avatar-optimization

[buoyant holly]

glad you're considering that kind of stuff and this is definitely the right spot the check

and yeah that gets a little complicated as the vrchat ranking system and what's the most optimized don't exactly line up as it's a simplified system to quantify performance

[coarse vine]

Yeah I've heard lol. Anywho, back to work for me!

[strong quarry]

I have a question regarding retopologizing, I'm currently using retopoflow in Blender and finally finished the retopo but what would be a good way to get the higher poly texture back onto the low poly mesh?

[buoyant holly]

texture baking

[strong quarry]

alright thanks

[ripe eagle]

would it be better to have a lot of skinned mesh renders with no shape keys or have 1 mesh with all the shape keys on that

[buoyant holly]

maybe one mesh without the shape keys and one with the vertices affected by the shape keys

[glad vault]

Does material swapping affect performance?

[glad vault]

Also how would I go with toggling meshes on in a way that they won't disable each other, acting independently, but without costing performance? I'm currently making a lot of objects that I want on my avatar and this just crossed my mind...

[plush kestrel]

Yes but everything affects performance so I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean significantly maybe just for a split second?

Actually maybe not at all

Depends how heavy the material is I guess

[stray tangle]

if you want toggles that are independant of each other, have a separate Bool for each one, and then set them up in separate layers in your FX controller

[zenith crown]

(you can also use an int parameter for each type of toggle you use, for example one for props going on the right hand, one for props on your head, etc... this way you can have up to 255 different props for each toggle system, active one at a time)

[glad vault]

Thank you!

[iron crystal]

how would i optimize dynamic bones? my count is super big and i want to minimize it

[stray tangle]

can you show a screenshot of the SDK control panel

put it in #avatar-help or something

[coarse vine]

This may be a dumb question, but do maps count as materials? I haven't messed with them yet.

[stray tangle]

wym by maps

do you mean like normal maps, metallic maps, etc?

[coarse vine]

Yeh

[stray tangle]

if so, then no, those are simply images. you add those to a material

[coarse vine]

Oh thank goodness

[stray tangle]

you can't slap an image onto a model and expect it to work

you add the image to a material as the base color (albedo)

[calm spade]

The textures have a cost

[stray tangle]

and then that gives it the color information

[coarse vine]

Yeh, I just didn't want my 2 mesh model to tell me it had 16 material slots because of math

[stray tangle]

no, material slots are per mesh

keep in mind that even though two meshes can share a common material, that counts as two slots

[coarse vine]

Yeah I knew that I think

I was just worried that Maps would be counted like textures. So 1 texture, 3 maps, 2 mesh would be 8 or something

Neato, thanks!

[unreal plover]

https://github.com/Naraenda/NarasUnityTools/

Here's the tutorial on how to do it: https://github.com/Naraenda/NarasUnityTools/blob/main/dbc_tutorial.md

[marsh phoenix]

Does anyone make custom avatars and if you do can you make one for me for quest please

[stray tangle]

wrong channel bud. for commissioned avatars, you can check out VRC Traders in #community-servers-old. you will need to make sure your discord account is verified with a phone number to get in.

also just a heads up, avatars aren't cheap. they take a lot of time to make, and people deserved to be paid for their work. depending on what you want, the price range can vary. avatars using a base model that require minor edits will always be cheaper than completely custom avatars made from scratch

[buoyant holly]

and if you just wanting a distinctive Avatar you can generate one using the website https://readyplayer.me/vrchat in like 5 minutes and have it run on the quest

[sick pelican]

Anyone got some tips on optimizing particle systems? I've messed around with particles a bit but besides that idk where i'd start in terms of optimizing (such as unnecessary options etc)

[unreal plover]

Less is better

[sleek cargo]

Mess around with emission rates and total particle count

[sleek cargo]

I’d try that ^

[sick pelican]

so for the most part less particles on the screen at once = better

thank you

[floral oxide]

Realistically the less particles emitted the better. This is because most people in VRChat generally hang around mirrors or will interact with a mirror at one point and that will double the count of what you put in. Since we’re talking optimization, make sure the texture it uses is compressed. Trails will also eat up people. Limit your emission rates and limit your max particles. If you’re trying to achieve certain effects, it is far better to use a sprite sheet that actively moves to imitate details which can allow you to use less particles to still obtain the desired effect.

[sleek cargo]

Oh and also you can try having the particles being recycled in a more optimal way such as a lower life time and have it’s end lifetime action do a call back or smth like that

[sick pelican]

alright, thank you for the tips

[slim beacon]

So we all know that dynamic bones are a pretty heavy performance hog, which brings up the question: is it still a better idea to use dynamic bones over cloth for a skirt/lowpoly mesh?

The most recent stuff I can find about it is two years old

[solid smelt]

Dynamic bones are bad, but cloth is usually worse. Following the guidelines in the avatar performance ranking system is a fair way to look at it.
Something to keep in mind is that cloth is locally done, so what you see might not match up with what other people see. Also, cloth needs its own skinned mesh to work, so you should think about that when thinking about performance.

[warped needle]

While talking about Dynamic Bones, does lowering the update rate matter at all for the sake of improving performance?
For example: in a lobby of 30+ FBT people with plenty of dynamic bones, would changing the update rate on everyone from 60 to 30 give any noticeable performance impact at all?

[autumn furnace]

No

[ashen spindle]

Changing the update rate wont make a difference because ingame the value just gets reset to the standard value. Even if you change it, the game will change it back.

[tender field]

why does the android sdk still say 10k+ polys is very poor? they updated the game, didn't they?

[calm spade]

Did you update your SDK ?

[heady flint]

can somebody help me export my avatar? im having difficulty optimising

[calm spade]

What are you having issues with exactly ?

[heady flint]

im super bad at this lol

dont know how to combine materials

sorry it took me a while to respond, been going ham at a ton of tutorials online @calm spade

[calm spade]

Which tutorial are you watching ? There's a few methods

[heady flint]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fco-G2j0Jg

this one

i think theyre using a different version of blender, makes it all very confusing

[calm spade]

oh boy that's very old

[heady flint]

is there a new better way to do it?

[calm spade]

https://youtu.be/YUZeBfYbfVo

Blender version doesn't really matter

[heady flint]

thanks! ill follow this

[last radish]

Should I use shapekeys or meshes for toggleable clothing and accessories? And what if the clothing pieces have dynamic bones on them?

[calm spade]

bones on duplicate bones

[heady smelt]

Cloth physics exist too yk try using that instead of dynamic bones for clothes

[last radish]

The question was more along the lines of which would be more performant: shapekeys or separated meshes?

[languid quartz]

Probably meshes. Because with meshes when they're disabled they are not being rendered at all, whereas with shape keys the clothing and accessories are being rendered all the time, they just become visible or not visible to the user.

