still happen though

Rift DK2 has no Lens separation slider and I hated it, constantly wanted them moved farther apart to be in both len’s sweet spots at the same time, but couldn’t. Never want to go back to that so skipping on S.

[marsh trail]

Yeah my vision is beyond horrid, retinitis pigmentosa is a bitch, i'm thinking of getting a VR headset at some point, hopefully there's some alternatives with prescription lenses available at that time...

[amber hemlock]

Classic rift fits glasses fine. Can’t speak for other headsets

But prescription lenses are def better if you can’t get by without glasses since they’ll let you get closer to the lenses and have a wider FoV

[marsh trail]

Aye, i was trying to avoid having my glasses crammed into a headset if i could avoid it, the rift had some pretty good alternatives in regards to prescription lenses, user-manufactured adapter that seemed to fit seamlessly into it

[velvet otter]

Is 20 dynamic bones too many

i only have 4 colliders,
wrist and hand

[marsh trail]

Each collider will add another dynamic bone "transform" to the list per bone that it could affect

15 bones 1 collider
30 transforms with collision check

I'm unsure if the root is included in that

[surreal topaz]

@velvet otter don't use colliders for your hands and wrists

Just use one collider on your hand

And add "height" to it

So it'll expand to cover more area like a capsule

[amber hemlock]

You’d think there would be a performance difference from sphere colliders, which are a lightweight distance check, and capsule collisions, which would seem to be a more complicated collision check?

[surreal topaz]

That's what I thought too

Capsules are actually slightly more impactful

But the limiter and performance ranking won't penalize adding height, so

[opal radish]

why is the final IK broken?

[gentle inlet]

Cause it's not surprising it's not

[surreal topaz]

Extra IK solvers on the avatar are no longer working for other people, only for yourself

And everyone is super stuttery and jittery thanks to the networked IK, the movements don't look natural at all. All this just to appease an inferior platform.

[amber hemlock]

Network IK is only sending IK that vrchat client knows about. Since Ik isn’t being solved locally anymore final IK is borked remotely

Yeah network IK really makes the whole platform look terrible. I’m glad this wasn’t my day 1 impression

Pc only worlds should omit network IK and calculate everyone locally

Since no quest user can show up

[surreal topaz]

Or just have a local toggle

If turned on, clients will send you their networked IK Info

If turned off, the old system is used and it sends you their hand/head/hip/foot targets

[amber hemlock]

But that means clients have to send both to the server

Since some want IK and some want forward rotations

Also IK targets are less data to send

[pine flame]

Normally there’s some interpolation that carries you over between network updates, maybe they didn’t add that

[amber hemlock]

I think the reason it’s smoother is ik targets only can send updates more often because it’s less data

[pine flame]

I’m actually really happy that the networked IK is back it means my ancient CPU can keep up, haven’t once CPU bottlenecked since the update

[amber hemlock]

Basically you are just broadcasting your head and hand pos/rot

I’m very unhappy with Network IK and feel the platform looks very poor. One thing that surprised me when I joined is how fine tuned the mocap was at showing subtle details

Now it looks kind of like I would have expected this kind of platform to look: kinda crappy

I feel something important was lost here and I hope network IK is not used if the world has no android build

Maybe it will get better we’ll see

The Ik during the livestream was very not good

[surreal topaz]

Well, the way I see it

The hand and head targets were probably interpolated leading to very smooth movement

You simply cannot interpolate muscle values smoothly like that.

The result in-between is completely different.

That's what makes the new IK not ever "properly" fixable either.

Even if you interpolate the humanoid muscle values (which is what they actually send over, now)

It will look different

And not quite as good

[amber hemlock]

Yeah I’ve seen that in <other platforms> it looks silly during lag

[pine flame]

Maybe fall back to local ik when there’s no data

[amber hemlock]

You can’t interpolate data without endpoints

That’s projection

Which is a baaad idea for mocap 😛

Without data vrchat does what I always does: freeze

Probably not on channel topic anymore

[pine flame]

Definitely not on channel topic

[balmy wadi]

whats the maximum amount of Tris allowed in vrchat? 70k now?

[woeful ember]

yes

[balmy wadi]

cool thanks

[still perch]

you should always reduce them to as low as possible without runing stuff tho

[surreal topaz]

Definitely get the polycount down if you can

In particular, parts that don't deform are easy to decimate. Stuff like rings on fingers have the potential to be super unoptimized

Planar decimation can make it still look good but also reduce polys

I once found an MMD lollipop on Deviantart that was 100k tris

I had to retopo that and ended up with 400, even though it still looks just fine

[still perch]

yeah. If you know what you're doing you can get really good results with low polygons

[stuck charm]

Please set your User Preferences' 'Translation Branches Directory' path to a valid directory"

what is this

[pure bridge]

more bragging than asking questions but nothing feels better than optimizing something like hell

1 mesh, 2 materials

<@/

and you can pull out the gun. its still 1 mesh, 2 mats uwu

sadly until unity 2018 is pushed for vrc im still stuck with using rigid bodies > <

no one will be able to tell how much work i put into the model unless they actively check cuz its just gonna be registered as medium cuz of a rigid body and fixed joint > <

[heady smelt]

F

No guns too unwholesome

[pure bridge]

:<

\

[heady smelt]

Bad solar

[pure bridge]

"medium"

[heady smelt]

Too unoptimized

[pure bridge]

shhhhh

[heady smelt]

@pure bridge T O O U N O P T I M I Z E D

[pure bridge]

aaaaaaaa >~<

[heady smelt]

No more guns for you

[pure bridge]

but i like my gun

[heady smelt]

NO GUNS

Too unwholesome and unoptimized

[pure bridge]

im sorry dad :<

[heady smelt]

Can't believe you

[pure bridge]

bbbut i tried my besttt

[heady smelt]

That's it you've been unoptimized for the last time

I'm getting Tuppers optimization belt

[pure bridge]

nooo~ ;n;

ill b good nextt time i promise ill make a one poly standard shader avatar

[heady smelt]

If you make it without a skinned mesh then i'll forgive you

[pure bridge]

ohk...

[heady smelt]

No more guns for you

[pure bridge]

ok... :(

[heady smelt]

You can keep the gun as long as you don't use any rigid bodies 😠

[pure bridge]

but then my particles are gonna look dumb and stuck to my arm

all of the kids at vrschool have world particles!

[heady smelt]

Yeah well all the kids at school that have world particles are also 1million polys and have 43 meshes

Do you want to end up like them

Or do you want to be optimized and worthy in the eyes or our lord Tupper

[pure bridge]

you do have a point...

[heady smelt]

That's what I thought

[misty escarp]

XD

[amber hemlock]

You can avoid most custom animators by just baking it into your idle pose which is always playing anyway

Surprised they didn’t do that

What’s red diamondboi for?

[surreal topaz]

It's the red man avatar I believe

[marsh trail]

Probably when things break like they usually did

[surreal topaz]

I guess the tutorial avatar was too high poly for Quest lmao

As well as the transparency causing issues

I mean it makes sense, a loading avatar should never be heavy on its own

Especially because the tutorial man is still 3 meshes and 9 materials total

[marsh trail]

Wait

[surreal topaz]

Although if they reuse the same material on the loading man it's probably equivalent to like 1 drawcall

[amber hemlock]

Diamondboi still has transparency

[surreal topaz]

Oof

Probably additive though

Still it doesn't seem like a good idea, unless they're opaque on Quest

At least the new loading avatar is less creepy

[amber hemlock]

Yeah who knows what they look like on android

Oh yes it’s way less creepy and also gender neutral which is nice

The blocked avatar is also great with its grey neutral : I face

[visual tinsel]

@surreal topaz Red man is no longer, it's yellow error bot

[surreal topaz]

Oof

At least it's more descriptive?

