since you want to work with mmds, get cat's blender tools
#avatar-optimization
pure bridge
graceful vine
I'd recommend using the new blender
Considering it's about to switch ui theres no reason to learn old blender ui
pure bridge
doesnt the new blender cuck up cat's or did i hear wrong?
dense crane
OK
dense crane
what do these mean ;-;
graceful vine
Just follow the tips above
dense crane
is this stuff safe?
pure bridge
yes
the only assets youll find that are either not safe or are not good are the ones from the site that ends in -mods and anything from any unscrupulous people (read: crashers) you meet along the way
dense crane
ok thanks
pure bridge
unity and blender are popular tools in all sorts of areas of game development and 3d renders from professional to indie, the sdk comes straight from the devs and cat's is a collaboration between community members and a tool we ultimately do not deserve lmfao
graceful vine
I don't even do mmd stuff but it's just got some neat stuff in it for regular ass creators like me
dense crane
SOo i made a i copy of the tips you gave
oh no my game crashed đ
why do i not want to go past that version of unity?
surreal topaz
The game uses 2017.4.28f1, and content built for newer versions cannot be loaded in older versions.
dense crane
so i cant use this one?
surreal topaz
That one is too old
surreal topaz
Unity 5.6 comes before Unity 2017
And it's too old at this point, the game no longer uses it
dense crane
how have i managed that?
amber hemlock
It used to be the correct version maybe over a year ago perhaps you followed a very old tutorial
dense crane
hurray i got it
pine flame
Just so you guys know, cats does indeed work on blender 2.80
graceful vine
Watch a tutorial
still perch
And if you need help with normal modelling please use the #avatars-2-general channel
this channel is for optimization related questions and help
heady smelt
I have a material that I have never touched and it has always looked the same in blender and exported to Unity. It's very light pink, but the texture is darker. I can't figure out what makes it lighter, and when I bake it to a texture atlas, it become darker like the base texture.
heady smelt
what is the purpose of weight painting?
woeful ember
it makes you move
woeful ember
yes
drowsy merlin
So I'm trying to bake a texture atlas in 2.8 and it's a nightmare
I know nothing about cycles materials and I'm getting ridiculous amounts of shine on my textures
I don't have any light sources in the scene so I'm stumped on this
anyone know where this light could be coming from?
marsh trail
It might be something related to your baking options, i personally don't use cycles and neither do i have blender 2.8, so i sadly can't help, but i assume it's literally just the baking settings
drowsy merlin
Apparently the background gives off light in cycles
I'm trying a new bake after changing something with that
this is such a mess lol
I want to go back to 2.7 but I've already done the entire avatar in 2.8
(It wasn't the background)
marsh trail
I mean, if it isn't a backwards compatible blend format, you could just export an FBX and import it onto 2.7, if it's already rigged n' skinned there's a setting i'd recommend using on import as it correctly orients bones, if you made any shapekeys they'll be out of order, functional but out of order
drowsy merlin
it just closes on trying to open the blend file
and I'm really not in the mood to fuck up my model again
this is really ticking me off though because I'm only having issues baking the texture atlas
everything else is great
marsh trail
You could export the fbx then, the blend could be kept for 2.8 if it doesn't work out
marsh trail
Sometimes the weirdest solutions... just work
drowsy merlin
I'm also running into transparency issues where transparency shows as black
and the typical solution for that isn't... there anymore
versed nest
you could set the baking type to diffuse only since combined pretty much bakes the rendered view
amber hemlock
Actually right click eye bone and see what they are called
drowsy merlin
@dense crane I'm guessing it's Hi_L and Hi_R
dense crane
thats shoulders
drowsy merlin
But yeah select one of the eye bones
amber hemlock
Right click one of the eye octahedrons and it will say the bone name in lower left corner of 3D view
dense crane
There are no eye bones đŚ
dense crane
Hi is the highlights of her eyes
I got the eye to work on the poppi alpha model
?
There called Fc eye L and fc eye R but not show up on the options
oh and cats says it cant be fixed
amber hemlock
Iâm pretty sure there are eye bones there can you take a pic from the side
dense crane
I can try
It also says this
I have one character set up already it doesnt matter for now
limpid oyster
does anyone give me some normal character bone please?
dense crane
which of these would be lowlid?
solid smelt
Basis, you want the lowerlid to do nothing most of the time
dense crane
what about vismes ?
solid smelt
Probably the ones that have 'mouth' in em. Those names are dogshit so just find ones that look like the character is saying AH, CH, and OH
dense crane
There are ones that say mouth specifically
solid smelt
Yeah but the names don't tell me what they do so it's best to check them manually
dense crane
how
solid smelt
Having the mesh selected, go to the right under the mesh menu which looks like an upside down white equilateral triangle and there should be a menu called blendshapes or shapekeys or something of the like
You can then drag specific shapekeys to 100 to see what they do to the mesh
dense crane
solid smelt
It's in that black horizontal bar that starts with the camera on the left
solid smelt
No other shapekeys change the mouth?
dense crane
smile, shout and frown.
solid smelt
If you can use some to mimic AH OH or CH then that's good, otherwise you'd need to make a new shapekey
dense crane
I mean the lip sync is bad but its something.
solid smelt
Some movement is better than none
dense crane
Yep
pure bridge
post pics of nice texture atlasing
(yes, the eye is about to recieve a number of important edits, dont yell at me >~<)
calm spade
calm spade
to be fair it was made by a professional
pure bridge
but like... its so pretty. and efficient. and compact.
pure bridge
makes me wonder what the world looks like
world atlasing is probably more interesting
because im trying to figure out what this world even looks like
karmic condor
its looks like this
karmic condor
I'm glad I did it, the world was supposed to be quest compatible and that helped me archive that.
pure bridge
big pill is watching
surreal topaz
@pure bridge you should bake your atlas two times
So that the black parts are transparent instead
graceful vine
Are we still posting atlasses?
This was an atlas for an entire map,
And heres the Junkyard so far. empty space for future stuff
https://i.imgur.com/t7la3Ri.gifv (this map)
sweet mason
Oh i like that one. Colorfull
pure bridge
glorious
surreal topaz
Lol my atlases are far messier than that
I always use 4k and use large margins, so I'm let with lots of empty space like
I don't have the patience to align it all
still perch
that indeed is huge empty spaces 
graceful vine
you should fill that alpha in, if its unnecessary. less alpha = better
surreal topaz
@graceful vine fill it in with what, and more importantly, why?
graceful vine
Black, because alpha is expensive (runtime and file size)
in reality, its like 0 difference honestly but every little helps
polar bolt
You can blur out the contents to ensure proper color surrounds islands - helps for mipmaps
graceful vine
the texture already has some bleeding on it
surreal topaz
@graceful vine file size is the same if I fill in the alpha
Unless I strip the alpha from the entire texture
But some bits are transparent, if they were opaque they would be black to begin with as the texture is baked, not stitched
I don't gain anything from filling in "empty" bits with black
graceful vine
Yeah, i figured that would be the case. Thats why i said if unnecessary
surreal topaz
It's a common one used for mobile though, the bits that need alpha are kept separate to save big on filesize
graceful vine
Last time i ran tests filling in alpha vs alpha on png change the file size
What software are you using?
polar bolt
It might be photoshop changing the colors on 0-alpha pixels thus making compression less or more effective
polar bolt
But yeah the file size change is because of png compression
graceful vine
Compression settings between the two are the same
solid smelt
Do those pngs have different file sizes when crunched in unity?
solid smelt
If you don't I'll probably check when I get home as it's interesting
graceful vine
i will do a checkings
solid smelt
All of my atlased have alpha so I'm curious how much size I could cut if any
graceful vine
Ive just always put black where i dont need alpha because it seems right
solid smelt
Black = nothing, alpha = nothing
I've kept alpha everywhere as some parts need it and blender puts alpha everywhere on the second bake
All the Warframe's atlases come with the alpha spaced filled with dead texture as well instead of black or alpha
graceful vine
Unity is giving me a headache right now, if you test this yourself let me know what the results are
solid smelt
I'll be heading home in a bit so I'll just download your images and let you know
solid smelt
@graceful vine at the default RBG Compressed DXT1 they are both the same size of 170.7KB but if you crunch them with RGBA Crunched DXT5 the one with the unnecessary alpha is 42.3KB and the other one is 26.2KB.