Additionally there are some issues with having shapekeys constantly active.

[last radish]

Thank you. And I did encounter issues with shapekeys. Weight painted parts like long sleeves were causing stray polygons.

[glad beacon]

So, some may cry at this but its the only way i could create something along the effect
is there any way to change a different parameter than the axes when using a 2 axis puppet?

rn im using animator flowcharts to create ranges to set a value, but that seems pretty clunky

[crisp willow]

I'm at a stage where I had to go back to blender because I realized I have too many materials, material slots, and a lot of individual textures but no atlases.

Frustrated, for sure, but almost there. I could use some tips.

[unreal plover]

I personally find Cat's atlassing a bit lacking so I use PackMaster and SimpleBake to generate dense atlasses

You'd have 2 UV maps, one for the original textures which you can easily edit and another one which will be the final 1 material bake

https://blendermarket.com/products/simplebake---simple-pbr-and-other-baking-in-blender-2 and https://gumroad.com/l/uvpackmaster2-std

[crisp willow]

Packmaster looks pretty good from a quick look

So I have finally come up against the paywall, eh?

Well, thanks for these. I'll keep it in mind when pay day rolls by.

[unreal plover]

You could always try atlassing yourself though it is quite tedious work

[crisp willow]

Incredibly tedious, yes! And I am very new to Blender and Unity both so this is all new ground to cover.
Admittedly, I did not handle the texturing and material work well enough for it to be easy later on.

I just wasn't expecting things like material limits and texture issues. In my head I was like "Oh, these are just pictures, it'll be fine."

[unreal plover]

Well with baking you don't really have to worry about material count since everything gets baked to 1 material in the end

[crisp willow]

Guess I have to say goodbye to my metallic bits?

[unreal plover]

Nope! It will bake it into a separate texture called metallics which describe how metallic something is

Same for smoothness and emission

[crisp willow]

Mm, so good to hear 🤌

Tonight at 3amEST, the paycheck cometh

[calm spade]

Packmaster is godlike

[tough warren]

For real. If you pay money for any blender plugin it should be this one

[crisp willow]

So I've gone and bought it

And I've run through the setup guide, but nothing seems any different.

[calm spade]

Do you have comparison images between blender packing and packamster ?

[crisp willow]

Lemme clarify- Blender itself isn't different. I'm not sure where or how, but I must've set it up wrong.

[calm spade]

Do you not see the side menu in your UV page ?

[crisp willow]

Aha- in the UV editor

[calm spade]

[crisp willow]

_There it is 🤦 _

So now this can create a few atlases for me?

[calm spade]

Yeah, you'll have a lot more texel density with the higher quality packing

[crisp willow]

Well, I believe I'm in trouble. It does a great packing job, for sure, but now I need to rearrange and scale my textures into a single image to fit this new arrangement.

I'm blaming this oncoming nightmare on a big old list of rookie mistakes. In other words, time to climb out of the hole I dug.

[calm spade]

You can bake textures onto your atlas in blender as well, franada has a tutorial for that

[crisp willow]

I went digging

Found the tutorial

And a bunch of things clicked!

Damn, Ruuubick, super helpful

I should want to do this with every UV map I've got, correct?-- One whole atlas for all the textures.

[unreal plover]

Say you have UVMap with all the original UVs for the textures you are currently using. You want to make a second UV in the mesh properties and call it something like Atlas. Then with the Atlas layer active use Packmaster magic. Then you want to bake from UVMap to Atlas to generate the textures that will work with the Atlasmap.

After that I usually duplicate the mesh/armature and delete the old UVMap and create a new material that uses the baked textures

The SimpleBake addon I linked earlier simplifies a lot of this and puts in to ~8 clicks if you set it up from scratch

[crisp willow]

That sounds heavenly, honestly. I just ran out of mental energy to get started.

[amber hemlock]

Is it possible to animate a new audio file into an audio source component, to avoid needing a separate audio source for every possible sound? I never need to play more than one SFX at a time.

Trying to use record mode on an animation does not work but I know there are many ways to get parameters animated that you normally can’t add

[stray tangle]

wish that was the case, but not possible

[amber hemlock]

So weird. Is it not even possible via mono behavior?

I know we can’t have those on avatars

You’d think audiosource.clip would be animatable

[proper grail]

Is it possible to start/stop at certain points? One big streaming file would fit

[amber hemlock]

Good Point. With mono/udon your can, but I don’t think animations can trigger that

Pretty much only have play on wake

Anyways, thanks!

[calm spade]

Mind explaining the reason behind the duplicate of the mesh/armature ?

[proper grail]

Duplicate mesh and armature together and export that with selected only. Yeah leaves a nice backup incase a material needs an edit before atlasing

[calm spade]

Ah as a backup, i thought that was necessary to make changes stick through export or something

[proper grail]

I suppose on that side of things as well

[crisp willow]

Franada's tutorial is almost working for me

I have, admittedly, a lot more than four materials to bake into a single atlas, and I am getting some awesome results with the packmaster add-on alongside this tutorial. My only problem is that a lot of textures wind up black after the bake, and it doesn't all bake into one image, it just modifies the existing images with the new uv mapping.

I feel like I'm missing a step even if I replicate all of Franada's actions.

While I'm here, I should ask if there's a limit to texture resolutions?

[crisp willow]

Gonna try without packmaster, see what happens.

[calm spade]

You should be aiming for a 4K atlas

maybe two if you really need it, but doubtful unless you're going for very high detail

Also make sure to merge your meshes

[crisp willow]

I can have one of those?

I literally just successfully baked a 2k atlas after a bunch of trial and error and blender stackexchange answers *cough ahem*

Siiick

[calm spade]

Yeah 4K is fine

Never ever 8K though

[crisp willow]

No-ted

Packmaster so good. Thanks for reccomending it, @unreal plover

G'morning

Alrighty, @calm spade when I baked, some of the textures baked to the new atlas, some of them modified the original texture. Is there a common cause for that?

Something, something Circular Dependency?

[calm spade]

I'm pretty sure franada's tutorial goes over that step ? Are they assigned to the same material, are they all merged and do they share the same UVMap ?

[crisp willow]

If we're talking about the same tutorial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqe8JRiYuu0 (this video that is) then I haven't noticed if they did or didn't. As for the materials, that'd be a no- here I'll DM you my list of materials- the meshes are all merged, and my UVMap includes an unwrap of everything from that single mesh.

I suppose I can't DM you the materials

I'll post it in #avatar-help

[proper grail]

Bake button bakes to every material in a selected mesh, and in the material its the last selected image texture that it bakes to. Using the selected UVmap

and by last selected I mean in each material

lastest one that was clicked

[crisp willow]

So I would need to create a new material specifically for the atlas?