[visual tinsel]

Yes

[amber hemlock]

There are actually many bots now. One for loading, hidden manually, hidden by safety

There’s one with a “very poor” symbol on its chest that I don’t think is being used

[surreal topaz]

Oh lord, that doesn't bode well.

They're probably planning to auto hide "very poor" avatars optionally

They better have fixed up their ranks by then, because I'm still being marked Very Poor for something like particle systems that don't even have emission

I'm fine with it happening for materials or polys, not much is wrong with the way those are counted

[fiery cedar]

im having problem with my avatar i cant seem to get it into a good pose

any tips

also enforce tpose makes it worst

basiclly the arms are messed up and i cant figure out how to make it look good

[fiery cedar]

its okay now again

[lament pond]

you can adjust the tpose of the model by configuring your humanoid rig in the hierarchy when you click your fbx model.

[sudden agate]

Is there any good guidelines/mesh tips to making hands bend/rig well for mechanim? I know there's weight painting but it seems like most hands are rough in the system regardless

[vast briar]

In unity it looks like my hit box is too small and when i log in my feet sink into the floor. How do i resize that box, or ge tmy feet to stand level on the ground?

[opal gyro]

Wyd when the spine is set to a length of 0

?

[strong jolt]

Are my eyes supposed to be google eyed if I’m using eyetracking? Looking at my animation in unity they act like googley eyes

[vague hearth]

@opal gyro ignore lenght 0 error, it usually writes after full body fix

[opal gyro]

It fixed itself when i was messing with the spine scale

1 / 1 / 0.99

[strong jolt]

Chill omega bot

[opal gyro]

was previously 1 / 1 / 0.90293729

or some 8+ decimal number

[opal gyro]

Does anyone know how to add-in? an avatar animator?

Does that mean the avatar will be in T-pose indefinitely?

[opal gyro]

So uploaded avatar, and there's no avatar.

[novel grove]

@opal gyro add animator component same as you added avatar descriptor 🤔

[opal gyro]

Thankyou, that wasn't in the part of the tutorial that I watched.

How is it going to say the head/hands/feet aren't mapped

when they are mapped

[lament pond]

@opal gyro click on body. the section feet , head and arms are empty

[opal gyro]

Am I in the wrong menu?

[lament pond]

no that's fine and should be working.

you don't have multiple avatars in your scene right?

[surreal topaz]

This isn't an optimization question

He probably put the descriptor on the wrong object

Please post more complete screenshots of the whole unity window with the avatar selected in the scene

[amber hemlock]

The @opal gyro it’s confusing but the error is supposed to be there. If it isn’t, it means hips and spine are not the exact same which means full body will not work perfectly.

[stiff scaffold]

Did you rename something in the model directly? 🤔

[opal gyro]

will have to wait 9-hours from now before I can look at it again, and also #rigging?

[sweet mason]

You probably have of bunch of bones as the root

Delete then merge all of the other extra bone to have few

[opal gyro]

📽

https://media.giphy.com/media/mGDjzbAstQx7Jm6sTI/giphy.gif

Re-editing clearer gif's

Moving to #avatar-rigging

[heady smelt]

me think it time for me to make VRChat Tutorial on Avatar Optimization (basic)

[still perch]

If you know what you are doing. Go for it.
But don't make tutorials if you have no idea how stuff works optimization wise.

[surreal topaz]

Oof, is this misinformation? 🤔

I checked the old poiyomi master (not toon) and it has pretty much the amount of passes you would expect from an outlined toon shader (comparable to Noenoe and pretty much any other toon shader except Cubed's). Also, if you're using both Opaque and Transparent, you're not taking up "twice the keywords". The keywords are an issue for sure, but it's not taking up 64 of them.

Back on topic: in practice, is there any difference between Mobile/Diffuse and something like VRChat's Mobile Diffuse?

I've had cases where a mobile shader was sufficient for PC, but on PC we can choose either one

[visual tinsel]

I haven't checked them, but I know they're mostly copy and paste from Unity's in builts.

[amber hemlock]

No double sided shaders available for quest?

[surreal topaz]

I don't think so

[pine flame]

@amber hemlock just double side your meshes, or the parts where the backsides show

with geometry

[amber hemlock]

Oof I was right at the limit

Or almost at it

I’m not sure that VRChat/Mobile/Toon Lit is obeying the ramp texture. I made it flat medium grey and still see shading

[pine flame]

I should check that out and see what it can do

[surreal topaz]

Yeah I had that issue as well with the fallback shaders

[empty pier]

@visual tinsel @surreal topaz Variants not used on Quest were removed.

[celest forge]

@opal gyro i have the same issue most of the times with unity...(drunk unity)

some times im just exploring the bones on the avatar or the inspector by maximizing and minimize the stuff around there then the error dissappears..

sometimes that error comes if u have an animation window opened or u did something around there.

[opal gyro]

I forgot what I did to correct it permenantly

but it probably had to do with how I was exporting it from blender

infact, I was just saving the whole thing from the save>as menu as fbx

with no settings (changes)

which led to other problems with the prefab

[heady smelt]

Lol.. something funny happened; but something to address when it comes to Safety Feature for VR Users.. -- Safety Mode should be careful about how shaders are used on Safety Mode for.. VR Users.. because it's still dangerous .. so like it a double-edge sword ._.

[amber hemlock]

Cats can't seem to custom decimate with a shape key whitelist unless you have at least two meshes. this makes me separate some small part of the model just to make the shapekey white list options appear - is there a reason for this?

[ripe tulip]

interesting

[heady smelt]

Im unsure what is the problem with this, so they arent seperate body's and are using the same material any reason why it turns whiter in some regions ?

It only happens also in certain maps

[sweet mason]

the panty ?

[heady smelt]

No

The discoloration

On the skin

[sweet mason]

you have some shadow turn on idk🤔

[heady smelt]

Tried it

But it doesnt seem to be that tho 🤔

[heady smelt]

looks fine also on unity

[rose berry]

mfw had been using 2017.4.27f1

mfw nothing bad ever happened

realizes im using wrong version

downgrades to correct version

20 errors pop up

nice

[heady smelt]

What else do you expect from 4.15f1

[rose berry]

idk what i expected

[kind coyote]

can someone help me optimize my model

i got a lot of errors when trying to build it

how do i fix these

[heady smelt]

hoooly 18 skinned meshes and 18 unique materials

[kind coyote]

yeah i got no idea what im doing, how do i fix this

[dusky cloak]

If you've never used blender (which you've said from your other comments) and you very very new to unity I suggest you go read/watch youtube vids about it

None of us in here will be able to teach you "how to make an avatar" in the space of 10 mins

A lot of us can help you with 1 off issues, or questions, but ones as vague as what you're asking are practically impossible to answer or even tell you how to answer without you asking a question on how to do what we've suggested

There are a lot of videos out there on how to upload an avatar. If you're just looking to upload one, even easier

[calm spade]

@kind coyote Look at the pinned messages of the this channel

kareeda has a lot of good videos on his channel, Tupper's video is great to start with

[heady smelt]

Hmm... so Runescape 3D models are not allowed on VRChat?

I will need to research on how to make the Ultra Poly Runescape Models in VRChat -- My only research that I can think of is figuring out how to turn UVs based off materials and convert those materials into one image; there is a way to copy UVS and to turn them into an image but to turn colors and make them one image based off the UV..