If you change it from the Mitchell algorithm to bilinear it goes to 39.5KB vs 26.3KB.
graceful vine
Thats still something right?
solid smelt
Itll make a bigger difference on a larger texture, the test one was only 512x512
So if you had a 4k atlas with a bunch of unneeded alpha it could bloat it when you try to crunch
graceful vine
@surreal topaz Incase you are still interested in the black vs alpha thing, read above
We out here optimising like a mobile game
marsh trail
I think that a texture with a black background simply ignores/removes alpha (depends on exporting application as you can export a 24bit png which in essence is a png without alpha), although you can still tell a shader to cutout or remove any specific color from it, the reason, i assume, that DXT1 is seemingly the same size is due to either being opaque or being the 1bit alpha variant DXT1A which is identical to the former, but as the name entails, only uses a single bit of alpha (either fully opaque or fully transparent) making it rather effective and very lightweight but it also comes at the cost of quality compared to its other counterparts, DXT2 through 7 respectively, (although iirc unity uses different compression algorithms than your standard DDS file so that may not apply), rather unsure of how unity crunch compresses files so i can't say all that much about it, but generally a 24bit png is lighter than a 32bit png, due to not having an alpha channel, but that again comes with a drawback of either being fully opaque (gradient transparency is quite literally void) or having full alpha support (even if you fill most of it with black, if any transparency exists, it's still a 32bit png).
So it comes down to, keeping 2 mats, one fully opaque atlas, the other a transparency supporting atlas, or a single massive atlas that has full transparency support, or fully opaque at the loss of general alpha quality via cutout
Although i assume the more alpha needs to be accounted for, the larger the filesize, that may vary depending on image complexity however (as i think the location of the alpha does influence the filesize to an extent but i've never tested it myself)
You could of course use a 8bit png, if you're aiming for the most optimization, which instead of the 16million (16,777,216 to be precise) colors that both 24bit and 32bit support, you have 256 colors which is akin to a gif, being a palette variant, it doesn't support alpha either however, but being like such you can far more accurately cutout a color as you only have an index of 256 colors, which is one of the reasons that animated pixel art in gif format can be so easily edited or extracted (the act of removing a background or foreground but keep something, such as a character), so they all have their benefits really
surreal topaz
Unity decides whether to import as RGB or RGBA but you can forcibly disable the alpha channel
Importing DDS files directly is very wonky and should not be done
velvet otter
Ok im a complete dummy when it comes to trying to lessen down the texture slots, becouse an MMD model ive used turns 5 png files into 30 material files. But the problem comes when unity's texture limit. I was wondering how one removes those unused materials.
the annoying bit is that all of the materials, are in a prefab.
velvet otter
And i then remembered that CATS exist and saves the day again.
pine flame
You can cut down on materials by atlasing your models
pine flame
Mmd models typically have more than one material for each texture for ease of editing and sharing, also because there are differences between the materials that arenât always apparent at first glance
amber hemlock
There is also âcombine same materialsâ which, if two different materials have the same diffuse texture, it will delete all but one and use that
You have to be careful because it can kill cutout materials but itâs best to atlas down to a single material then duplicate whatâs been broken so all materials use the same single texture
You can always change shaders on the duplicates material but a single texture to download is still better
safe swift
Am I the only one that an avatar with crunch compressed textures/particles/animations can take up to 10-20 minutes to upload? Have an avatar that's 10mb small, yet takes like 15-20min to upload.. I'm 100/100
wow..
it actually did turn on
will check the log too though
marsh trail
It should only be established once security is tight enough to prevent non authorised users from accessing it, aside being incredibly slow to build & publish with future proofing enabled, it's a free ticket for anybody with the right know-how to rip assets
rapid wagon
Let's talk audio
Raw, bigger wavs
Or
Compressed oggs
Besides load times, what are advantages of ogg?
Don't hear a huge difference in sound quality, I've seen from 10mb down to 300~ kb
modern lagoon
doesnt unity auto compress it anyways
marsh trail
WAV's get compressed to either OGG or MP3, i personally just use mp3 files directly
"Depending on the target, Unity will encode the audio to either OggVorbis(Mac/PC/Consoles) or MP3(Mobile platforms). For the best sound quality, supply the audio in an uncompressed format such as WAV or AIFF (containing PCM data) and letUnity do the encoding."
Further information on supported audio formats https://docs.unity3d.com/462/Documentation/Manual/AudioFiles.html
dense crane
so when setting up dynamic bones what is the collider bit for?
grave crystal
@dense crane you set a collider script on your wrist (and give it a height setting to envelop your hand), and assign that collider in the section (for example on your hair's dynamic bones).
Be aware that colliders are a larger performance draw than just using dyn bones. Try to limit bone chains as best you can while using them.
still perch
If you ask what it is, just ignore it. That's the best for all sides 
solid smelt
Only in blender by selecting both objects and pressing Ctrl+J
safe swift
What would perform better for particles - 8-15k opaque mesh triangles or cutout billboards
sudden jewel
cutout still uses alpha test, so you'll incur a cost for that
safe swift
oh, I could just use unity profiler for that, but yeah - was thinking how big of a difference there is with opaque triangles vs alpha boards
turbid pumice
So, today I tried to upload my first avatar and I thik I got most stuff right, but his face keeps "smashed" when I'm not moving, does anyone have any tips? (Also I'm new here and idk if this is the right chat for these questions)
calm spade
Try posting a gif of your issue in #avatars-2-general
calm spade
that's just a weight paint issue
Find a tutorial that explains what it is, and how to fix it, and you'll be good to go
amber hemlock
Cutout layers are always drawn even if thereâs something in front of it
Actually disregard that I was thinking of transparency
proper grail
Is there a button in blender to draw the current materials onto a texture
I feel so close yet every one hour render has failed me
proper grail
Figured it out! two uv maps, the target generated atlas map in every material, uncheck clear image, and bake diffuse color only
heady smelt
Rendering in blender isnât for texturing, by the way. Itâs for showcasing~
Well, most of the time it is
Well I mean, itâs still only a release candidate
sudden zodiac
@heady smelt it's not
heady smelt
Did it get released?
sudden zodiac
Yes, 2h ago
heady smelt
Osht
sudden zodiac
@surreal topaz it's not really a disaster, just a new thing to learn
heady smelt
Yeah, luckily blender is still open-source so overtime things will improve
And rather quickly compared to other programs like maya for example
And who knows, new method may end up being better after Hotox pulls the magic rabbit out of their hat
2hrs have passed so theyâll appear eventually~
sudden zodiac
It's pretty difficult to adopt cats to the new nodes since everyone can set them up completely different
woeful ember
yeah but in vrchats circumstance you could just assume toon/unlit just throw it through emission and it'd be no different from what you currently have right? (well assuming it isn't designed for rendering)
only issue would be potentially transparency
i suppose you could replicate popular* shaders within vrchat but at that point they would be better off just working on it within unity unless you're texturing from within blender
amber hemlock
People are still gonna be using 2.79 4 years from now, no rush
woeful ember
pretty much
calm spade
I know i am đ
woeful ember
really if people are using 2.8 they're more than likely capable enough to work inbetween 2.79a and 2.8 if necessary
empty pier
@proper grail @surreal topaz @sudden zodiac You can paint from one UV set to another using the texture painting tools. You can see it being used here to do projection painting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz4qV5_zuMo
The basic technique is to create two UV sets, then use the paint tool in single image mode to clone from the source image to the destination.
While you can use it for atlases, it can also be used for any kind of UV manipulation.
Like manually rearranging UVs or making the left and right halves of mirrored model unique again.
proper grail
Interesting feature, but not really what I was looking for
This is the end result I wanted, combining a bunch of smaller UVs into one
graceful vine
select each one and move them manually
proper grail
Oh no its super easy in 2.8. Can make a second UV map. Select all the materials you want on it. in edit mode use uv -> average and uv -> pack. Throw the same generated texture in each material. bake diffuse color
empty pier
You don't want to do that if you have multiple parts of the mesh sharing the same UVs
It saves texture space to stack geometry that uses identical textures.
Using those commands will unstack them.
Also averaging them may cause you to close detail if the original UVs weren't already uniformly distributed.
It's not uncommon to make the face UVs larger than other parts of the mesh so they can have more details.
pure bridge
oh shit there actually is an avatar MB size limit? fuck dude
safe pagoda
ya what is this why does it exist please remove it
pure bridge
it exists because you dont want avatars to spend a long time loading, have a significant footprint on your network, and to not take a long time for your PC hardware to work with, as well as just general space (such as on your RAM)
in other words, removing it is an awful idea
calm spade
I'm guessing this is a Quest upload ?
pure bridge
most likely, 10mb seems too small for PC
reduce texture size and number, my first guess to a high number like that
pure bridge
wild. evem the unity build is set to PC? shit dude, i really havent seen that before
what assets are on / a part of your avatar?
safe pagoda
both audio sources are very small
pure bridge
whats the actual size of them on your system in MB?
if its not the audio it could be texture size
safe pagoda
is there the possibility that the latest sdk may have on accident made it so all uploads are set to quest
pure bridge
idk, thats a unity thing not an sdk thing so prob not
safe pagoda
no thats not true at all i was able to upload models before
using an older sdk
i just updated my sdk just now and im now having this problem
Ruuubick is there a possibility that the sdk is not uploading to the PC version of the sdk/unity because its not defined by the project settings of the Unity project itself, but the SDK might be confused and think it's set to Android instead of PC (IgbarVonSquid)
tawny pendant
so it appears that the issue is derived from unity thinking that the build platform is android by default the way to resolve this issue is to go to file and click on build settings and then click on pc and switch platform
high talon
So I tried to optimize my avatar. So far so good, everything is good, BUT the bounding box.