[proper grail]

nah Needs an target image texture in each material for bake to go to

[crisp willow]

I'm gonna be honest- I didn't quite understand your advice, so I tried what I gathered from it and got a different result, but it's still an incomplete atlas.

How can I set the target image?

[proper grail]

Its the last texture image node selected in each material

aaaaaa that sentence is 80% jargon

[crisp willow]

I'm jargon, honestly But I think I understand.

Let me give it another shot

[proper grail]

Yeah, just angrily arrow key down through the list of materials and make sure they all have the correct image texture highlighted

[crisp willow]

I'm only angry when my work night is wasted. As long as I get my result before I sleep, we stay Super Chill

[proper grail]

AH youre 96% of the way there, no worries!

[crisp willow]

Then I need my visemes, and a quick process through Unity, and woohoo

Probably won't get that done tonight.

Gyahhh

Almost had it

[proper grail]

ha, blender things.. dont be afraid to restart blender after certain errors like circular dependency we overwritten your texture youre welcome. It likes to use textures in memory and never update them to what they are

[crisp willow]

I think we got it

Mmmmnope forgot the outline

[proper grail]

One of these bakes will be perfect

[crisp willow]

Realizing that I didn't unwrap the eyes or the eyebrows made some weird artifacts at the bottom of the UVMap

Take

23

The outline is also causing a small issue as it serves as more of a makeshift shader than a texture.

Inverted Hull wooooo

So including it in the texture atlas is kinda pointless

[proper grail]

Now to move onto only atlasting things that will use the same texture or material. And separating opaque and transparent shaders

fun fun

[crisp willow]

My metallic gold is coming out black now

Other than that, the bake is good

[proper grail]

Yeah diffuse color, metallics and specular'd are black and only reflect the color they are perceived as. In short, set them to 0 in blender for baking diffuse color unless you have a shader that does metallic color

[crisp willow]

OKAY- Got the bake I wanted.

Went from 16 to 3 materials.

Outline, gold, and the texture atlas

Side bonus

The texture I used for the face was a mirrored texture, but at some point it baked as a full unwrap of the head. Now I can do some image editing and put in some nice little asymmetrical bits.

[stray tangle]

stacked UV's bad

good for UV space, bad for creativity

not sure why a lot of models go for mirrored stuff

[neon token]

I mean, it’s an easy doubling of texture size
if you want some asymmetric portions you could only mirror some parts and keep the rest separate

[solid smelt]

If something is symmetrical then you should stack the UVs, can always unstack later if you want to change something but your design should be final by the time you're baking

[raven badge]

Does VRChat allow the line renderer component? I want to make a simple laser beam that's cheaper performance-wise than using a particle system.

[dry egret]

I have an avatar with 93 materials on it, why does my friend keep saying that’s bad. They won’t give me a reason, it’s my first avatar but why does it matter?

[crisp willow]

In short, each material you use needs to be rendered by every other person sharing a world with you. That can be an issue because not everyone's systems are created equally.

The more materials, the worse it gets

[buoyant holly]

also if there's any real-time like basically it's twice as worse

and you do not need 93 materials ever on a avatar as that would potentially be Overkill even for a vrchat map

[minor charm]

I'm pretty new at avatar creation, I followed some tutorials and got an avatar running, it has one mesh, one material, what I want are eyebrows that show up through the hair, can I do that with a single mesh? is this the right chat to be asking for help? I don't know what the best way to do this is, my plan is to make a second mesh and material, and just weight paint it together

[floral oxide]

@minor charm If they are a separate mesh and not just drawn on the face, you can do that with a single mesh, just literally move it forward pass the hair in Blender. But if you intend to make the hair move like with Dynamic Bones, then expect it to move in front of the eyebrows unless you really sit there and add in colliders for that. The overall work for it is relatively simple and a bit more than normal but easy to accomplish if you really want it that bad. No need for a second material and mesh.

[minor charm]

I don't know what you mean by "move it forward", like in front of the face?, I was thinking of using a stencil shader as the hair has quite a bit of volume, but now thinking about this I think I'll need more than 2 meshes, so the eyebrows don't show up from the back of the head

[unreal plover]

You can use backface culling so it doesn't draw when you view the brows from behind :P

[heady smelt]

i'm scared to mess with this "custom shader keywords" stuff. if i upload an avatar it wont break if i use it right?

using the unity toon chan shader

[stray tangle]

should be fine

[floral oxide]

You can remove them do not worry.

[last radish]

Do Dynamic Bones cancel out Rotation Constraints when placed on the same bone/object? Both work when run in Editor (and with the SDK3 emulator) but in-game only Dynamic Bones work.

[stray tangle]

should maybe put the rotation constraint on a parent object of the one with dynamic bones

[quaint venture]

Is it more optimized to have an atlas for each material or one atlas that all materials use?

[calm spade]

the point of an atlas is to only have one material

If you have multiple materials you aren't making an atlas

or you might be, but that's against the point of an atlas

[amber hemlock]

Component order (top to bottom) is how unity operates normally, except for LateUpdate events which also go top to bottom again. Never looked at dynamic bone code but unless it used late update, components below it should overwrite it

[last radish]

@amber hemlock Sadly it seems Dynamic Bones cancels out Constraints regardless of order. @stray tangle I put the rotation constraint on the parent with DB on child. Now the mesh gets rendered twice! One for just the Constraint and another for DB with Constraint! Buggy! The same happens when the DB is toggled off directly with an animation key. More insanity: When toggled off with an animation key, DB is still working when viewed from a mirror and off from first person.

[solid smelt]

DB does not change the transforms of the bones it is effecting like FIK or constraints, you should not be trying to use DB and another source of transform manipulation on the same bone.

[last radish]

The problem being I can't toggle DB off, either. It still remains on to some effect.

[quaint venture]

The point of an atlas is to reduce materials. I have like 30 materials unatlased. I need to use one slot for top, one slot for bottom, one for eye shader, one for fur shader and one slot for the head and jacket for a total of 5. I need them to be seperate materials for my toggles, which uses the dissolve shader in poiyomi to take clothes off with individual toggles. I'm already green stat with all my toggles, was just wondering if there was a best practice. My question is the material that is for the head and jacket can either be using the same atlas as the rest or using one just for it as there is no overlap. Is it better to have them as one image or two? I think 2 is better but not sure.