That is the only way I feel you can put a RS Model into VRChat with full Optimization

So I think the only way to do Low-Poly RS Models for VRChat is UV-Snap Shot; go into Photoshop and basically try to geometrically color in within the UVs. Then RS Models can be uploaded with high Optimization; 1 Skin Mesh; 1 Material Mesh and under 9k or less

[amber hemlock]

@heady smelt What issue are you having with low poly models?

[heady smelt]

No issue; just trying to turn the model into an UV image with all its textures (with no images just colors) intacted

[pure bridge]

oh

uh

ignore what i just said

yall didnt see anything

[heady smelt]

Also I found out Optimization issues:: the most common area >>

[pure bridge]

definitely didnt respond to an optimization question an entire hour ago > >

[heady smelt]

So like it's the Materials and Mesh area that have issues lol

[amber hemlock]

Cat material combiner can bake in all texture and colors to a single texture atlas, don't know if that's what you mean though

[storm ingot]

check on ngons these can mess up alot too

[heady smelt]

I guess that could work; better than my idea than just drawing and coloring them in.

[heady smelt]

So reason why I need to combine colors is because of this knuckles here

It has too many Mateials and can be turned into 1 material ;c

And then you have this mess.. with 204 Materials

[shut widget]

g

[heady smelt]

Fully Optimized Knuckles.

Finished recording for my Avatar Optimization Tutorial Video.. now I can voice over the pieces that occurred and make simple 3 minute video on how to Optimize an Avatar short amount time nobody needs 10 min video

[amber hemlock]

@heady smelt What is that chart I keep seeing? Are you making that manually?

[heady smelt]

It just a Manual chart using the JoJo STAND Power Template as Reference; and just throwing the main areas for Optimization

There are other ones; but those are just the main ones

So For example; this is a SUPER BALANCED and OPTIMIZED Avatar; as it passes all the tests

[pine flame]

What is the script you use to generate that graph chart thing

[heady smelt]

It's just Illustrator xD

[pine flame]

Oh well it looks nice, haha

[fair breach]

when i enter play mode usually only the play button gets highlight but now the play and pause gets highlighted,and when i try to upload avatar it doesnt work,even if i switch the scene to game i cant click anything naming avatar and stuff

T-T

[pine flame]

Click the pause button it should unpause

[fair breach]

i tried and it doesnt

[pine flame]

Are there any errors in the console?

[fair breach]

is it because of vrik

another avatar works but this doesnt

[pine flame]

Did you put an ik component on the model?

[fair breach]

yes i have vrik and ik execution order script

its ok now '-'

thank u synergiance for helping

[pine flame]

Glad it helped!

[heady smelt]

You know what I realized; everyone's avatars unless they are Knuckles = Not Optimized

[heady smelt]

So like -- are the issues in the Pub caused by people with Un-Optimized Avatars? hmm? 🤔 --- Description even says "Please use Optimized Avatars" So.. it must be. xD

[surreal topaz]

The description of the Pug says "please use an optimized avatar" which is good advice for everywhere else, too

[pine flame]

Mine are fairly optimized, my target is good, goal is excellent, and I don’t go above medium unless for good reason. None of these are knuckles

I even have an excellent TDA Miku with tons of effects

[dark storm]

yeah most people's avatars have giant unnecessary dynamic bone chains

so it instantly eats up all your CPU

using the safety performance setting to limit dynamic bones is probably one of the best things they've added yet

[pine flame]

Maybe I can write a script that optimizes skirts

Like merges bone chains together

[still perch]

cats has bone merging.

[pine flame]

It has per bone chain merging

But 2 dimensional merging I haven’t seen

Normally on mmd skirts you see 8 chains of bones

If you want to merge them you actually need to divide the weight of half of the bone chains between each of their neighbors

[surreal topaz]

Oh yeah, that's true

That would be great actually

[amber hemlock]

Regular blender can do that, it's vertex mix modifier

set to ADD mode

[pine flame]

Automagically?

[amber hemlock]

uh, i mean, things are only so complicated. Vertex Mix Modifier is there for all your add/subtract/replace one vert group from another needs. you just tell it where to take the weights and where to put them.

you get a live preview and "apply" confirms the changes

it's not a simple one button thing like cats does, but not everything can be simplified to a button.

it is pretty darn simple as is 😮

[pine flame]

That’s one bone at a time, too much effort, rather script it

Then others can benefit from my labor

[stoic heron]

Hey @pine flame, can I PM you?

[pine flame]

What for?

[stoic heron]

I'm trying to learn 3d-modelling and stuff through online tutorials, but there's some specific stuff about VRC that I can't find an answer for. Probably because I'm dumb and don't know the keywords, I'm kinda looking for someone I can PM and bother about some questions every now and then.

[pine flame]

You can ask questions here, the people here will be more available than any one person, plus, they’ll know more of the answers. Yes you may need to wait sometimes if it’s slow at that time but if anyone knows the answer they’ll help you.

[stoic heron]

Alright, thank you.

[sweet mason]

be dumb is not a good thing to say

[austere geyser]

with an avatar that has an excessive amount of facial bones how do you go about that? (i can't seem to merge them) the bones aren't really used for anything other than weight.

[surreal topaz]

You can't seem to merge them why?

A large amount of face bones can apparently cause local lag

[amber hemlock]

Seeing a lot of unitypackage with bad texture settings. If any of your textures contains NO transparency, not even cutout, be sure to set transparency to none on the texture inspector - it makes your textures use 25% less memory.

[lapis vigil]

🤔 interesting

[austere geyser]

well i can't merge them. i attempt to merge but it doesn't merge them

[surreal topaz]

Generally Unity should detect the lack of an alpha channel and not import as RGBA

[amber hemlock]

Not happening for me

sRGBA with solid opague A still come in as sRGBA

Changing alpha to none changes to sRGB and has the expected 25% smaller file size

If it’s doing anything post-upload I wouldn’t know but it certainly isn’t saying so

[surreal topaz]

It isn't doing anything after upload

But basically if your image has an alpha channel Unity will probably import it as such

If you actively strip it out entirely, the setting won't make a difference

[amber hemlock]

Yeah gimp loves to add a full alpha channel even if entirely unused maybe photoshop strips it but gimp you have to explicitly delete the channels

[surreal topaz]

Probably yeah

Haven't had that happen often

Also texture baking in Blender only enables the alpha channel once it encounters a bit of alpha

Which is why the first bake has black transparency and the second bake works fine

[sudden jewel]

AFAIK "deleting" an alpha channel from a PNG just makes the alpha channel opaque

I don't believe PNG supports straight-up missing a channel

[heady smelt]

🅱upper may I have a bedtime story before I go to sleep

[still perch]

No. And this isn't random chat

[heady smelt]

😔

[marsh trail]

In paintdotnet you can actually save the png as a 24bit png, essentially making it not use alpha (32bit is 24bit + alpha in a nutshell)

1) PNG-8, which stands for 8 bit, supports up to 256 colour indexed palette. Which works very similar to GIF files.

2) PNG-24 works very similar to PNG-8, it however supports over 16 million colours (2^24 = 16,777,216 to be exact).