My mesh is wider than it appears, due to wings being able to unfold, and my tail is really long, when fully stretched out. Okay... so I managed to shrink the bounding box, and still seems like it'd still not cause too many issues for my avatar, but the SDK said it was under 5 x 6 x 5
I load into VRchat, and check the stats... it's still Very Poor, becuase Bounding box is for some reason... at least 28 x 2.0 x 10 and I don't know where it's getting these numbers from! numbers fluxuate at bit, but are around those numbers
What's more, I look at my older avatars, and they're fine bounding box wise, but the ones that I optimized the bones (by reducing bones in half in tail, removing bones in hair/feathers, and removing dynamic bones all over) and those are the ones that are rediculous! and I can't fiigure out why or how!
marsh trail
Ingame stats take into account the "real" bounding box scale, disregarding user input if i recall correctly
graceful vine
No, it uses user input
But if you have multiple objects on a character i.e big ass wings it can use those as a bounding box
marsh trail
I recall users with disabled pens having their bounding box at an absurd scale due to their way of resetting (sending the pen to a very far away location the second it's disabled to keep whatever was drawn intact but stop it from drawing) in essence completely disregarding user input, so does it just go for the higher offender?
graceful vine
It goes for the highest offender yes, pens need big bounding boxes so they dont stop rendering when the user walks away/ out of vision
marsh trail
So it uses the "real" bounding box radius, in which the highest values are what is shown instead of any user input (except perhaps if the user inputs values above what they currently have, but even then i think the system uses the highest values disregarding user input, but i may be incorrect) i recall having a model with broken visemes (of which i knew nothing about at the time) and simply rescaled the bounding box manually, not only was the bounding box stats showing the radius at an absurd radius, but the in-game model itself was being affected by lights around the map even without any viseme/shapekey currently active, so it enforces the highest box radius aswell
graceful vine
As long as you dont have fucking stuff on your avatar like pens, the user input remains true in my experience
graceful vine
Shape keys shouldnt change the bounding box, there had to be something else going on that you were unaware of
shut sequoia
if theyre broken they can
graceful vine
How?
marsh trail
Broken shapekeys are known for having extremely offset vertices, so they add up to the radius
shut sequoia
like a syllable that fucks up a vert
graceful vine
Hm, so if broken shape keys are present it disregards user input?
marsh trail
Straight to the trashcan as far as i can tell
graceful vine
Unity is a confusing beast
marsh trail
If they go really out of orbit, unity won't even render the model
Giving it like a -infinity box range
pure bridge
ive experienced it before by trying to make emtpy game objects in blender
specifically, my avatar was maybe 50m ahead, 50m above me
and i rotated ariund the thing while it floated in the air facing the ground in neutral pose (not tpose)
funny enough it wasnt visible, but objects i attached directly to it armature were
furthermore theyd bop up and down as if part of the foot
fucking weird
marsh trail
I recall trying to make a static cubic platform that i could stand on, it did not go well to say the least
pure bridge
i just thought of a good way of putting down a reason why optimization is important, but i cant think of any better place to put it than this chat, so enjoy if you come across this:
lets relate optimization for a second to the amount of people you can have in a world
usually this is set by the world author, or constricted by an event host, but lets move away from a hard definition and talk about it in a different way: how many people can you have in a world until you start to lose or drop frames?
oculus already has an answer, and its a policy for staying on the store, because games that cannot meet 80 fps will not be allowed on their store. their personal reccommendation is 1-2 million tris and 500-1,000 drawcalls (meshes + materials) per scene, the scene being each frame, and those components only counting when they are rendered / visible, so disabled game objects dont count!
were not gonna talk about how much these figures have changed nor how this relates to VRC itself, but we can use them as a good starting point
now think about an avatar that is just barely passable according to SDK standards - one that has 69k tris
how many times can you multiply 69k before you fill up 2 million? thats roughly the amount of that avatar you can have in a room before VR users drop frames
light flame
Divide 69k by 2million and youl have it.
Hang on
pure bridge
thus, you can also consider an avatar that has twice as many tris - 140k - not as one that is not just heavy and poorly optimized, but one that takes roughly the same amount of work to render as it would for two avatars, or two players. In other words, a 140k tri avatar effectively takes up two player slots rather than one on your PC, and in a way the room capacity has been lowered by one
marsh trail
Roughly 28-29 users
pure bridge
and thats not even considering the tris or drawcalls that go into worlds
light flame
or avatars with lower tris
still perch
dont forget that in that calculation, you need to factor in the world it self
wich usually should consume the most
pure bridge
plan around numbers like that, and youll usually end up with a an avatar that tends to work well in most settings
im not a world dev, but i usually plan my avatar weight around the idea that most worlds are gonna have 300-400k tris, still not sure about drawcalls
marsh trail
Now correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't parts of the world culled based on the camera orientation?
light flame
With a decently rendered world and the 69k tri limit, you'd probably get 11-15 or so in
pure bridge
they can be, and it's good to plan around that too
light flame
before major slowdowns
marsh trail
We need to take into account aswell that this is based upon currently in-view users (provided their bounding boxes are proper)
As anybody not in-view is culled and hence not counted towards such (hence disabled objects)
That's why your FPS can suddenly shift when you look between an empty area to a crowded area
pure bridge
exactly. My two cents, i havent developed worlds nor looked at unity's perf thing, only going off of numbers and "napkin" calculations, furthermore this isnt considering that vrc itself is kind of bloated and laggy and sometimes makes its own limits on worlds thru performance because of this
nonetheless this would still apply in the ideal future when the game is optimized and still holds some very real weight now
so for anyone who's optimizing right now id say that this is a good enough method to follow by
marsh trail
All things considered, i always decimated my models to bellow 20k before, untill recently that is as now VRC is (supposedly) using more than a single core
pure bridge
same dude. i hit 60 frames alone, 40 ish with people, and 20-30 in publics
light flame
jeez
pure bridge
i always strive to make my shit work as good as possible on as much hardware as possible cuz fuck this dude
light flame
I've got 4g ram and integrated graphics off a celeron
pure bridge
this is more on my smart ass anyway, buying an i5 6400 and all
marsh trail
Back in 5.6.3p1 the max polycount was 20k, they expanded on that fairly recently
pure bridge
20k would be a good number to hit for events and high numbers of people per scene, which i think is what they were originally going for
1 million tris worth of 20k avatars is like...50 people? i think...
marsh trail
Ehh, even then the IK was the major hoarder back then
pure bridge
yeah what am i saying of course its 50
marsh trail
I recall a world allowing roughly 60 users and everything was laggy as hell
pure bridge
shit dude community meetup (40+ people per lobby) is laggy as hell lol
marsh trail
Keep in mind the world itself wasn't that complex, at most it was probably even less than 30k at the time
light flame
The worlds wouldn't have been as optimised though back in the days of old
marsh trail
It was a motherbase from MGSV recreation that was in development
marsh trail
They sadly dropped the project after a while, unsure why, but generally worlds not being optimized back then isn't really accurate, alot of worlds were and still are, just a few outliers were laggier than others
By far the most optimized thing that must be optimized is worlds, if the world isn't optimized, it doesn't matter how eco-friendly the users in it are, they will all lag
pure bridge
cant wait for this game to get optimized in 1-2 years so the gospel of community optimizarion has more weight than it does now
mhm! optimized worlds = happy users, and more of them
light flame
'Aight, I gotta turn off discord and turn on focus for VRChat. I'll be back in a few hours.
pure bridge
kk
marsh trail
I kinda wish avatar LOD's were a thing, that'd bring a massive performance boost, albeit a bit heavier overall
World LOD's are amazing and should be used whenever possible
Especially for very large worlds that don't need detail to be constantly at full resolution
marsh trail
Levels Of Detail
pure bridge
i only remember that from the cursed unity asset
explain if you dont mind...specifically in how it relates to vrc
marsh trail
It loads a lower poly model of a section based upon the distance the user is from the location
pure bridge
dude holy shit thats genius
marsh trail
The transitions might not be seamless, but they sure as hell help performance-wise
pure bridge
yeah i can see that being heavier on systems but not necessarily on frames
id be up for that to some extent for avatars though, especially when screens are still too shitty to see things at distance with
i could see that being more useful for worlds tho
marsh trail
Yeah, more-so heavier on filesize is what i meant, as the lower poly models are still in the file itself
pure bridge
fuck dude you actually just answered a question of mine
about how to het away with really highly detailed ornamentation and other shit
marsh trail
LOD's also cull if you're not looking at them or are at a certain distance
pure bridge
cuz i was walking around in the library of congress and went " what would i have to do to model this," and the thing is the top of it was all highly detailed floating golden flowers
marsh trail
So they're handy in that regard aswell
pure bridge
should just be culling them or unloading them in place of flat tex at distance
holy shit now i want to make a library of vrc with this shit
"dude ur shitty fucking flowers are like 10k tris each and there's 50 of them! how am i not lagging???"