Eventually I'll move to one material slot that switches between 8 different materials for every combination of toggles but that's awhile off

[floral oxide]

So what I've learned is that if you make a material for different shaders. This is far more the efficient way. For example if the head and jacket both share the same image, then you only need 1 material using that image for both of them. Even when you toggle them on and off it's still going to be there and you can still overlap it with some types of animations. Now let's say your eyeball uses the same image as the head and jacket, but you want a poiyomi sparkle shader on it when the head and jacket use a standard shader already, now it's a separate material on it's own that uses the same image. So now you're up 2 materials but 1 texture. Toggling clothing will unfortunately count as separate meshes. so you'll up your material count for every separated object. You can counter this by creating a Shape Key in blender to shrink the clothing. This will still give you the option to toggle clothing and still be considered 1 mesh. But you can't avoid it if you intend to use multiple types of shaders.

[quaint venture]

There is a material for each shader and each toggle for a total of 5. To do the toggles I have the atlas with the skin removed and the atlas with the clothes removed as the dissolved texture in a poiyomi cutout shader, so I can do the toggles without needing any additional meshes.

Doing it the shapekey way is less optimized and more of a pain in the ass

[floral oxide]

You're not wrong but that's what I've seen others do. if you look at some of the older anime models that have like a bunch of face gestures in their head, that is what they are doing because they dont want to separate them and be flagged for multiple material and mesh count.

[quaint venture]

That's fine for things that don't deform, but for like skin you need the skin to fit into the clothes without clipping but still the same vague area or you will see your skin become weird claws around your arms if you just shrink it down

[floral oxide]

That's understandable and I'm with you on that. I'm just letting you know what I do and also what others tend to do. I do the same thing you're doing so you're good. One thing I do differently though is I will cut up the body to hide certain parts of it to prevent any possible clipping. Like if the jacket covers a majority of the body, I will clip the body in the areas it covers in case the avatar will bend in a way that will come out out of the jacket. This is just my preference as I dont not care sometimes how many meshes i use. I will separate meshes for the sake of toggling.

[quaint venture]

If you're using a cutout shader and the part of the atlas its using is deleted no one can see it if they have your shaders shown. If there is anything that cannot be shown to people without your shader, those would need to be either shrank to 0 0 0 by default and changed with an animation, or separated into another mesh.

[floral oxide]

For Quest purposes, you don't really get the option of using a cutout shader. (you do but thats another talk) But for the sake of optimization and friendly purposes, you dont get a cutout option. Anything transparent renders a solid color.

[quaint venture]

I dont think I've ever seen a quest avatar with toggles, but then again I don't play on quest. My quest fallback version is just the shirt on, pants on with the under skin and jacket deleted

[floral oxide]

My most iconic avatar i made specifically for showing off the possibility for Quest. It's a minecraft chicken that has 24 prop toggles , 6 sets of transparent particles , 8 skin change toggles , 1 pet and 8 custom dances and the overall size of the avatar was at 2MB.

[quaint venture]

Oh wow

[quaint venture]

How many polys is that?

[floral oxide]

was less than 1000 if remember correctly. not that much

[quaint venture]

Damn

I guess being minecraft it took less to make it look good but still, I'm impressed

It was a struggle getting to 10k for me

[floral oxide]

yeah they aren't kind with the amount of polys to be given for Quest for not very poor performance

it's a shame because I can run over a million polys with the Quest 2 and be fine with it , so being limited to now 20k is a bit ridiculous but i dont make the rules lol

[quaint venture]

I wish the fallback avatars could be 20k

Would make it look a lot better

Without the under skin and jacket I'm already at 36k, so doesn't take much to get it to 20k

[floral oxide]

yeah the fallback avatars are kind of weird, havent dived into them yet.

im assuming decimating it just makes it look like a PS1 character right ?

[quaint venture]

I had to remove a lot of details and then do targeted decimation so it still looks good, just less good

[floral oxide]

rip my guy, hopefully they realize the better potential quest has and bumps it up some more

[quaint venture]

Imagine if the limit was 40k that would be rad af

[calm spade]

We already just doubled the limit

But if you have two materials using the same atlas texture, you're doing it wrong

[floral oxide]

What's the right way to use 2 separate kinds of shader materials into a single material? I would like to know how to be able to use Standard Cutout and a Mobile Additive shader in a single material.

[quaint venture]

Thus avatar was originally a commission, the top and bottom are atlased to begin win and so was the skin. I've split out the skin but the clothes are much more mixed together so it's hard to split it out. It's on the list thought. But it sounds like the answer to my original question is have the head jacket be its own atlas. Thank you!

[calm spade]

You can't, that's why you have two different atlases of smaller size

Also additive wasn't even meant to be used outside of particles

[floral oxide]

That's what I'm more curious about. Like If were to use something else as an example, like i want the jacket to be a standard cutout but i want the eyes or something to be a matcap. How would I do that as a single material? Because from my understanding, i can't use multiple types of shaders without having to create more materials. Im forced to use a matcap separate from a standard cutout.

Because I would love to Atlas the entire model and then use specific sections as materials or something but still be counted as 1 material for the 1 atlas texture. That would be great.

[quaint venture]

Something I did was just make a generic material and then manually edit the textures until they looked correct in it, then atlased them all together. Only things I couldn't do it for were the eyes which have an animation and fur which I couldn't make look right.

So like my skin previously had its own shader because it made it more pink, so I edited the texture to be more pibk

[floral oxide]

Yeah that's what I more or less want, I have no problem editting the textures and UV Mapping them in Blender. The problem I come across is that for Quest purposes if I want to use different types of shaders, even atlasing at it's best can only get me so far. Since PC gets 32 materials before it's considered poor where Quest only gets 4. That's not much to work with. 4 is what I can get if I optimized it into 1 texture and then 1 fancy texture like matcap, i could toggle it to change my outfit like once or twice to max it out to 4 and still be considered Poor. Or if i want to add props, i have to make sure i can fit that on my avatar ATLAS otherwise a sword would be enough to count as an additional material slot.

[calm spade]

There's no solution for that kind of things, it's fine to use a couple materials on your avatar, i personally have 6 since my head is separated from my body

[quaint venture]

The material slot limit is how many slots you use not how many materials you use, you can have 50 outfits as long as they have the same shape and you're just changing the appearance

[floral oxide]

Yeah pretty much, it's definitely a challenge fitting within the realm of the Quest standards. But I feel that setting the material count from 4 to something like 8 wouldn't be any noticeable change in performance. 8 would be enough to give some kind of flexible capability for Quest and still be within the realm of safe.