3) PNG-32 which is pretty much PNG-24 + Full alpha transparency

I've read around that some people convert images to jpg and then back to png's to remove any possible alpha which is a horrible idea as jpg is a lossy format, so that conversion is going to cost you quality in the long-run
Filling up an entire layer under the image with a solid color and merging it should be enough to make an opaque png, 'less even that exports as a 32bit png on your program of choice, in which case i got nothing

If anybody's curious about checking their png's in more detail, perhaps this would suffice
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/apps/pngcheck.html

[amber hemlock]

In Gimp it’s just colors > transparency > delete alpha channel. Top bar changes from sRGBA to sRGB

then the png exporter will export 24bit which is all you need (alpha is just a 4th color channel making it 32bit)

My point was just textures that use no transparency can save on texture memory by telling unity to not use the alpha channel in unity’s texture inspector. Then you don’t even need to open it up in an image editor, but do at least one of them, on a 2048x2048 atlas it will save 2 mb per texture

[teal osprey]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/390924372782612480/583427308401066034/unknown.png

Why does his toros yeet into his legs.

[sweet mason]

Reset the pose maybe. Did you overight the file?

[heady smelt]

O_O

[wise flume]

what would be recomended settigns for soundbits?
Basicly like an emote saying hi etc I want it to be on short distance so they would be kinda directedto ppl close to me rather than whole world

[lavish prism]

Hey there! Has anyone had massive performance decreases ever since Networked IK was released?

A friend and me are trying to figure out the cause of this. It never was a problem until the networked IK update. is is really just the mere presence of a number of bones that suddenly causes this massive drops in performance? (even without any dynamic bones it still does the same)

[heady smelt]

https://i.gyazo.com/2c4ec9d1633aa345654ef2d1e77ef160.png when i combine the materials from here i seem to have 4 eyes instead of just 1 in the atlas

https://i.gyazo.com/e117434c4f165ef39f10b416523da634.png

there's no "same materials" to combine in CATS

https://i.gyazo.com/6888aa901f6f1e817a9de2e7bed0052e.png

none of the other materials use this texture

i have some other stuff repeated too but the eye is the big one and it repeats 4 times

[subtle spear]

My mouth on my avatar continues to spasm, when I do nothing his eyes close and he suddenly opens his mouth wide open

Immediately closing it again right after opening it, what is going on?

[heady smelt]

do you have visemes

i noticed that when i had lip sync set to default

[subtle spear]

I do

But 1

actually

There's only one thing wrong, it made visemes with the stupid hair

How do I fix that

@heady smelt

[heady smelt]

uh

what i'd do is select all the hair in blender and then shape propagate

while selected on Basis

https://i.gyazo.com/00cbf6c9936346b517cf1f2bf41a154e.png

you can press space to pull that menu up and search

i'm a noob at avatar stuff so idk if that's what'll fix it all though

[subtle spear]

Nervous noises

For the spazzing out face?

Apparently there are no jaw bones

So I'm going to force my avatar's mouth closed

Somehow

[heady smelt]

you shouldn't need a jaw bone

[subtle spear]

I don't know though, why this is happening

[heady smelt]

can you show me this:

https://i.gyazo.com/0c780f793037d5bd25b55c1f6eeb0e27.png

for your avatar

[subtle spear]

Um

There's nothing like that there

[heady smelt]

for "lip sync" what do you have selected

[subtle spear]

Viseme blend shape

[heady smelt]

now drag the body from the top left part of unity to the face mesh part in there

[subtle spear]

Alright

[heady smelt]

not from your assets at the bottom left, but from the scene in the top left

[subtle spear]

Ok, got that

[heady smelt]

ok, now do you have the visemes available

[subtle spear]

I have 1

[heady smelt]

did you generated visemes in blender

[subtle spear]

I did

Guess I'll go back?

[heady smelt]

when you click to assign them in unity, do they not show up?

[subtle spear]

Only 1 slot is available

[heady smelt]

uh

can you show me a screenshot

of your vrc_avatar descriptor

[subtle spear]

Takes a second

Just hold on

Override empty doesn't mean anything, I made it

[heady smelt]

you selected "jaw flap blend shape"

pick "viseme blend shape"

[subtle spear]

oh

oops//

[heady smelt]

now just match em up

and tesst it out

[subtle spear]

Will that fix the spazzing out

[heady smelt]

it should

also add me ingame so i can see your little catboy or whatever it is

[subtle spear]

I will

Yikes

His body crumpled up for a second before going back to normal

[heady smelt]

while talking?

[subtle spear]

No, just loading in...

That's really weird lol

Freaking weird...

I didn't know that's how cats were made

Give me a min to check something

[heady smelt]

you good?

@subtle spear

[subtle spear]

Friended

Also

Spasm

Did not fix

[heady smelt]

ok

did you do some decimating?

earlier?

[subtle spear]

None

[heady smelt]

ok

can you select the face, eyes, etc, everything that's part of that system?

and hide it?

the whites of the eyes, eyebrows, mouth, eveyrthing

[subtle spear]

I can

[heady smelt]

https://i.gyazo.com/123e98fe4e7ff0133cecc80437565922.png

like this

so we don't break the shape keys

[subtle spear]

Oh

[heady smelt]

then press a to select everything

[subtle spear]

Wait

I'm sorry

[heady smelt]

ok

[subtle spear]

I'm not in blender

[heady smelt]

let me make a cup of tea but basically i want you to hide the face so we don't touch it when we try to fix the rest

you can press h to hide what you selected in blender

ctrl l will select stuff related to what you select btw

you'll also need to be in edit mode

i'll try to explain once i'm back in a few min

[subtle spear]

I can't put my fbx back into unity..

I mean blender

[still perch]

import it?

[subtle spear]

I just had to right click and show it in explorere

Nvm

I'm dumb.

[heady smelt]

im back

[subtle spear]

Just hide everything on the head?

[heady smelt]

the face, eyes, eyebrows, etc

keep the hair there

[subtle spear]

This is difficult..

[heady smelt]

try ctrl+l when selected on something

you'll see what it does

thats an L

ctrl+L

[subtle spear]

Got them al

Leaving ears alone cause it's hair

I think

[heady smelt]

now watch this

press alt h

that can unhide all the hidden stuff

but, anyway, go ahed and keep it hidden

[subtle spear]

Gotcha

[heady smelt]

https://i.gyazo.com/bfaf8a7a73f0f6a29661c91c6769c415.png

navigate over on the right here to where you see Shape Keys

as you scroll through them you shouldn't see anything move since all the stuff you hid should be used by those shape keys

do you see anything move?

by scroll through i mean you can click on a key to see what it would do

obviously blink should only blink

if it moves your hair then that's a problem we can fix

[subtle spear]

I don't see where shape keys are

Am I stupid?

[heady smelt]

i was where you are now a few weeks ago

you're not stupid, blender is dumb and convoluted

but basically on the top right click body then that upside down triangle thing

1s

https://i.gyazo.com/60ae8eae84f3b8d980c13badbe64422a.mp4

[subtle spear]

o.o

[heady smelt]

did that help

[subtle spear]

I'm magic

Now

Or something

Yes it helped

[heady smelt]

so if the stuff is unhidden you should see it move on that shape key

like blink youir eyes will be closed, etc

does anything move that's not supposed to on those keys?

for the viseme 'aa' does the hair move or something?

[subtle spear]

Let's see

[heady smelt]

you wont see stuff move unless you're in edit mode btw

you can toggle mode by having the cursor over the scene and pressing tab

https://i.gyazo.com/8d97e6c74573b6f88948b1b9d6567766.png

[subtle spear]

I checked

It's moving

[heady smelt]

it tells you towards the bottom left

the hair is?