"wizardry and hours of work my guy ;)"
its time.
marsh trail
It's a unity built in feature, and it's also documented enough to grab onto it fairly easily
marsh trail
"Your set of Meshes have file names ending in _LOD and a number ranging from 0 to the total number of LOD levels minus one. For example, if the base name for your Mesh is Player, name your files Player_LOD0, Player_LOD1 and Player_LOD2 to generate a Player GameObject with three LOD levels."
I heard that it's bugged in regards to avatars so i wouldn't try to use them (i think avatars show all 3 LOD's at once instead)
You can have as many LOD's as you want, but keep in mind that the filesize will increase as you do
pure bridge
yeah, thats the thing >x<
heady smelt
marsh trail
I'd recommend 3 LOD'S in general
pure bridge
one thing that kind of irritates me is when a world is pretty but textures loik obviously low detail up close
marsh trail
LOD0 the most detailed
LOD1 mid-range medium detail
LOD2 very low detail
pure bridge
a lot of assets werent really made for you to truly get close to the eye with, and i feel like we'll be seeing more of people getting around that as VR becomes more prominent
is there any way to LOD textures?
marsh trail
Unity also uses mipmapping, essentially loading lower-resolution textures of a model the further you're from it, so you can still have some good looking textures
pure bridge
cuz time and time again i enter a world with massive ass bricks and a normal map to match and the floor looks like fucking soap
marsh trail
That is done automatically by default iirc
pure bridge
ah
marsh trail
LOD's are Mipmaps for Models and viceversa
pure bridge
so then whats stopping me or in this case any other world author from creating a high enough res repeat tex (say like 8k) and using that?
prob that it looks noisy at a distance id assume
marsh trail
Just load-time and generally if you had alot of them it could cause a drop as you got close
pure bridge
ah...
marsh trail
But even then, i doubt it'd be anything crazy, unless you went absolutely crazy
pure bridge
hm... ill probanly think about this more when i get around to makjg worlds
i already have some ideas from what ive learned today, and shit duud i love getting crazy đ 
đ
marsh trail
Haha
tired nimbus
Only problem is LODs dont work as expected in VR currently
marsh trail
The only downside i can see regarding LOD's is the filesize increase and how models can pop into existence
tired nimbus
The distance is massively different compared to that of unity editor
pure bridge
oof...
tired nimbus
marsh trail
Ah i recall that, for some reason VR is rendering the lowest detail LOD far sooner than it should right?
tired nimbus
Ye making stuff look much worse and stuff dissappearing from very little distance away
marsh trail
Yeah, that really need to be fixed, LOD's are amazing but we don't need world-wiping as a standard xD
pure bridge
interesting
oblique pasture
exotic fulcrum
Is there a way to merge my materials together. I want to make my pc avatar quest compatible. It says i have 8 materials and it has to be 4 to 1 materials. Is there a way to do that in unity?
If it's not possible in unity is there a way to bring the unity avatar from unity to blender so i can edit it then bring it back to unity without messing a bunch of things up? So i can just replace the unity model with the new and improved blender model.
exotic fulcrum
if that's not possible then can someone recommend a good tutorial for combining materials and atlas textures in blender please?
shut sequoia
exotic fulcrum
thank you.
amber hemlock
Ideally you are supposed to start in blender. Right before exporting as fbx, save a blend file. Go back to this blend file if you ever need to update the model, and after your changes re-export as fbx directly into your unity project, overwriting the fbx with cats export.
If you never started with blender, or forgot to save a blend file, you can import your fbx into blender with cats but this will usually corrupt your prefab when you re-export and require you set up a new gameobject heigharcy in unity, so save the fbx as a blend before export so you never have to do it a third time.
So long as you always go back to the same blend file that originally exported your fbx (and it still has its prefab association to the fbx) you can freely update the model in blender and it wonât ever mess anything up in unity
You may need to set the fbx to ânoneâ and back to humanoid to force the skeleton definition to update if you moved bones around
I find regular blender fbx export (as opposed to cats fbx export) tends to cause problems updating pre-existing models in unity. No clue what cats is doing differently
lament garden
Does anyone know how to atlas in 2.80? I got use to using the texture-atlas add on that 2.79 offered and now they've taken that away from me
calm spade
shotariya's mat combiner should also be available for 2.8 as per the latest update
amber hemlock
I really gave 2.8 an honest try but could not even figure out how to turn on texture render
Very frustrating feel like a newb again
lament garden
I feel the same way
I'm forcing myself to learn it and I've actually managed to figure out how to bake a texture in 2.80, but it's still not quite right
however if you want to view your textures on your model through blender:
woeful ember
you can try importing an fbx with embedded textured if CATs doesn't work for automatically assigning textures
(i haven't tried CATs in 2.8 in a long time)
incase you wanna see a more toon like style aka flat
lament garden
i've just always made it a thing to use blender with out Cats aside from the import function XD. Assigning textures hasn't been much of an issue.
woeful ember
new images for discord aren't loading for me reee
lament garden
yeah you gotta open the original idk why đŚ
amber hemlock
I use catâs pose mode because the rest/pose switcher is the most pointless thing ever
lament garden
looks like you can see everyone elses images but your own right now
I do remember it having a use I just can't remember what it was for
ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻ
dense crane
so setting this up for hair, what should i do for only a slight hair bob?
pine flame
So long as you go back to the blend file things will never mess up in unity
Actually things can mess up, for instance changing material slots may make you have to manually fix materials in unity, but all you need to do to fix that is drag the materials into their proper new slots
dense crane
i have a blender file saved.
heady smelt
@honest solar Not really. But there is the Unity Cloth Component for cloth-based items (Skirts, scarfs, capes, flags and other basic things). Which may help your situation?
simple vortex
Hello, I don't know how Atlases work exactly, but this one seems to be using much more wasted space compared to ones i've had before, is there anything I have to do about this?
solid smelt
If you're worried about wasted space then the auto tool for CATs is not what you want to use. I would recommend watching Tupper's manual atlasing tutorial as that is the best way to atlas your models.
karmic condor
If you are insistent on using the auto tool, you can at the very least change some space settings in the newest version, but it is not perfect and you will still get some wasted space
Also holy cow I can only guess that black texture in that atlas is a 2k texture. You might want to lower the resolution of any low contrast textures. It will make the high contrast parts looks better as unity shrinks everything to a max of 2k on textures by default
novel grove
@simple vortex combine through matcombiner panel and change size to 'automatic', panel inside cats forced to 'power of 2'
simple vortex
Alright, thank you all very much
sudden jewel
You can save some space on that all-black texture by changing it to a black diffuse textureless material. Material Combiner detects and and bakes diffuse textureless materials down to a tiny spot texture so you save a ton of atlas space
slender saffron
Idk why but the bone merging only affect half of the skirt... Can't get it to merge the left portion of the skirt even though they all share the same parent bone
There seem to be a cap on 12 bones đ¤
sudden jewel
I don't believe there's a cap, the naming might be different enough that Cats is getting confused
marsh trail
CATS be using Neitri's tools as the base for merging bones, doing such should merge selection to the appropriate bone parents, there must be an underlying issue regarding it, never heard about it happening before personally, but perhaps restarting blender could suffice, if not, you could also try having 2 blender windows open and copy&paste (ctrl+c and ctrl+v) the model onto the empty blender, and if that doesn't work, you might want to try contacting hotox to explain your situation
@slender saffron
slender saffron
The weird thing is it say it's going to merge Skirt_0_0 (12 Bones) but then 0_0 to 0_11 gets completely ignored, and 0_12 to 0_23 gets merged
Then, say I delete 0_12 to 0_23, the option to merge the skirt doesn't even show up on the bone merging tool
sudden zodiac
@marsh trail It not merging all bones is caused by the bone select algorithm, not the actual merging process
@slender saffron I already have ideas on how to improve that algorithm, but I don't have the time do implement it because I'm on vacation đ
dense crane
is this good?