[calm spade]

Not even the same shape since you can offset UVs with animations as well

[quaint venture]

Is there a good guide for that? I haven't heard of it before

[calm spade]

Quest is a mobile platform, and sadly any increase of what people can do results in lower performance for everyone, it's not a choice sadly

[calm spade]

in the material tab you have offset as an option, it slides your texture across your UV, so you could have an atlas of different outfits on the same texture, and change the offset on the material to be in the correct spot

[quaint venture]

Interesting

[floral oxide]

Not even additional safety functions for Quest? like if any avatar walks around with more than X amount of Poly , X amount of material , X amount of whatever, set to hide and block the avatar? with that it's at least optional to change capabilities for different performances. Me being a Quest player from the start, i can say that Quest 1 definitely falls in the realm of needing to be limited to the current standards. But Quest 2 is more than capable of running higher standards. Not to what PC can do but somewhere in the middle.

[floral oxide]

never thought of that, thank you for that.

[calm spade]

Quest 2 is a lot more powerful, but the Quest 1 gets the same content, and the behavior for most is to show all avatars around, so gradual changes may happen if we find ways to solve those issues for users

[quaint venture]

What about changing the fallback system to allow poor? That would double the limit making it a lot easier for people to have a backup that isn't a default avatar

[calm spade]

The double in poly for very poor limit was a step in that direction, but it didn't really affect the 300k poly avatars running around

Fallback is supposed to be a quest optimized version of the model you're wearing, poor territory is already too far down the real of not quest compatible

Generally people need to stop treating Quest as a PC equivalent

It's a mobile headset, on mobile hardware

Air link changes that for a lot of people though

[normal nova]

I spend all this time making a bake system and people wanna use 8 materials on cell phone hardware |D

[quaint venture]

The only limit that was annoying is the poly limit, I'm fine with the other limits

Just a few more thousand would be so nice

I'm fine with 1 mesh 1 material

[calm spade]

I personally really dislike the avatars with 16 different clothing types in one, it bloats file size, it is considered very poor by the perf system meaning i have to manually show people who tell me that's what they're using

20000 for the quest is already VERY generous

[quaint venture]

It's 10k for fallback, 20k would be amazing

[floral oxide]

That's the thing though, i've been in public black cat lobbies with over 8 people that totals out to over 1 million polys , particles and all that crazy unoptimized stuff and ran fine with it.

[calm spade]

"fine" is very debatable

[quaint venture]

Godfall avatars are evil. You don't need 590k polys haha

[calm spade]

When we did perf test, on quest 1, a single 300k very poor public avatar dropped me 20fps

[floral oxide]

What about the 2?

[normal nova]

I've been eyeing a way to create props with scalable bones, which shouldn't make it more expensive like shape keys would

[calm spade]

The 2 does better, but it's generally not just poly, it's the materials, the particles

[calm spade]

Definitely much much cheaper

[normal nova]

I can't profile anytning though :v

[calm spade]

Constant mesh skinning

[floral oxide]

The biggest notices for me are when people run particles and trails, and of course intended crashers. But things like the transparency or 100k poly dont put a dent on me.

[quaint venture]

What about a 50k avatar with 1 material and 1 mesh vs a 10k avatar with 1 material and one mesh

[calm spade]

multiply that by 30

[floral oxide]

Trails will eat your performance up its bad bad

[calm spade]

now you've got a public instance

[floral oxide]

For Quest the average is 8 players

[quaint venture]

I'm arguing for fallback avatars I'm unaffected by normal ones haha

[normal nova]

Yeaaah I initially added that feature, and then scrapped it

[calm spade]

Sadly the first player experience on quest is large populated instances

[floral oxide]

going into a 30 player room all together does damper a Quest for sure even if everything was optimized, that I know for sure. But the average quest player is used to 8 because I guess when you make worlds, thats the default number no one changes for some reason

[quaint venture]

I agree 300k is way too much but I think 10k is too low. 20k would be nice and 40k would be godtier

[calm spade]

fallback is the same, they're meant to solve the issue of perf, doesn't work if we increase its limit

[normal nova]

I mean, if you CAN have a ton of people in one room, you should want that capability right? Over having one guy in a corner with an extremely subdivided sphere for a head

7.5k is plenty for most avatars if you do normal baking btw!

[floral oxide]

Would there be any kind of reconsideration for Quest if the sample was size was something more suited to the average Quest player? A lobby of 15 people tends to be what Quest players dive into in the Black Cat.

[calm spade]

We can't make choices based on what the analytics say the average is, because there could be as many people in 3 people instance as people in 20

If we increase it for the people who hang out with a few friends in a public instance, it's also for the new player joining a big black cat instance for the first time

[quaint venture]

Were there performance tests done against high poly but only 1 material and mesh? If not I don't think it's a fair test to set the poly limits against it. Maybe it would actually make sense to make the requirements something like poly count times material count

Isn't that the draw coubt?

[calm spade]

material and meshes suffer the same problem, it's drawcalls all the way down

[normal nova]

They affect different bottlenecks

[calm spade]

you have a mobile gpu, and a mobile cpu

whichever gives up first

[quaint venture]

Poly Count times mesh count times average material count?

[floral oxide]

Make sense but if they joined a large lobby that can hold 20-30 people. But usually when a Quest player enters that they end up leaving of course do to performance. So the environment most of them experience is usually an 8 player lobby. a bit more if they do that Friends+ thing usually up to about 12. In a black cat, they'll hover around a 15 player lobby. Testing a 30 player lobby is a bit extreme for a Quest and isn't the average nor is it the most common scenario in their experience playing.

[calm spade]

We test things that are reliable and consistent anyway, so it's easy to tell what changed, visually and per the analytics

Things are much better now than they were

[quaint venture]

I think the taking down public worlds with the terrible very poor avatars is the correct path, killing the ceiling. I just feel like the floor is too low.

[calm spade]

Doesn't mean we get to be complacent and forget that the quest 1 is a thing

If the quest 1 were to be deprecated though

[floral oxide]

Right and i thought about it for awhile but someone mentioned adding in additional safety functions much like you do with Dynamic Bones.

[calm spade]

The floor is low on purpose, because that's what people should aim for and learn to make content for, a mobile platform

[quaint venture]

That's fair I suppose

[buoyant holly]

and I said that's just a good skill set to learn in general how to make good avatars with a small budget

[floral oxide]

I'm all for learning ways to optimize and make avatars as small they can be, it's been quite a journey at best and I'd like to say that it's helped out a lot because I'm able to teach people how to optimize their avatars as much as possible. Again with what I told Moderated, I used to have a Quest avatar that very well worked nicely that both Quest and PC players can see and it used a lot of specs that was considered very poor or things that no longer are available for Quest. But even at the time of it's creation, the avatar performed well without reducing really any performance in a Quest 1. This proves to me that the majority of the problem does lay with the Poly count. But does transparency for Quest really have to suffer that? As well as Audio?

[buoyant holly]

the documentation for all of the game engines mentions transparency is expensive for mobile Hardware

[floral oxide]

It mentions it yes, but playing it first hand and bench testing it show the results say otherwise.