[subtle spear]

No

The mouth

[heady smelt]

thats good

[subtle spear]

As it's supposed to

[heady smelt]

go through all the keys and see if anything looks weird

[subtle spear]

Looking now

Nothing looks weird

[heady smelt]

do you mind if i come see you ingame

to see what it looks like

[subtle spear]

One sec

I'm switching between computers so it takes a bit

SOrry

[heady smelt]

i'm not in a rush

you lemme know and i'll hop on

join me wherever i happen to be ingame at the time

[hazy barn]

Has anyone ever run into this problem before? My model looks fine in unity, but appears to be missing textures in the eyes and hands once uploaded...

[wide trail]

nooooo clue

im new here

[hazy barn]

edit--shader issue, setting eye texture to cubed cutout lite culling off and gloves to cubed unlit shadowed fixed it.

[woeful gorge]

anyone know how to fix this? it's as if the spine doesn't exist

i get this error but don't really understand it

[solid bronze]

Have you applied the Full body fix in blender with CATS?

[woeful gorge]

no i don't think so? didn't even know that existed

[woeful gorge]

lol did the full body fix and it got even worse

[sweet mason]

Reset the pose if you update the unity file

Pumpkin is a good plugin you should have in your project

[woeful gorge]

oh it worked! thank u so much ❤

[north pewter]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm trying to combine materials using cats blender plugin, but for some reason with certain materials, it just combines them and doesn't ask me where to save it, so I have no idea where it's gone... any help? is it easy enough to manually combine textures?

[iron falcon]

Idk if this is the right place but why does my avatar appear very dark in Unity?

I was following a video and it said it's because of the shaders that I have to switch to standard, I did that but nothing changed

[amber hemlock]

Poppy when I get that error I usually redo the unity skeleton by setting it back to generic and then humanoid again

that dumps it's outdated data from before you updated the FBX

Also if you ever need to go back to blender from unity, I recommend opening your blend file from right before you exported the avatar. this causes less problems than opening the FBX you exported, it usually currupts your model that's already in scenes

[pine flame]

Also always save just before exporting, for whatever reason saving after exporting adds quite a lot to file size

[half stratus]

Any idea why cats' atlas tool isn't working for me?

it just makes a 1kb file that's 4 pixels

[calm spade]

For the material combiner ?

You can also ask directly in the Cats Discord, they're super helpful

[half stratus]

oh coo

[amber hemlock]

Are the textures showing up in blender? Before the model is fixed, the textures are not actually assigned to the model yet, so material combiner won't find them.

[rose berry]

yo guys, if i were to use 3 materials on 1 avatar, is having 1 single texture atlas (and having all 3 materials referencing the single texture atlas) better than having 3 textures?

[surreal topaz]

Yes

3 materials with the same texture is better than 3 different textures

[amber hemlock]

unless you need vastly different shader parameters you could make them the same material and use masks to let your shader treat different areas of the atlas appropriately; tho you’d need to know shader code

I needed separate materials for backface culling on/off until I did it in a Shader with a mask

One small texture mask in exchange for one less material

[sand oak]

https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/bwaj27/discussion_vrchat_going_on_about_polygon_limits/ how accurate is this?

[surreal topaz]

It's misinformation for the most part.

"Polys don't matter XDDD" is a meme. Polys matter.

There is so much misinformation in that post, it's hard to figure out where to begin.

First he says:

And even my own avatars reach upwords of 200K, and my group of friends on Quest don't even lose a frame around me.

Then he literally criticizes the exact same statement by jokingly saying:

"But OP! Me and my friends don't lag when we're around eachother! You don't know what you're talking about!"

He also utterly ignores the performance impact of mesh skinning

[sand oak]

what's that

[surreal topaz]

Avatars use "skinned mesh renderers" 99% of the time, so any mesh that has bones or shape keys

Before rendering the mesh, the mesh first has to be transformed based on the bones and shape keys

[sand oak]

ok

[surreal topaz]

Which takes up CPU time and possibly GPU

[polar bolt]

When it comes to polys on avatars - remember that they are skinned - moving and each vertex position calculated from (usually) multiple bones - even if skinning is gpu assisted, its still not 100% so all that vertex data gets bounced back and forth between RAM and VRAM - which is costly

And yeah, put blendshapes on top

[sand oak]

is there anything that can be done to improve performance for that?

[surreal topaz]

I've seen "Good" performance avatars that lagged immensely as soon as they started talking lmao

I'm not sure if this setting is respected, but setting the quality on the skinned mesh renderer to 1 or 2 bones should help performance a bit.

I think VRChat has it set to 2 by default though, so leaving it on auto is fine.

Other than that, keeping poly count low is a good idea.

Easy rule of thumb for PC: VRChat's performance ranks are quite accurate when it comes to most categories.

Disabled components are not counted fairly though (such as disabled animators for inventory systems)

And neither are enabled particle systems with disabled emission

Lmao, and then in that thread, the guy says "when my Quest friends go to the Pug, it lags because of materials and not because of polys"

You know, the Pug. That world that doesn't have a Quest version.

[heady smelt]

The pug being optimized in general is a joke

[surreal topaz]

I blame the game more so than the map

[still perch]

The Pug West is also a "The Pug" so i dont see the problem

[pine flame]

Pug west nobody goes to, also its occlusion culling is incredibly bad, it’s got literally everything stripped out of it, it’s a joke bringing that world up when talking about quest as it reflects the dev teams attitudes toward the quest which is strip everything out of this game to the point where it’s plain old unenjoyable

[surreal topaz]

He's not talking about the pug west lol

It only has 8 players

And there's no way that this many quest avatars have too many materials

Also I agree with what Synergiance said lol

VRC on the Quest was a mistake for the core playerbase

But if it brings in more people they probably consider it a win

[surreal topaz]

Lmao the guy in the thread Szena posted is digging himself deeper by the minute

"Using DDS for smaller textures is bad"

?????

Although the guy already lost all credibility when he said "polygons don't matter"

[heady smelt]

the full pug had a quest version for a short time, dunno how they managed to upload it, but quest users i took there reported less than 20 fps, and i happened to take them to crowded pugs typically, so probably many users (although, robots) around

polys do matter but if vrchat wanted to truly optimize super well they would get rid of the needless amount of transparency too

and as far as the little arguments over small polycounts go, you won't see an appreciable difference really, even with some 3 million polygon table sitting in the hub the other day i didn't drop under 90, but of course it does all add up

most people with '200k plygons but dont lag their friends' just don't do dumb stuff like have 200k dynamic bone collision checks too

[stable star]

Quest avatars have no transparent shader for them, except the particle one that doesn't look right on avatars in most situations

No cutout either

[heady smelt]

quest -avatars- don't... but the menu, nameplates, etc all do

[stable star]

Pretty sure that's all ui

[heady smelt]

quest users tell me they stutter just opening up the menu most of the time 😦

[stable star]

Not mesh

[heady smelt]

transparency is still transparency and has a huge effect on something as fill-rate limited as the quest

but, anyway, i shouldn't involve myself in these discussions any more, the canny post is already up

since it applies to more than just quest users, some people here may be interested since it suggests ways to improve performance outside of just some flat limits on each platform: https://vrchat.canny.io/feature-requests/p/quest-avatar-limits

[surreal topaz]

Transparency is benign enough on desktop that it won't matter there

Also, static meshes with 200k polys are not as bad as 200k poly skinned meshes that you might find on a very poorly optimized avatar

[woeful ember]

yeah really a ridiculous thread (reddit)

[rose berry]

when i first heard about quest i was hoping it would encourage people to start optimizing their shitty 100 dynamic bone unmerged mesh with like 50 materials lmao

this wasnt what i had in mind

[woeful ember]

people want instant gratification that's the issue for the large majority

combine that with misinformation like that reddit thread for example and it's nasty combination