jagged plinth
Reduce the number of materials
That's really the only thing it has going against it, but you should consider turning down the poly count too
dense crane
i cant without the model breaking
graceful vine
You can
tiny hawk
Hey does antone know what's going on with material combiner? I've renamed, and moved the files around and yet this error still happens.
simple vortex
I think I've gotten this error once, some material had an mmd texture with an error symbol near it. Remove the texture and it should work
@tiny hawk
tiny hawk
Problem is that it's not mmd, and removing the texture doesn't exactly solve the issue at hand does it, considering the whole point of atlasing is combining textures.
simple vortex
http://prntscr.com/opq8po
It doesn't have to be MMD to have the error, check all your materials for this section
The error happens when the Atlas generator is trying to display the image of the material in the list but the material doesn't have a texture image to begin with
removing that won't ruin the material or I don't think it will
tiny hawk
I was able to do a fix. Basically I had to convert the files from png, to bmp, then use cats own png converted to get it to work.
sudden zodiac
Well that's one way to use that button đ
tiny hawk
Yeah it's weird, but I think I'm just gonna stick with manually atlasing because the quality comes out a bit better.
rustic marlin
sudden zodiac
@tiny hawk in what way is the quality better?
tiny hawk
Basically the ability to decide what needs more upscaling in the atlas more than other materials. Aka the body's part of the image will be larger than the eyes.
sudden zodiac
@tiny hawk do you really upscale in that case or do you downscale all other textures?
Because you can downscale each individual texture in the material combiner
tiny hawk
Maybe upscale is the wrong term for this, but essentially I can control what material has more room dedicated to the image than others, and usually I bake in 4k
sudden zodiac
Then it's not really higher quality, since you can do the same in the material combiner
tiny hawk
How so? I might start using it more often to shorten my build times for avatars. Besides having to fix the whole error thing with the files.
sudden zodiac
Press the little gear icon next to the material, you can set the size there
amber hemlock
@sudden zodiac Anxiety. https://i.imgur.com/czwkAkJ.png
sudden zodiac
@amber hemlock Oh đ
hoary juniper
@sudden zodiac Is there a way to disable the MMD texture panels that Cats adds? I don't see what it's used for and it clutters things up for no reason.
sudden zodiac
@hoary juniper It is from the mmd_tools plugin that cats uses to import mmd models. You could go into the code and remove some lines to prevent it from loading
hoary juniper
Hmmmm, I'll take a look, thanks
karmic sky
Where do I fix the bounding box?
cerulean holly
Bounding box may get much bigger if you have some stray verticies far away from your model or be result of something added to your avatar like snail marker which I believe needs to hide the marker by moving it far away from your avatar. If you didn't add anything you may try fixing it in Blender by box selecting entire avatar, hiding it than pressing A to select all, deleting it and unhiding your avatar. Other possible solution would be to check your shapekeys and see whether there aren't any verticies going far of your avatar after using one of the shapes. You can also manually change boundix box size in Unity if everything fails but I read there may be some other problems if you do that.
solar urchin
Why is Join Meshes greyed out?
nvm, solve it
had to import the model with cats or else that would be greyed out
deep cedar
its a hide feature added in new 2.8
it doesnt "have" to be pulled in through cats, but blender takes old blender files, or fbx's with hidden items, and hides them across the board, instead of in the alt h/h menu
you can fix it by clicking one of those drop downs above it, and choosing to show all hide functions, then unclick each until you see which one is actually hiding it
trail folio
Hey,
Does anyone know a way for Texture atalssing in 2.8 without using Node editor? Currently I have to set nodes in each of original materials so that they bake to textute
marsh trail
I think 2.8 took a big leap and went straight for rendering based on nodes, completely replacing blender internal, although i may be somewhat incorrect as i've personaly had no interest in researching about it much
sudden zodiac
@trail folio Try Material Combiner, it works in 2.80
proper star
anyone wanna help me lower the polys on my 150k poly avatar? it would be very nice to get some help
candid sedge
could try the cats tool for it
proper star
you see here. i have it but i rarely use blender and idk how to even like import it into blender nor import the model
ah ha! i need to hit import fbx huh
candid sedge
might be better if you start on a mega starter guide then
proper star
yeah haha
@candid sedge hold on, i import cats pulgin with the important tab correct? if so what kind of thing is it if you understand what im saying like a fbx or something else
steep frost
prime beacon
6 million polys
there were a few of them where i found him,public german map is full of those people
prime beacon
brain: -
pure bridge
question
what would be better
A > one really high res (4-8k) noise texture
B > a really small noise texture (sub 1k px) repeated like 20 times
as in, what would be better for frames / stability?
hopefully this is a general question, such as if said texture could be anything from a normal map to an emission map, masks, etc.
pure bridge
tiled textures count as drawcalls? 0~0
holy shit
i need to like
go and fix a lot of shit
cuz i have a ton of things tiled to like 4-25
graceful vine
Tiled textures? I don't follow
graceful vine
Oh seamless?
pure bridge
when youre using an y normal shader
import like say a hair normal
and go ahead and open up the tile/offset menu and turn up the numbers a lot
graceful vine
I honestly don't know what you mean, likely because I've never used this system before
graceful vine
I'll cut you a better deal you can have 2 seconds
pure bridge
two seconds have passed
this
im asking if it would be better to tile that 256px tex or just to make one really large version of it
graceful vine
I thought you meant something else
pure bridge
yeahh
graceful vine
Smallest is bestest when it comes to basically everything
hoary juniper
Hmmmm, yeah, that's not really good advice
Is it better to have a big high res texture full of random noise?
No. But that depends on the noise. Random white noise or blue noise can be small. Repeating patterns should be as small as possible. For noise that isn't meant to be repetitive, larger can be justified, or if it's visibly large on screen - like, cloud patterns, that would make sense.
Is it better to have a really small noise texture, under 1024x1024...
1024x IS large for random noise. In reference to above, 1024x makes sense for random clouds, but if it's just white noise, 256x is the highest I would suggest...
Which is better for performance?
Smaller.
@pure bridge
graceful vine
What exactly is blue noise and how does it differ to any other kind
graceful vine
I see math, immediately scared
hoary juniper
White noise is purely random, so at a distance or when blurred it gets clumpy, but blue noise is generated to average out into, well, grey.
It's handy for shader stuff where you want to make something look blurry or soft without doing a blur or softening it đ
graceful vine
So nothing ill have to worry about anytime soon
heady smelt
Am Having Issues trying to atlas
I allready have a atlas that I had generated via CATS but am trying to make a new one Just to try to make my own textures
crisp vigil
should i deal with any z-fighting inside a model or is it better to just ignore it if it can't be seen
visual tinsel
Technically there shouldn't be any geometry inside the model if you can never see it. :P
heady smelt
quick question. do you find a T pose or half T pose better when making an avatar, which has better shoulder deformation?
visual tinsel
A pose vs T pose?
solid smelt
A pose is better for shoulders because it is at the 50% extension of arms at side/arms high up. T pose scruntches the shoulders too much for me
amber hemlock
You arenât limited to A or T pose you can actually have ANY reference pose
A pose is better because itâs more of neutral reference. Actually unityâs fetal / âmotorcycleâ pose is the most neutral pose but itâs hard to model that pose so no one does
graceful vine
I didnt know it had a name
amber hemlock
I donât know if it has an official one actually!
amber hemlock
All tutorials Iâve seen call it motorcycle pose though
Itâs just the result of all humanoid muscles at 50%
paper forge
Do anyone have a link to a two sided shader?
midnight barn
Is it possible to merge skinned mesh renderers?
pure bridge
@midnight barn ye, just do it in blender, with cat's or manually with ctrl+j
midnight barn
hmm, i don't know what any of that means besides general knowledge of what blender is
this is an avatar i converted years and years ago but i want to optimize it, it's low poly and everything but the only thing that makes it poor performance is number of meshes and materials
pure bridge
cat's blender tools, popular addon for blender specifically for getting avatars ready for unity and vrchat
just take the fbx out of your project and import it normally into blender
select all of the meshes on your avatar and hit ctrl+j and they'll join normally with no conflicts like 99% of the time
as for materials, CAT's has a tool that will do that for you under Optimization>Texture Atlas / Materials (it's called material combiner)
it will combine all of the materials on your avatar into one and retain the quality
amber hemlock
Sometimes joining meshes will break the UVâs, mainly if their individual UVâs donât have identical names.