But we're relying on documentation that never considered the Quest 2 in mind.

[buoyant holly]

https://i.gyazo.com/dac61524bd2fd6d871a87018d7992fb0.png

https://i.gyazo.com/ca10d4aebffc528586e80fdc48c38a85.png

https://i.gyazo.com/e9dbb8fc20cb53418d3b05b13ad61c7e.png

a quest 2 still has the same rendering characteristics as any other Android phone

[floral oxide]

Right again, the documentation says that. But the performance says otherwise. I'm willing to give my avatar to guys just to show you that it's possible , it works, despite the documenation. It's outdated with what's now new information. Sure it's mobile but guess what? this mobile device called the Quest 2 is pretty powerful. I have yet to see another mobile device that rivals it.

It's no different than if a Quest 3 were to come out and out perform the Index or Vive but yet you will still say "the documentation says its mobile so its too expensive for us to have it on Quest" but it still performs better. When will the line be crossed for this?

[buoyant holly]

question have you done your performance tests where there would be lots of overdraw generated because a single Avatar in a black void isn't a terribly useful test

[calm spade]

I think Oculus benchmarks are more reliable than random users one off tests

On top of that you're not taking IK and voice into account

• nameplate

and visemes

[floral oxide]

Do you guys even own a Quest 2? Have you guys ever tried one? Not a Quest 1. But a 2.

[calm spade]

I own three, so yes

[buoyant holly]

yes the development team has Quest 2

[calm spade]

You're not the first to go and say "but i tested and it ran fine" over the past two years, people were saying that on the quest 1 too, but analytics have always proven everyone wrong

[floral oxide]

No Quest 1 was bad

i can say that for sure

from the day i got it

to the day i canned it

But the Quest 2, although not perfect is much better than a 1.

[calm spade]

Yes, and much much worse than a pc

[buoyant holly]

probably buy a literal order of magnitude

[calm spade]

[floral oxide]

that's true, because it is indeed a mobile, its running everything on its own like a PC, but only vouching and fighting for the current limitations to just be raised a bit. Nothing to match the PC.

like materials from 4 to 8

[buoyant holly]

doubling that would have disastrous results because then everybody would do that

[calm spade]

We raised the limits a few months ago

[floral oxide]

everybody CAN do it , not everybody will

[buoyant holly]

and also given the limited Shader set you don't need 8

[calm spade]

You don't need 8 materials on quest for anything

[buoyant holly]

yes but they have to make your development decision as if everybody is making the most awful Avatar they can

[calm spade]

You shouldn't have multiple outfits on a quest avatar to begin with

[floral oxide]

Not anymore after I found out about the whole UV offset thing yeah of course.

The example was just that though.

[buoyant holly]

yeah that's a waste of vram

[calm spade]

Sure it all comes down to knowledge on how to do better, that's what i'm arguing for

Learning how to make better avatars for a specific platform > VRChat raising the limits and making it worse across the board

[buoyant holly]

especially if kind of funny considering everybody is Anime avatars which are style that handle very well on mobile content limitations

[floral oxide]

So despite being able to run better than the Quest 1 and with the limitations given, Quest will always remain in the lower budget standards? Even if it were to one day out perform a known PC headset like the Vive or Index ?

If it gets to the point where it can outperfom an OLD index, a PC headset. Then shouldn't it be given thought that it can have even just slightly better standards?

[buoyant holly]

it is never going to beat a PC because the PC will always be getting better faster than the mobile

[floral oxide]

Yeah looking like old PS2 avatars lmao

[floral oxide]

I said a PC headset, an old one.

which is capable of running the PC current specs

if it beats that, it's still not allowed to have better limitations?

that's the issue with what im talking about, it can get to a point to where it easily handles more than 200k polys

but you will still keep it at the low 20k

[quaint venture]

Slipperslope go brrrr

[buoyant holly]

that's probably going to be like 10 years before that happens so that's not terribly relevant at the moment

[quaint venture]

What if the quest 3 can time travel tho did you think of that

[floral oxide]

Let's see what happens next year then when the Quest 2 Pro and the 3 come out. It doesnt take them long to make these things, the difference in performance between the 1 and 2 are major and they are only about a year or 2 apart. 10 years? That's a low blow and undermining Quest.

[buoyant holly]

I sincerely doubt a quest 3 can power match a GTX 1070

[calm spade]

They rely on existing mobile hardware

[buoyant holly]

considering a PC graphics card is the same size as a VR headset

[floral oxide]

that can always change in the future, technology grows

that includes the hardware

[quaint venture]

And you can have this debate then, no point in making changes based off what ifs

[buoyant holly]

and even with a quest 3 the transparency is probably not going to change because the Baseline Android rendering stuff that makes transparency a bad idea wouldn't change

[quaint venture]

I dont see a reason why a quest avatar would have more than 2 materials, you don't have enough polys to do toggles in a normal anime avatar which is 99% of them

And no fancy shader either

Honestly more than 1 is unnecessary 90% of the time

[buoyant holly]

and given the way anime Hair Works you don't need transparency for that

[quaint venture]

Only reason I want a higher poly limit is to not have to do as much work decimating and removing details, the material limit makes sense to me as is

[buoyant holly]

heck even on PC you could could probably cut down on the amount of materials with proper mask textures

[calm spade]

Removing detail is necessary, it's a mobile platform

[floral oxide]

The transparency isn't really for the hair. It's for things like clothing designs or even particles. Nothing crazy.

[buoyant holly]

you don't need to see individual belt holes as geometry

[calm spade]

transparency is crazy

[buoyant holly]

most of those clothing designs you can use the blender knife tool to cut out and probably end up with less geometry

[quaint venture]

Does quest allow cut out transparency? (As in on or off, no blending)?

[floral oxide]

wouldnt that create more polys by cutting it into more? even though the poly limit is low, you want to give up a simple plan with some small transparency to increase an otherwise already low poly count limit ?

[buoyant holly]

no transparency whatsoever on the avatars

[quaint venture]

Ah

[buoyant holly]

depends on the source transparent model has a lot of the anime clothing leaves large parts of the mesh transparent

[floral oxide]

so it depends, that means there is a fine line at which you would agree to allow transparency? under what certain conditions?

[buoyant holly]

not anytime soon because of the way the Android renderer works

[floral oxide]

the idea is crazy to me seeing that I've never seen anyone crash because of a transparency issue. It's always been related to an overload of particles , meshes , materials, crashers , custom shaders

[buoyant holly]

transparency is not likely to make a crash but it's likely to make bad performance

because of overdraw

[floral oxide]

Again, i cant tell you the number of times ive seen someone drop 300 particles and crash me, but a small minecraft chicken with some of the soul particle spritesheets never hurt me or anyone anyhow. even if its just 1 particle Quest gets rendered as very poor.