[rose berry]

misinfo isnt even worst
90% of people just have that "i dont care about optimization" attitude

[woeful ember]

anyways i wanna see options for limiting materials&meshes for avatars

[rose berry]

but still complains when they drop below 30fps

[woeful ember]

yes the "i don't care" which is essentially instant gratification in a sense

they don't wanna care but expect instant gratification

[rose berry]

unity lowers the barrier for content creation

[woeful ember]

Not to say people don't have prioritys and perfectly fine logic and reasoning

[rose berry]

sometimes a bit too much

tbh that reddit post

at first i thought it was a massive shitpost

like

how can i tell what is satire when people really are more stupid than i ever expected

[woeful ember]

i'm fairly positive it's misinformation as rokk has deduced

a troll/misinformative shitpost

sad thing is that people upvoted it

[rose berry]

polygons dont matter

nice

joining meshes not important but do it anyway unless u want to animate

what the

actually the more i read the more i lose my shit lmao

[amber hemlock]

I am actually considering a quest specifically for pc vrchat streaming just to lose the cable

Cheaper than vive + wireless and probably same quality

[shut sequoia]

Can already tell you that's a massive slog on your PC, a friend was doing that last night and he was dying lol

[surreal topaz]

Yeah, you're uh

Taking a CPU heavy game

And putting it through one of the most CPU-intensive applications you could think of

[shut sequoia]

For essentially no reason.

[surreal topaz]

Vive wireless is a better purchase if you want to go cable-less

People seem to be quite happy with it

But it's expensive because HTC.

[wary wolf]

Do bigger textures just take longer to load or are they detrimental to performance? I always atlas my models, but upping the texture quality in Unity seems to strain the system quite a lot.
Something I picked up on Reddit: do shape keys affect performance when vertices remain in the same position? I use "shape propogate" a lot when they break or I forget I was working in a shape key, so technically, my entire body has a vertex position assigned for every shape key.
So after going through the optimization tips, I got those questions left. Damn this turned out lengthier than I thought...

[woeful ember]

biggers textures basically just take up more memory

i wouldn't be concerned about using 4k for an atlas'd avatar

8k is probably overkill in most circumstances

as for shape propagate idk how it technically stores and handles it

but if it simply stores changes from A to B for example then probably not

[wary wolf]

I gotta check whether my textures are within the 4k limit actually (there's quite a lot coming together for skin, clothes, hair, props etc) but that's definitely manageable.
The shape keys literally make the mesh remain static (since I used to run into instances of my body exploding in shape keys when combining meshes) so nothing special about them.

Thanks for the response! ♥

[woeful ember]

there is probably a few scenarios in which texture size matters but 4k for only one texture isn't bad

but if you can get away with 2k by all means go for it assuming the visual loss isn't significant

[buoyant holly]

considering you're basically just dealing with color gradients & shaded colors a little bit of resolution loss isn't going to hurt

[heady smelt]

it doesn't -seem- like shape propagate causes performance issues, i've decimated a lot of stuff down and had to use it quite a bit

[hazy prairie]

yo i need help with the atlas optimization

Whenever i press save atlas to it only combines my materials

and it changes my model to orange

can you help?

what do you need help with?

[amber hemlock]

Where does Toony Colors Pro 2 stand in terms of optimization for VRChat?

[distant forge]

I don't think you're going to see much difference between various shaders unless they do heavy work like raymarching, refraction/reflection (GrabPass) or use multiple passes like an outlune (though 2 passes for an outline is pretty ok compared to most other things--no worse than an extra material)

The main issue TCP brings is it uses lots of keywords (don't know if it's improved in v2)

Keywords aren't an optimization but it's like using a slot permanently. Once all 256 are used, some graphical features like bloom can malfunction and some shaders don't load, and vrchat must be restarted.

Most vrchat optimized shaders have stopped using keywords entirely. The author of Toony might not be engaged in the vrchat conmunity (i don't actually know who makes it) so it might still use keywords

[rare crypt]

Can someone tell me why this

[heady smelt]

Are you talking about the console error

Also please take actual screenshots and not a picture of your monitor

[amber hemlock]

Casual unity dev has an interesting combination of skills x)

[rare crypt]

This does not make any sense

[rare crypt]

I need help with this

[amber hemlock]

I recommend using your print screen key and paste here instead of taking camera photos lol

Don’t worry about the console. It’s always going to have random errors

[opaque vale]

Based on Tupper's tutorial, how do I separate the face expression textures to the main atlas textures?

do I just leave the facial expression texture alone and merge the other textures?

[surreal topaz]

Lol I recognize that model

Arlvit's Aya

You should first atlas everything as a whole

Then later on, you manually select the transparent bits (such as the blush)

And assign them to a new "transparent" material

Which is a copy of your atlas material

I intend to make an addon that makes manual atlasing easier, but I haven't had the time lately

Ideally you would just click a button and it would scale and align the UV's similar to material combiner

[opaque vale]

yeah but it just tears the materials and make them into rice kernels lol

So I make two different materials, one for the normal texture, and for the 'transparent' material?

[surreal topaz]

Well first you atlas it all as one material

Including putting it on the same texture

Then later on (as one of the last steps), you make a new material and give it the same texture as the atlas material.

Then you assign the transparent bits to that material

This leaves you with one opaque and one transparent material, both using the same texture

[opaque vale]

one opaque and one transparent material?

[surreal topaz]

Yeah, after you make the atlas, you add a new material there

Copy the Atlas material and paste it into the new one, call it "Transparency" or whatever

In mesh edit mode, select the transparent bits (such as the blush), then assign them to the Transparency material

I really need to update my texture atlas tutorial once I get the addon finished

[opaque vale]

Something like this?

[surreal topaz]

Almost. It seems you also selected the eyes. Those aren't transparent, so those shouldn't be selected.

Make sure to select the atlas texture at the bottom of the 2D/UV window

So you can see what you're selecting

Then use the B and C keys, as well as CTRL+L (selects all linked) to carefully only select the Blush, Gloom and nosebleed parts

And maybe the eye highlights. They're the transparent white parts next to the eye texture.

But that's preference.

Let me pull up another model very similar to yours

I zoomed in a little bit on the part that contains the most transparent bits:

You want to make sure that you only select these to assign to your transparent material, because the other parts are not transparent.

And for the part with the eyes, I only did this one:

The eye highlights on these models looks fine with cutout, but transparency on the highlights makes it look like "intended"

[opaque vale]

Well, I cant bake the texture no more because of an error

"Circular reference in texture stack"

But I did select the eyes and emotions

[surreal topaz]

You may have to restart Blender. I'm not sure why that happens

[opaque vale]

Ah, got the textures back

So I just assign them to the "transparency" material?

[surreal topaz]

Yes

The bits that have to be transparent

Then you can give that material a different shader in Unity

[opaque vale]

just hit "assign" to the transparency material?

[surreal topaz]

Yeah

[opaque vale]

Oh cool. thanks dude

[opaque vale]

eyy it works!

[opaque vale]

Ok, another problem...

Selecting cutout would give me a hard edge onto the blushes, but the eyes wont disappear

But if I put on fade, the blushes looks normal, but the eyes become transparent...