So I always make sure to rename them to the same thing (usually âUVMapâ) before joining
marsh trail
Perhaps Hotox could add an optional auto-rename UV's (much like combine same materials) to the CATS fix menu
amber hemlock
I actually think cats does this already. Iâve never had cats mess it up so far
I just run into it when manually joining
jolly marsh
having a transparency issue with unity after importing to blender
(color is just another skin, ignore that)
I did try adding a 2nd layer of it,
thinking it was just a problem with it being a single face thick
(didn't make any difference)
cerulean holly
Did you try recalculating the normals after adding second mesh layer? It is possible both layers had normals pointing in the same direction. Enable backface culling in Blender to have better representation on what you gonna see in Unity (Press N ->Shading ->Backface Culling).
jolly marsh
recalculate normals? alright, i'll try that
and yes backface culling shows me exactly that. much appreciated
jolly marsh
Normals where the answer. thank you so much @cerulean holly
sudden zodiac
@marsh trail @amber hemlock Yes, cats already renames all UV maps to UVMap before joining meshes
marsh trail
Oh nice, i actually didn't know it did that already
sudden zodiac
Here is what it does: https://i.imgur.com/lxgfNas.png
sudden zodiac
Since half a year maybe even longer
split hound
Also, backface culling is on by default now in cats @jolly marsh , so if you see through it check to see if "separate loose parts" gives you two skirts. Make sure you're in lookdev mode in the future, it's handy
jolly marsh
oh sorry this was answered, forgot to pull it down
split hound
if you need to create them, select a mesh object, tab for edit mode, a to select all, search for "mesh: duplicate" and then search for "flip normals" and you have something two sided without a shader
jolly marsh
Kohi answered this one ^^
split hound
yay for quest compatible. Sweet! Slow day at work so I'm chilling here in the meantime if you have any issues with blender/unity
jolly marsh
oh i do have some things i'm uncertain of that i want to get clarified before i continue which are over in #avatar-rigging
split hound
oh!
proper grail
I want to call it shader masking but google doesnt come up with anything, Does unity have a shader that can select what shader to use based off a texcoord?
heady smelt
guys how do i remove the Dynamic bone collision check count
graceful vine
Remove dynamic bones
polar bolt
@proper grail Each polygon on a model can have only 1 material, 1material=1shader, its up to that shader to determine what is drawn on screen from given texture inputs and other data that same polygon has
Thats why shaders themselves support masking some of their features
amber hemlock
Really wish I could wrap my head around shaders. Seems like everything cool revolves around them
pine flame
well not everything but you can do some pretty cool things with them
proper grail
@polar bolt Okay that sorta puts me on the right track towards 1 skinned mesh/1 material. So im looking for a shader that has the most options. Is there one on the vrc shaders off whitelist?
Ill be going through them i am just wondering if one pops up from memory
tiny hawk
With Cats material combiner is it possible to combine both a diffuse and a normal at the same time?
novel grove
@tiny hawk install 2.0.3.3 version of material combiner and use Multicombining through MatCombiner panel for that (don't work with 2.8 blender)
tiny hawk
@novel grove thanks, I'll give that a try.
proven fog
whats a good amount of materials for an optimized avatar?
still perch
proven fog
why does the VRC blogpost tell me 10 is the max to keep optimization?
karmic condor
1 is best
still perch
so.... no model at all? 
sturdy socket
shush, dont spread my secrets
I also use an exploit to remove my nametag, that's like 4 or 5 materials less, that's what i call optimization
sturdy socket
2 l8 
cerulean holly
If my model has 1 mesh, 1 material but 5 textures how many draw calls will it have? Is it the same number as for model with 5 different materials with one texture each? VRChat doesn't seem to account that in avatar performance rank.
still perch
it can't have 5 textures if it only has 1 material
graceful vine
^
still perch
1 material can only have one texture image
sturdy socket
well do you consider normal maps and emission textures?
graceful vine
No.
sturdy socket
no i mean kohi
still perch
They are not textures
sturdy socket
well yes, but actually no
still perch
Only the Albedo is a texture, the rest is kind of "configuration images" that make the shader render things in a specific way
karmic condor
They are like settings conveyed through a image file
cerulean holly
I see, but they do influence performance a bit I guess?
still perch
they're no bother
cerulean holly
Cool, so normal map is like having extra details for free
karmic condor
Yep, occlusion too.
cerulean holly
How dare I forget
quiet flame
Hey guys, can someone help me with gameobject is missing in the animation tab?
hoary juniper
@still perch That's misinformation, don't say that
They're all textures to the GPU
However, the number of textures doesn't matter (*), only the material count.
*: Not speaking literally, but the truth is complicated. If you need a hard limit, 8 per material is probably it.
heady smelt
@quiet flame not sure if you still need help, but if you double click the name of the missing item itâll bring up a pathing type of thing
(Armature\Hips\Tail) or something like that. Simply just adjust it so itâs pathing to the correct item, if youâre not sure how exactly it should be structured check another item that isnât in the missing state and copy itâs pathing then change the directory to the item youâre looking for
drifting trellis
do dynamic bones that currently have the mesh they are manipulating turned off still require processing power? i've been setting it up so they only activate when the object is active, but want to make sure i'm not just wasting time
mint kernel
the ranking systems says "2 Skinned Meshes " is "good" but ingame it says 2 Skinned Meshes are Medium .. why ?
before the update, the avatar was still classified as good
graceful vine
It was changed recently
solid smelt
@drifting trellis if you turn off the mesh for the dynamic bones the actual bones will still be dynamic and take processing power, even if you can't see them.
minor wren
dybones are active when the bones (gameobjects) are active, even if the mesh isn't
drifting trellis
Okay nice, glad I wasn't wasting my time. Thank you!
azure berry
but u can also disable the dynamic bone component in an animation @drifting trellis
empty pier
@mint kernel That's a bug, can you make a Canny post for it?
graceful vine
^
tender sundial
above, someone claiming that I can't have multiple textures on one material, even though I literally do that on at least 5 shaders (although not on any actual production ones, mostly on ones I was playing with to see whether there was a tidy way to reduce materials without actually atlasing. please don't hit me)
reminds me actually that I must put a hard limit on texture resolution for my new project, but first I have to come up with a sensible limit for that
at the moment I'm thinking 4k (after atlasing)
there is that, but it also makes some kinds of effect slightly easier to do if everything is theoretically doable as one material
I started enjoying having everything one material where possible on newer avatars
unfortunately the new hero avatar is unlikely to be like that because I'm likely to want custom shaders on at least eyes, glasses, and one other gadget, so that's already 4 :/
I know I could slap together multiple shaders into a giant megashader and use some data point to choose the shader
I just don't know how keen I am on scraping for that excellent rating on material count, when I have other areas which are usually way harder to even achieve a medium on (for me)
tender sundial
now that is a problem in its own way
but I think the Android version of my new girl will not have said gadgets to avoid the need to optimise them
severe isle
hm
tender sundial
I'd say more but I don't really want to spoil everyone in existence on what could actually turn out to be a nice gadget that nobody has done before
but in any case it requires a custom shader, so it ain't gonna happen for the Quest build
the amount of work to make an alt version that uses only animations is far too high, and the number of polygons it would take is also high
before worrying about that though I'd like to try and get my dynamic bones down to sensible levels on my main three current setups :/
finding a way to reduce my Excellent avatar from 64 polygons down to 1 is the other thing on my todo list but there's some maths that I haven't quite figured out the right logic for yet
tender sundial
the 64 is a miscomputation in the first place but it's slightly motivating
technically the avatar has 0 polygons
but with the new way it's calculated I should be able to get 1
tender sundial
nah what I mean is, I know how the calculation is being done, and I think I can make a version which is still 0 polygons, but which is now miscalculated as 1
so that it doesn't look as "bad" as 64
severe isle
huh
tender sundial
basically I'd go from having 192 vertices to 2 vertices
tender sundial
no polys at all, I don't join the vertices into lines
current stats are 192 verts, 0 lines, 0 tris
tender sundial
and it's 192 because I needed that many to draw a sufficiently nice sphere in the geometry shader
if I reduce to one line or something then I can just use a quad instead of a sphere and it should be fine, but finding the right dimensions for the quad has been slightly infuriating
severe isle
ahh. makes sense 
a sphere
tender sundial
it comes down to "find the smallest quad that completely contains the sphere in the camera"
so you'd centre it on the sphere I think, and then figure out how wide/tall it has to be to completely cover, but it sounded really easy until I tried to do it
normal verge
Does anyone know where the Texture Atlas properties window is now in Blender 2.8 I can't seem to find it anywhere.