[quaint venture]

That should only cause issue if there's blending right? If its fully transparent there should be no issue, unless I misunderstood what you linked earlier

[buoyant holly]

even a cut-off Shader would have to worry about overdraw

[quaint venture]

Ah, rip.

[floral oxide]

not sure what to tell you, i've seen the transparency in numerous quantities, never did anyone bad in performance despite the documentation

[buoyant holly]

https://i.gyazo.com/f71221ec49670dd145a7a1b9271eaa18.png an example of a anime dress that has most of the geometry transparent

[buoyant holly]

the developers have done more testing than you

[floral oxide]

okay but if someone comes up with new kind of information you just dismiss it ?

[quaint venture]

I use cut off on my pc one, dont see a point to partial transparency

[buoyant holly]

including probably making much more worst-case scenarios than you have

[floral oxide]

not one to sell myself out but i dont quite agree with that

[buoyant holly]

well yes when it's just a anecdote especially when you have to go against the literal developers of the engines

like the people who have made Unity definitely know more than you do

[floral oxide]

im not going against them, i want the same thing they want and that is to find the best solutions for everyone

[buoyant holly]

yeah but you're trade-offs that has potentially worse performance for folks because people will make avatars with terrible transparencies that like overlap considerably

[floral oxide]

i still have yet to see anyone crash or drop in performance due to transparency

if anything

why not make it optional

[buoyant holly]

that's because they're not allowed on Quest

[floral oxide]

why not make it a safety setting

you do it with dynamic bones and particles

[buoyant holly]

PC has considerably different rendering characteristics and power level

[floral oxide]

that doesnt answer my question on why you can include a safety setting

[buoyant holly]

because you don't want the avatars look bad for most folks because they have their safety settings on

like I'm not turning on transparency for a random stranger if I was on Quest

[floral oxide]

the avatars already look bad for quest because of the limitations

[floral oxide]

i would

[buoyant holly]

yeah but that's a different kind of bad seeing a transparent Avatar with the transparency turned off

[floral oxide]

what i wont do is turn on particles from a stranger which is more of the realistic problems

particles are an issue

trails are more of an issue than that

but transparency getting the bad wrap because its written in documentation that someone wrote most likely prior to the Quest 2.

[buoyant holly]

the vrchat team seems to disagree given that you've been told multiple times why they don't do transparency

[buoyant holly]

yes because the quest 2 doesn't change the rendering characteristics of Android which leads to it being a problem

[proper grail]

Quest 1 does not have hardware depth testing, no transparency without overheating. 13.7 ms is not a lot of time given mobile hardware. Everybody has to be comfortable, not just people with newer hardware.

[floral oxide]

thats why the safety setting was brought up

it literally gives you that option

so it works for both old and newer hardware

if you dont want to turn on transparency then fine be my guest

but if i want it, why stop me

[buoyant holly]

have you checked to see if the quest 2 has any hardware depth testing

[normal nova]

you've been talking about this for days...

[buoyant holly]

because if it doesn't it it's in the same problem ballpark as the quest 1

yeah I'm not quite sure why it's keep going cuz they're in the dev team have told you no ! ! Status

[floral oxide]

I can get back to you on that if you'd like, i'm not gonna randomly say yes and not know. again im just speaking from what im experiencing right? you tell me i cant handle transparency, but i go out in vrchat and play seeing it with no problem. you tell me 20k is generous but i go out and see over 800k just fine. i guess i'll just assume my experience is a lie because the books say so.

[buoyant holly]

you literally cannot get any data if you're playing on the PC version

[proper grail]

And with the standalone quest its not even the VRC team that makes the rules, if your game cant run at >72 fps at all times (reasonable times when it comes to vrc, given that its a upload your own content social game) than its not allowed on the oculus platform

[buoyant holly]

so it's going to have to deal with the quest 1 Hardware restrictions until Facebook literally stops allowing the quest-1 to run vrchat which is probably not anytime soon

[tired hearth]

I'm looking for combine skinned mesh, so I check this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=352&v=1fco-G2j0Jg&feature=emb_logo

But if my avatar want some toggle emote(swords, bats, guns, etc), is it possible to make animation with joined mesh?

[sick timber]

Yes, you’ll need to use blendshapes/shapekeys/whatever you call them where one state (using state because you can use either, although I would recommend using the fully active state) is the object in the correct place, and the other state is it hidden inside the mesh. After you save, export, and import it to Unity, you can set up some animations that have the shapekeys enabled or disabled, then either set up some 3.0 stuff (idk how to do that) or assign the animation to the 2.0 slots.
This should probably work if set up correctly, but in Unity you will need to enable legacy blend shape normals or set the blend shape normals to import or there will be buggy lighting, and a significantly larger upload size.

[heady smelt]

hey, can anyone speak to the performance benefits of this dynamic bone / constraints method?

https://twitter.com/bnuuy_vrc/status/1406644068977885188?s=21

a model i bought has a massive component count (39..) and im looking to reduce it while still maintaining quality the best i can

[languid quartz]

Constraints are fairly efficient, and can run on multiple cores. Using them to copy the movements of a dynamic bone chain to improve performance is quite viable as a result.
In pinned messages you can find a tool by Nara, it allows you to easily set this type of thing up.
#avatar-optimization message

[heady smelt]

thanks, definitely gonna look into this then

[mild hemlock]

Hey, is there anyone that can make me an emo goth girl? If not its fine :]

[candid onyx]

Okay so im having this issue. Somehow I got a material atlas that came out to be 65536x16384 pixels, and its 90% empty space. This image is so large I cant even import it into unity properly, and so it wont work. The problem is if I crop the image, the UVs get messed up. What do I do?

[lunar kraken]

Not sure if I ask here or not

I need help putting my pc avatar into quest

Idk how to do that stuff and a friend of mine who helped me with my avatar before really busy with stuff irl, so he csnt help me

If you're able to, pm me ok :3

[unreal plover]

You can edit the UVs in Blender :p

Make sure when using CATs to generate atlasses, to make sure your input textures/UVs don't have any extra space around them that could be trimmed

[lone tiger]

Also don't use CATS built-in MatCombiner, use the one that is located in its own tab, which allows you to set size of gaps between images to 0.

[quaint venture]

Click material combiner tab set size of images to 8, set size to automatic and check crop by uv

Also if your textures themselves have a bunch of empty space this wont remove it

Now on to my question is there any world where I can see my avatar rendered like 1000 times so I can compare performance between different techniques?