[sweet mason]

Use different material if you use fade

[amber hemlock]

wonder why the LOD component isn't whitelisted

could shove my quest version on my PC version at distance

[marsh trail]

@amber hemlock LOD's are whitelisted though :o
Atleast for worlds, think they're buggy with avatars

Something about literally all of the LOD's rendering on mirrors or something for avatars

[amber hemlock]

It blocks upload for me

[marsh trail]

Oh then they blacklisted it for avatars

[amber hemlock]

Had no idea it was whitelisted for worlds though, nice info

[marsh trail]

It's hella useful for performance

[amber hemlock]

Yeah, it would be for avatars too

[marsh trail]

Sadly as i mentioned prior, i think all of the LOD's rendered on mirrors at once

For avatars that is

[heady smelt]

there is one big problem with LOD groups: if people play vrchat at Desktop Low or VR Low you will get the lowest LOD meshes always

[amber hemlock]

Honestly? I'd consider that expected behavoir

[heady smelt]

so be careful with that, every player might see different things

seeing ONLY very low LOD is not expected behaviour I would think

I mean if you get closer it will still be low poly

[marsh trail]

Sounds like the system is working to me, people playing on the low end would assumedly have a lower LOD spectrum, not full-blown lowest LOD but, lower

[heady smelt]

that's not great

[amber hemlock]

Yeah sounds more like something unity is just doing automagically

[marsh trail]

Well, technically, a higher LOD group but lower Level of Detail in general, since LOD 0 is the highest Level of Detail

[heady smelt]

just fair warning that people will different versions depending on vrchat quality settings and it's pretty extreme

with lower I mean lower fidelity

[marsh trail]

Eyup, say LOD 5 per example (assuming it as the lowest detail)

I can see that being a nuisance to users, but helpful for performance

[amber hemlock]

Good for desktop users where visuals really just take a back seat to social

[heady smelt]

I wouldn't advise using LOD groups in vrchat at all

[marsh trail]

Why not?

[amber hemlock]

Not even for a "if you can see this, you're on Low detail mode" signs? 😄

[heady smelt]

because with the vrchat quality settings it doesn't really work as you would want it to

since most people play in 'low' you get only one LOD version, the worst

[amber hemlock]

but yeah that is pretty standard in unity games, where quality settings also make LOD's falloff quicker

[heady smelt]

we don't really have any control over it

[marsh trail]

Not over that setting unfortunatelly, LOD's can be fine tuned as much as you like, but if it shifts to lowest on low, it's quite the pickle...

[heady smelt]

90% of people will have that

[amber hemlock]

That's kind of bad though, isn't it? Here's a quality setting that 90% of people use, so we need to force the game to look good on it's lowest setting

[heady smelt]

set up occlusion and maybe even doing you own LOD switching of meshes based on distance

the LOD system is not really useful right now, the camera also seems to judge distance differently than in the editor

[marsh trail]

Then keep a lower but still decent quality LOD, you make them yourself afterall, it's good practice on worlds and improves overall performance

[heady smelt]

don't count on LOD to make anything easier or be useful

[amber hemlock]

I wonder if VR worldscale messes with distances

[marsh trail]

It doesn't make it easier, but it does improve performance, you need to set them up yourself afterall, if anything it's more work to do it than naught

[heady smelt]

how does it improve performance when everyone sees the same meshes?

it's just CPU overhead at that point and slow everything down

optimise in a different way

[marsh trail]

If no LOD was present then they'd see the highest quality

Hence, still a performance boost

[heady smelt]

you're just wasting bandwidth, noone is going to see the high poly versions

maybe one or two people who run at vr high

[marsh trail]

Or everyone that runs on desktop without a low tweak

[heady smelt]

you'd be better off making two worlds, a high budget and low budget one

using lod just forces people to download assets they'll never see

something to think about

[amber hemlock]

Good point

[marsh trail]

And yet, for everybody else that can, their performance will be equaly stable, it's a double edged sword

[heady smelt]

use it when you make your own unity games, that's what it's for, in vrchat, it's not very useful

[amber hemlock]

I would think that could be fixed though. No reason the VRLow quality preset needs to slam LODs

and if it didn't, we'd have a very decent optimization method

[marsh trail]

Any canny about it?

[heady smelt]

another big issue is even when it works and people play at high quality settings the meshes will pop from one version to the next

and you won't have too much control on when they change

looking very amateurish and maybe even dropping a bunch of frames while it switches meshes

[marsh trail]

You can change their range to shift between, but i think the sudden pop is unavoidable

[heady smelt]

trust me, in vrchat client it doesn't shift in the same range as in your editor

so you have no real control over it

[marsh trail]

And you honestly shouldn't be losing frames on an LOD switch unless it's absolutely massive

[amber hemlock]

the pop is just how lod works. well made models don't visually pop, they change detail when you can't see that detail anymore

[marsh trail]

From 12k to 100k per example

[heady smelt]

don't take my word for it, try it yourself 😉

[marsh trail]

I did

[amber hemlock]

Well, there wasn't a canny so I made one. https://vrchat.canny.io/bug-reports/p/vrlow-quality-setting-forces-all-lodgroups-to-lowest-quality-model

As for the distance falloff, if that's a problem, could always canny that one too. The worst that can happen is they aren't interested

[sturdy socket]

Off the vrc imposed lod is way to aggressive

[marsh trail]

Idealy you should have 3 LOD groups, although you can have more for smoother transitions, but the filesize will start stacking up

[sturdy socket]

Congrats adeon

You have mail got boosters

[sweet mason]

why not change update rate of the animation

[marsh trail]

With LOD Group
+Better Performance
+Quality Transitions Seamlessly (if done well)
+Good for both high end and low end systems
-Larger Filesize
-Users in Low only see Lowest Detail
-----------------------------------------------
No LOD Groups
+Smaller Filesize
+All Users see the same thing
+/- Good/Bad for High/Low end systems based on detail
-Map must be far more optimized and details may be lost entirely in the process

Das all i can think of atm

[heady smelt]

this should move to #world-optimization but again: the way it's set up in vrchat means you only see LOD0 at 50cm away ...

seamless transitions are impossible

[heady smelt]

@heady smelt have you found any way to fix that besides using nvidia inspector and focing negative LOD bias?

oh, that's something else, Negative LOD Bias is a texture filtering setting in your GPU drivers, some games try to sharpen textures by giving negative texture filtering settings, you can clamp that to combat texture 'shimmering'

it has nothing to do with Unity LOD which is showing different versions of an object according to distance etc

ah right it's textures only not different objects

ye ye ... it uses the term LOD because it concerns making smaller copies of textures (mipmapping) to show when an object is further away

this is all handled by your GPU drivers, Unity LOD groups is the game engine swapping different meshes for different distances

[tranquil sparrow]

Hey I need some help with Joining meshes for my Nanachi avatar, I have them all selected and I'm hitting ctrl+J but its not doing anything, dunno if if Im doing something stupid or not.
I've narrowed it down to the pieces I need.

[candid sedge]

is that blender 2.8?

[tranquil sparrow]

Notta clue, that I'll have to figure out quickly

its 2.79

[candid sedge]

Tbh i'm not sure what those objects are "chests" "arms" "ears" but you could try saving removing those

then try joining them

if its breaks just reload save

[tranquil sparrow]

the objects were originally like this

cause its different parts to switch around

wait what?

[candid sedge]

i dont think something can be joined if they are both the child object of another thing

[still perch]

Please do not mention that site here @tranquil sparrow

[candid sedge]

but im not sure what that symbol is

[tranquil sparrow]

Ah oki, I didn't know wasn't allowed to >.>

[candid sedge]

its not welcome in a lot of places

[tranquil sparrow]

Why's that? I've never heard of it unliked in servers

[candid sedge]

did you try yet?