They completely changed the whole interface in Blender 2.8.
graceful vine
you dont need to atlas in most cases. it just improves the avatar rating @severe isle
No it also improves performance
pure bridge
you should 100% atlas whenever possible
even if if you're still gonna use 4 unique materials, it helps to just have one texture for all of them
marsh trail
Does unity re-use the same texture if used on multiple different materials with different shaders?
I'm having a bit of a blank here, if it indeed re-uses the exact same texture without any duplicates of any kind, then using a single atlased texture sounds like the best idea, whereas if it does not, you'd have massive texture duplicates with "empty" spaces using up more memory than need be
The benefit of atlasing is the notion of reducing drawcalls, decreasing the number of materials essentially, multiple textures or a single one per material is negligible at best however
graceful vine
The idea of atlassing also relies on the fact that you should do as little materials as possible
You can use the same texture on multiple materials but that doesnt decrease draw calls so its the same as using different textures, aka: the atlas is pointless
frosty palm
Oof so maybe decimate what you can before atlasing?
Im learning making models btw, very interested in optimize stuff
graceful vine
Good!
shut sequoia
Kareeda has some good optimization guides for porting avatars
calm spade
Pinned in the channel ^
heady smelt
okay guys, so I've noticed that some of the content in vrchat was very low poly due to the fact that the models of the dmc 5 characters have a lot of polygons
I've tried to import it into unity, but when I saw it, there were a LOT of polygons over the limit. right now, I'm doing what I do best and imported it into blender 2.79.
weak path
why does my model have this like holographic effect? it shows up in some worlds and it gets annoying can someone help me remove it
timber blaze
might be an outdated shader?
empty pier
@weak path Are you using an old version of Cubed's Flat Lit Toon?
There was a bug in a fairly old version of Cubed's Flat Lit Toon that caused data to get mixed up in the ForwardAdd pass used to render point and spot lights.
It lead to weird ghost images like that.
weak path
@empty pier you have a link to the new updated shader?
empty pier
Cubed's shader hasn't been updated in a long time (Sept. 2018) you might want to try switching to a newer one.
Like this one https://github.com/Xiexe/Xiexes-Unity-Shaders
weak path
Thank you!
woeful ember
*Gonna be reporting this as a bug eventually (seems to be an issue relative to blendshapes)
the solution i came up with is Separating the Eyes to a new Mesh and naming the Mesh for the Eyes "Body" in order to function correctly
and proceeded to strip any unnecessary vertex groups (you should be left with four vertex groups) and that's it
*Incase anybody is reading this i'm going to state that i did indeed encounter a change and what i previously stated seems to be somewhat incorrect
*it's super weird but i'm still trying to determine what exactly is making it tick so try taking what i've previously said with ALOT of skepticism
marsh trail
Hmm... i've never heard about eyetracking performance issues myself personally, but i think it's likely a bug (obviously uninteded behaviour but y'know).
Do you perhaps have any further information regarding this?
And if this was done on a hierarchy without any eye vertex groups (but eye bones present) does the same occur?
I assume it must be quite impactful since 2 meshes are more performant.
@woeful ember
woeful ember
not sure about the vertex group part but i did see one avatar that had the loss but had blendshapes intact for eyetracking with vertex groups for only one pair of eyes
but the eye wasn't actually tracking
so depending on how some people set it up if it has the shapekeys intact it should still attempt to use eye tracking thus a loss should be incurred
i initially recognized this performance loss earlier this year but i was quite confused at the time and only recently have i actually done countless tests to finally deduce this result
marsh trail
I think this should be taken up as a bug-report, this sounds like completely unintended behaviour
woeful ember
this is definitely something that could be improved on their end or within CATs
anyways the loss from the eye tracking seems to far out weigh the additional skinned mesh
assuming you test this "properly"
incase you're wondering i was using Intel GPA Frame Analyzer to recognize this issue (but i don't believe it was absolutely accurate in some circumcstances)
i've correlated this with actual ingame performance while stressing the GPU in VR
marsh trail
I'd imagine it should be taken up by the devs/programmers as an increase in drawcalls to fix an issue with a "built-in" feature sounds counterproductive
woeful ember
OS - Windows 10 Enterprise Edition
Mobo - Asrock z97 Pro4
CPU - i7 4790k 4.4Ghz
GPU - EVGA FTW GTX 980 ti 1285 MHZ (Latest Driver and i tested with older drivers aswell)
RAM - 16GB
VR - Oculus Rift
really the loss for an additional skinned mesh is extremely negligible compared to the loss from the eye tracking
anyways yeah i'll consider making a report
marsh trail
If it's that bad, then i agree, but i'd reckon it'd be best for both worlds if it gets patched, increasing performance over a give/take scenario
woeful ember
but yeah if you wanna test this yourself and give me your results that would give me more samples
again this is only valid if you do it "properly" though
then again perhaps somehow in my process i might be hitting something unexpected giving me these results
but i've kept it as narrow as possible for comparisons
woeful ember
56,137
i separated the vertices weighted to the vertex groups for the eyes which had a bunch of junk cause of blendshapes since it was an MMD model
so that group was fairly large at 1,824
marsh trail
Very well, i'll do a bit of a test myself, which map did you use for said test?
woeful ember
i've attempted multiple scenarios but the one i particularly used to stress my GPU in VR was within baked lighting "Thulens avatar world"
marsh trail
I however do not have VR so the stress will likely be far lessened
woeful ember
i had to rely on looking into the mirror and using a camera to get below 45
really this probably isn't the most optimal method for this but it worked
i guess
marsh trail
I can however open multiple instances to stress my whole setup
woeful ember
there's a chance it was bottlenecking CPU since i didn't confirm this but the data mostly correlated with GPA frame analyzer
marsh trail
Unfortunately i can't have both instances on the same world instance as before, so i have to use different world instances, but that should be fine regardless
@woeful ember does this seem proper?
woeful ember
yeah but make sure you still have shapekeys
marsh trail
The 4 main ones right?
woeful ember
you can retain misc shapekeys aswell
yeah but i left all of them intact for my final test
marsh trail
I just wiped ehm all out honestly, but i'll re-create them if need be, as the only thing present on that mesh is the iris' which are the only moving eye part
The mesh with visemes is in BodyMain
Body is the iris'
woeful ember
yeah just make sure you retain the ones necessary for eye tracking
make sure the import settings for unity are identical
avoid overwriting/reimporting fbx since i suspect that might be causing some issues
marsh trail
Oh yeah, i'm making 2 different dupes for this, without any DB's or anything, just plain model
I'm editing a pre-existing avatar i had, makes it easier
woeful ember
i did the testing as barebones as possible
marsh trail
I'll even use the standard shader for authenticity haha
woeful ember
i used Robot Kyle as a baseline for performance since he didn't have blendshapes far as i'm aware nor eye tracking
marsh trail
Alright, going to upload both variants now for testing
Seems like the SDK decided to be a pain for me today
Triple checked everything and even applied from none to humanoid
woeful ember
đ¤ˇ
marsh trail
Behold, missing bodyparts-man
woeful ember
it just works! ree
marsh trail
I'll try re-exporting it, but the other one is clean apparently
Guess i'll restart unity to check for stupidity
Y'know, the weird part is that the multiple meshed one has no issues and it's the same model haha
woeful ember
đ¤
woeful ember
who was the villain lurking
marsh trail
Never tick this boi
woeful ember
đ
marsh trail
It casts some black magic on your unity deleting your body or someshiz
1 out of 2
Both uploaded
Hmm, i think ima need something heavier as i'm getting the same outcome
woeful ember
are you hitting 90 frames?
marsh trail
woeful ember
go to "Thulens avatar world" and turn on the mirror
marsh trail
I am currently there
woeful ember
depending on your system that should get you below 90 as long as you keep the avatars in the background within focus
ah turn on the heavy mirror
woeful ember
well you can see a difference the one with two skinned meshes should be the winner
in VR at 40 fps i was getting a 10fps difference
with a camera enabled
marsh trail
woeful ember
make sure you have all of the avatars in the background on screen though
they're laggy as fuck
sturdy socket
ah a better discord user 
woeful ember
specifically the one in the corner with the wizard hat
marsh trail
Actually, it depends on which instance is currently on
They seem to vary between 70-80 fps regardless
woeful ember
yeah the difference definitely seems higher than it should be
the fix should solve the lost in performance almost entirely
since i was getting pretty close to robot kyle in terms of performance with 5 materials
marsh trail
The odd thing is that both seem to be giving out extremely close results
I tried to gyazo it
woeful ember
i should probably try a world with a more stable framerate
i might just mash up something to lag my GPU but i'm kinda lazy at this point
marsh trail
Perhaps also test it with other users' inputs, switching between both and testing with other users should provide a fairly reliable test
woeful ember
it's eratic for some reason even on VR it was jumping inbetween like 36-40* fps
anyways the fact that you're running two instances probably isn't helping
marsh trail
It was the most reliable way to stress my system at the moment, i just get a 90-93 constant fps range otherwise
woeful ember
i get down to 70 with the mirror turned on with only once instance
there might be some weird stuff going on with that world i'm not positive
marsh trail
Also for specs
Win 10 64bit (build 17763.678)
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
16 GB RAM
Asus ROG GL702VM
Anyway, as it stands i sadly can't vouch for it working or not as the test seems rather inconclusive, but you may reach a reasonable conclusion at some point, going to wipe the dupes now
woeful ember
it's already a rather reasonable conclusion from what i've done
but perhaps a better way of stressing it to get a more accurate measurement of the cost might be in order for measuring the actual performance loss
woeful ember
alright so i did a simple setup in which i basically placed a whole bunch of mirrors within a world with some stuff in the background with post processing and i ended up with pretty much the same result
more mirrors seem to cause it to be calculated multiple times as expected
*Incase anybody is reading this i'm going to state that i did indeed encounter a change and what i previously stated seems to be somewhat incorrect
*it's super weird but i'm still trying to determine what exactly is making it tick so try taking what i've previously said with ALOT of skepticism
runic mist
I have an avatar that has opaque and transparent parts. Is it better to have 1 material that is rendered with a transparent shader on the entire model, or 2 materials: one for the opaque stuff and one for the transparent stuff?
proper grail
Cpu wise, yes. Gpu no. Bunch more reasons for no too. Transparency costs a bit more even at 0% and there are gonna be visual glitches like that weird you overlap people effect. And than there is still worrying about what shader itll fall back to when blocked.
weak path
I see alot of models with face emotes that are on desktop where they use. Shift and the f1 etc buttons is there a video that shows you how to do that?if so can somone share a link
pure bridge
how to create them? uhh id make a video rn if i was home
there's one on kareeda's channel
weak path
Ik how to make em dont you have to make an animation?
Like how you would make the blinking animations
shut sequoia
His video on it is more for props. you just record an animation on a duplicate, copy and paste the keyframes so they're the same, and then drag it into your animation override
weak path
Where on the override is it for the f keys sorry for all the questions
proper grail
Shift + F1Hand gesture - Idle
Shift + F2Hand gesture - Fist
Shift + F3Hand gesture - Open Hand
Shift + F4Hand gesture - Point
Shift + F5Hand gesture - Victory (Peace)
Shift + F6Hand gesture - Rock 'n Roll
Shift + F7Hand gesture - Finger-gun
Shift + F8Hand gesture - Thumbs up
weak path
@proper grail ayyy thank you so much!
amber hemlock
Also I believe left or right shift controls which hand does it (tho you trigger the same gesture regardless) this lets you do two at a time like vr users can
wet nest
Does the author of the Phoenix Wright PC avatars have plans to make them compatible with quest
carmine blaze
How would I go about fixing this issue?
azure berry
Check your rig in unity and make sure everything is in its right place @carmine blaze
carmine blaze
would it be possible to get some vc assistance because I'm not sure I'm doing all of this the right way
actually I'll hold off on that for a minute
ok nevermind I got it
blissful garnet
sudden zodiac
@vague hearth đ
graceful vine
Examples are pointless, do some basic research and you'll discover how to optimise game assets @agile radish (moved to this channel because relevant)
Just because an avatar looks good does not mean it is good, or well made. Which is 99% of VRChats avatars
agile radish
@graceful vine I can optimise, I think you miss point of post
graceful vine
You dont need 50+ mats or even 300k tris to be a good avatar.
agile radish
I not say that
graceful vine
Articulate better then.
agile radish
Perhaps not make assumption would help
graceful vine
Regardless you said "all good avatar break rule" this is untrue
Sorry i put two and two together and assumed you were uninformed.
As an example, heres an avatar made by a user in here "UniformVixen#0094"
5300 poly's, one material
Breaking 0 rules and looking stylish as fuck.
agile radish
Yes, I agree that avatar very nice. If only more have same skill
shut sequoia
what rules? there's no more standards lol
they dont care about unoptimized avatars any more 
graceful vine
đ
shut sequoia
if they did we'd at least see attempts to limit public-set avatars
its easier to just keep giving us tools to disable stuff
graceful vine
Its not easier, its almost the only viable solution right now - People kept and will keep bypassing stuff
Only so many checks you can do serverside, so why not just offload them to runtime (safety system)
shut sequoia
Well when we had limits very few bypassed since it meant world removal
and avatars forced private
shut sequoia
significantly slower
graceful vine
But its just not gonna work iguess
shut sequoia
i noticed a change once worlds got "rotated" out and favs did as well
3 fav slots helped a lot with rotating out the trash, but forcing avatars private wrks even better
lament garden
"Basic research" isn't a source of knowledge. In a game where a large portion of the game is user-made content "basic research" is a pretty poor piece of advice to give a new user @graceful vine
I don't frequent this channel very often, but i haven't seen another user even mention going to
https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips.
graceful vine
Ofcourse its not i was just pointing out how flagrantly wrong the statement was.
lament garden
fair, i just get spicy when people don't bother to give them any direction and just point them to google
graceful vine
I always try to help when people are genuinely interested.
lament garden
I don't use cats blender, but does it have any issues with using it in blender 2.8? I've always done everything manually so I'm curious to hear what other people have to say about it
azure berry
Doesn't seem to have any issues so far that I'm aware of in 2.8
lament garden
I might have to give it a shot. I've heard there are some pretty cool things in 2.8, but it just looks a little odd at the moment.
candid sedge
Cats can do a lot for you
lethal quarry
But are they purr-fect?
lethal quarry
XD
candid sedge
Not really sure if people have made full videos about it tho
lethal quarry
I mean there a re lot of cat videos out there, being there since the early 2000s.
... Wait.
candid sedge
lethal quarry
I'm thinking of the wrong kind of cats, aren't I?
lethal quarry
X3
candid sedge
But anyway if they have not even put a drop of effort in it can feel pointless for other people unlike some one saying i tried this and i dont get it or what video would you recommend ya know
buoyant holly
there are optimization tips in the pinned messages
azure berry
yeah it takes a bit to get used to 2.8's layout but i like it now that ive learned more of how to work everything @lament garden
lament garden
i straight up bought a course just so i could learn the new UI the right way @azure berry
there's a lot of things i haven't put to use in blender so i figure why not
azure berry
lol yeah thats useful, sinces theres tons of features in blender that alot of ppl dont even know about or use properly
lament garden
right?
I'm already making some objects from scratch, but I want to make full models at some point
buoyant holly
then start brushing up on your blender tutorials so you can learn how to make stuff
graceful vine
There are some popping up
calm spade
There's literally tutorials for everything at this point lol
lament garden
challenge accepted
sudden zodiac
There are pretty much no avatar tutorials for Blender 2.80, that's a big niche right now
dense crane
why cant i get my atlas workin?
buoyant holly
what's currently wrong with it
dense crane
every time i try to turn it into an atlas it says this
buoyant holly
pretty much our error message meant something gone wrong I don't know enough about pythons do you actually tell you why it's gone wrong you might try turning on and off your plugins a couple of times or reinstalling them
dense crane
fine...
buoyant holly
sorry I couldn't be more helpful there
proper grail
Could not identify file type .dds. My first guess would be to convert the textures to .png files
formal moss
@dense crane if you could, what's the name of that base avatar?
uncut valley
I need to get my avatar to not be so short. How the hell does one do that. These online tutorials suck. Dont mean to be a BUG
still perch
Well, scale factor in unity.
For a propper reference add a cube in unity. The default cube is 1x1x1 meter
Of use the example Avatar from the SDK
uncut valley
@still perch i figured it out.
So im adding my materials map which is in PNG format but why does it look like this? It takes so much just to upload avatars I swear. This is a custom one. Can anyone point in some type of direction???
still perch
Optimizing for a game engine is a little bit more, but for someone who knows how to create models from scratch it should be a finger snap.
split hound
@dense crane I happen to know the fix for that one
you have a material that has no mesh association
basically, there's a material that doesn't have a vertex group associated with it
or, you cannot access the image file the material is referencing
it's always one of the two with combiner, and yours seems to be the second case
the main issue is here:
find pc00201_body_col.dds, and, in blender, make sure it can find the file
easiest way is to select it in the dropdown on the uv mapping tab (the 2d grid) and on the right, expand the menu, click the file icon to open the reference image, and re-point it
alternately, delete the material from the list, save your .blend file, and close and reopen blender