[tranquil sparrow]

When I unlink them they disappear from the list but not the model

[candid sedge]

so when two meshes are no longer the child of two different ones can you join them?

[tranquil sparrow]

No I can't

they've disappeared from the list

[candid sedge]

can you take a picture

of what your trying to join

[candid sedge]

they are not even removed

[tranquil sparrow]

Cause I had to undo it, cause when i removed them it disappeared from the list but not the model

[candid sedge]

the grey ones are not meshes tho i think

[tranquil sparrow]

they aren't, they're groups

[candid sedge]

so just remove them and join the meshes

[tranquil sparrow]

when I unlink the meshes from the groups though they disappear from the list

[candid sedge]

like deletes the mesh?

[tranquil sparrow]

https://i.gyazo.com/ed6928455cbb8b26812961b6e1e4854f.gif

[candid sedge]

try clicking the mesh and selecting alt+p and select clear and keep transformations

[tranquil sparrow]

Nothing comes up when I hit alt+p

[candid sedge]

ctrl alt g when you have a mesh selected under a group?

[tranquil sparrow]

still nothing

[candid sedge]

well maybe just using buttons will be the way for you then do you have a tab on the left side of your screen called relations?

[tranquil sparrow]

Yeah

[candid sedge]

try the make single user button and if not remove from group button

[tranquil sparrow]

What do I select from here?

[candid sedge]

first two

maybe all idfk xD i dont have to deal with stuff like this

trial and error

[tranquil sparrow]

its not doing anything

[calm spade]

You tried selecting one in your scene, then Ctrl +j ?

[hidden merlin]

Your outliner is in groups mode

Search for objects

maybe it fixes

[wheat plank]

you still having issues @tranquil sparrow

?

[tranquil sparrow]

I found out it’s blender itself, it’s not responding to any hotkeys for some reason

[pure bridge]

i have a but of a dumby wumby question that someoen will probably have to DM me the answer for safety

how do i not make a crasher on accident?

see, i have a couple of ambitious animation projects that i want to get out

such as cool laser beams or magical spells for staffs im gonna add to future avatar projects

but one more immediate one is something im doing for a friend

which is just shooting webs that stick to things, spiderman style

here's my beef

im probably going to be doing mainly particle and trail stuff for things like that right

and obviously i dont want to go overboard on my or anyone else's PCs

but i certainly dont want to end up crashing anyone with what was supposed to be a pretty animation

so im just wondering how to avoid that sort of thing? is it a matter of particle count? shader? both?

[calm spade]

Don't overdo it ?

[pure bridge]

iguess

i try not to anyway

[calm spade]

And test it out with friends before

And don't use it around people who didn't agree to it

[pure bridge]

most particles ive ever had on an anim was like

200

all spread out

seeing as how the default particle system starts woith 1k, thats prob not a whole lot

cant see myself even breaching 600

[calm spade]

Yeah, that's a very low amount

[amber hemlock]

When I use CATS atlas, myAtlas is being generated in indexed color mode, which reduces the color fidelity by a ton. Can't figure out why, all my source textures are saved as RGB.

[sweet mason]

Use the tab for atlas insted of the one in cats

[sweet mason]

So you can custom all kind of option

[heady smelt]

@calm spade speaking of crashers, i had heard that the particle limiter thing inthe config didn't work anymore, and i've definitely seen it not work to prevent crashers, is there a way that we can prevent it still? or would you just reccomend hiding particles/lights for people i don't trust

[still perch]

Particles aren't the only thing that is abused to crash. So it will not be helpfull if other things are abused for crashing.

[calm spade]

@heady smelt Hiding it from non friends is usually the best way yes

[heady smelt]

i'll just continue to block anyone that has annoying shaders/particles and hope that trust system drops help discourage

it would be cool if we could white/blacklist specific shaders/etc but i understand that's a lot of work even for the people using the white/blacklists

[surreal topaz]

The difference is that having the particle limiter at all disabled PlayerLocal collision

Which stopped pretty much all particle crashes without turning them off entirely

[heady smelt]

The fact that people who code modded clients have already made and have been able to use shader blacklists that actually work and the vrc team hasn't kinda says something tbh

[still perch]

It's not that easy tho. The moment a official blacklist comes they'll make / mod the shaders so it's not on the list anymore.

Plust priority for the dev's is often hugely different from personal interests of players.

Don't forget this is an in progress game.

[heady smelt]

Trust me 90% of all crashing shaders are old and haven't been updated

[still perch]

Because there is no need to. Once there is, they will.

[heady smelt]

That's because the people who use them can't make their own so they use the old one that people who know how to make gave to them

[heady smelt]

"Plust priority for the dev's is often hugely different from personal interests of players." unironically a bad thing

you'd think the devs play enough to run into the same things we do as players and are similarly frustrated by it - the only thing that seperates us is that they can do something about it

dont mean to be harsh on the devs, i doubt their priorities are -actually- much different than regular players'

i don't know a single dev who wasn't a player first, anyway

[surreal topaz]

@heady smelt well only some of the devs play the game

Also their priorities are very much different from most players tbh

Just look at the highest voted canny posts that are either super low on the priority list or just ignored

[amber hemlock]

@sweet mason I don't have a tab for Atlas. what plugin is that?

[surreal topaz]

He means the material combiner addon separately I think

As opposed to the Cats auto atlas button

[sweet mason]

Cats ask you to dl something to merge material. That one can be use separately

And you have option

[amber hemlock]

Oh I could never get it working separately

The UI seems to be broken? It's all empty

[heady smelt]

So...
Game objects are impacting the performance rank now... I'm sorry but I fail to see how. Let's say you use 10 game objects to rotate and move 1 object in a certain way... it doesn't really make it less optimised, it just helps animators ect to do certain things easier... (talking about the new update that is)

[surreal topaz]

Disabled objects will now also count, which is utter BS.

Stuff like mesh swaps where only one mesh is active at a time is now gonna get you auto hidden

70k polys on a skinned mesh is fine, but 5001 polys on a mesh particle is obviously "super laggy" and deserves Very Poor

[heady smelt]

I mean, a box w 100 empty game objects under it is still just a box...

But no

Me unoptimized now

[trail yarrow]

yeah inventory systems are getting shit on here

I have about 40 empties for my inventory system

even though it's only to toggle 6 different objects

and my avatar itself is medium

[heady smelt]

It's a unnecessary feature

[trail yarrow]

like it's one thing to implement this, but to even count empty objects is ridiculous

it's not a good idea to start, but that makes it so much worse

[heady smelt]

I mean. Imagine like having 40 empty game objects on a box, and quest users cant see it😂

[trail yarrow]

lol

[heady smelt]

It's true tho

Like

Why empty game objects?

We have a particle limiter, If anything hidden skinned meshes or something in the sorts that counts the amount of hidden material you have would be better....

[surreal topaz]

VRChat in 2020 be like:

Sorry, skinned meshes and animators were too laggy and have been disabled by default.

[heady smelt]

Why can't everyone be like nikei and not have nice looking animations

How about we make a model purely made out of 100 empty game objects and put it next to an normal avatar to see the performance drop you get from the empty game objects? I'd love a explanation video on that

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468851317683650583/588127498580000792/unknown.png

Cursed

[minor wren]

define "many"
10? 100? 1000?
seriously.

[surreal topaz]

What they probably mean is that they will now also count disabled objects/components

So if you have a flashlight on your avatar you'll be hidden by default because that's technically a light, buddy.

Can someone explain to me why they can't strip off these components rather than hide the whole thing?