[proper grail]

Theres a map called The Dodecahedron that has 12 mirrors all facing eachother, good multiply my avatar world

[quaint venture]

Thanks, ill have to try that. Might have to raise my resolution to drop my frames so I can actually tell the difference, 12 isn't that many.

[proper grail]

Mmm its more about getting as many draw calls as you can. Mirrors and realtime lighting are multiplicative with the amount of materials so thats the low hanging fruit

Resolution will just stress how many cores your gpu has

[quaint venture]

I want to test the difference between 4 materials and 2, because 2 is way more annoying to do. I've got like 10 animations and 5 materials to handle 3 toggles in one material slot

[proper grail]

Whats best and what the "worst case" avatar rating fall away from eachother in these odd cases

[quaint venture]

Oh it's already green stat I'm just pushing it to the extreme

[quaint venture]

Just reread one of the articles, there's something built into unity for performance testing will try that

[unreal plover]

Just duplicate your avatar 40 times and use the Unity Profiler

[white turret]

Looking for someone who if i send u my vr chat model can change it to a quest + pc model rn its just a pc model and i cant use it what so ever on my quest i can pay any amount needed^^

[normal herald]

does anybody know how to fix the CATS atlas from totally fvcking up the models textures? like black turns to white and the model suddenly got red eyes instead of blue

[amber hemlock]

Hard to say just based on the description what’s going off with it. Though you should expect after the atlas the joined textures must all use the same shader settings. If they need separate shader options, either group them by what shader they can have common and only atlas those together. Or atlas everything and then mark separate materials as needed again

[delicate cloud]

Ive noticed most of the avatars i have been uploading to vr has had eyelids go past the blinking point i set in cats blender. Tried fixing it, set the value to from 1 to 0.5 as the blinking value is too large, pressed stop testing and fix afterwards, then upload, but the values get reset back once Ive uploaded it through unity to vrchat

[quaint venture]

Don't use the one under the cats menu, use the one under material combiner

[normal nova]

You can also try Bake if material combiner(s) have issues

[quaint venture]

Is it more optimized to use multiple images or multiple uv maps?

[buoyant holly]

depends what are you trying to do

[quaint venture]

Toggle clothing

Currently i have versions of the atlas with parts cut out

an alternative is having one version of the atlas with multiple uv maps with various parts shrunk down into the transparent parts

[buoyant holly]

you would want to have multiple mesh renderers turning on and off as you're still having to render all of those transparent triangles on your second idea

[quaint venture]

Even in a cutout shader?

[buoyant holly]

yes as it still needs to process all of the transparent triangles

[opal stirrup]

Any tips on trying to optimize a little over 300k tris? 😅

[calm spade]

What kind of meshes ?

[opal stirrup]

Really, it's for the whole model and the different clothings. I'm thinking I probably can't bring this down to less or equal to 70k.

The body itself with no clothing has...

74262 tris

Time to go cry and be a Very Poor user

[calm spade]

Why is it that high on its own ?

[opal stirrup]

No idea, I'm terrible (and new) at this stuff. 😛

I'm thinking I could probably decimate some of it

Decimating is odd

It's not my model by the way, that's why I don't know 😋

[calm spade]

Decimation is really not suggested

Dissolving edge loops is much better and a lot less destructive

[opal stirrup]

Sounds fancy. Time to find out how to do that

I'd like to not ruin my model while optimizing it haha 😋

Oooooh, I know how to do that, I think.

[buoyant holly]

just make sure you don't accidentally dissolve the edges required for the UV to work

[opal stirrup]

I'm doing it, wish me luck

[opal stirrup]

I managed to remove 22201 tris on the body, there's still work to be done though. I don't think it's possible to go from over 300k (for the whole thing with the clothing variations) to 70k though 😋

[buoyant holly]

that's like a whole Avatar you remove so that's a good start

[opal stirrup]

It would probably be best to have different avatars with the different clothings instead of having everything on one

And that way, achieving 70k might be possible

[buoyant holly]

yeah that way you're not unnecessarily filling up vram

[opal stirrup]

I feel so out of my paygrade here Learning everything on the spot

[buoyant holly]

it's okay everybody has to start from somewhere

[normal nova]

Decimation is fine, most of the stuff in vrc lacks clean topology

[heady smelt]

so while the clearest answer is "neither" which is better:

1 8k texture
or 2 4k textures?

i am manually atlasing something and don't expect to go near that high cause i dont have or need to, but im wondering which would be better

[buoyant holly]

seeing if you could make your atlases better packed

but do not do the 8k texture that'll give everyone a bad time

[heady smelt]

alright, good, thats what i was assumin

[buoyant holly]

but yeah see if you can get it any smaller so you only need like one to 4K or less

[unreal plover]

Also if you don't need the transparency, make sure the texture is set as RGB and not RGBA. Saves some memory and helps reduce download size :P

[heady smelt]

yeah, i think i can get away with just a 4k texture, thats what im hoping
theres 5 textures in total, 3 are 2048, one is 1024, and the other is 4096

fortunately the 1024 one could literally be 1x1 and it doesnt matter lol

[opal stirrup]

Oh I just realized my avatar's accessories (jewelry, belly button piercing) add a little over 30000 tris by themselves. Oof.

[amber hemlock]

I’ve seen perfect coplanar triangles have subdivisions.

If only there was an easier way to draw triangle in 3D

[proper grail]

I do love me some single vertex group 120k tri 25 face brilliant cut diamonds

[worn vault]

Question, what’s the recommended scale for an avatar

[proper grail]

In unity? Mess with the fbx import size to get it to whatcha want. Recommended in scene is 1:1:1 for animation humanoid retargeting purposes

[opal stirrup]

I feel that. Gotta see them tris. Accessories like chains (my avatar has two) and fishnet clothing are terribly painful to optimize, dear god.

[unreal plover]

Fishnets should be done via texture/bumpmapping

Really easy if you have a shader that has access to detail mapping and masks

[opal stirrup]

I don't know how to do that 😦

YET

[buoyant holly]

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StandardShaderMaterialParameterDetail.html

[rancid basalt]

So.... I need help with my model scale in unity because it ends up being giant

[onyx harness]

The default 3d object cube's size is 1m x 1m x 1m. It's a great tool to use as a point of reference for scaling

[rancid basalt]

Oh I see

So create a cube and go from there?

[onyx harness]

I do. I can't post an image here but I'll drop some settings in #avatar-help for a cube I use to measure 6 foot

[dark dragon]

Just a quick question, is there any noticeable quality loss from crunch compressing textures? say if i were to turn it up to the maximum to save as much space on the textures as possible

[calm spade]

100 is the least amount of compression

and no, you won't see a difference

i suggest not doing it on normal maps however, but downscale them instead

[dark dragon]

I mean at max compression (0), if theres no diffrence though then thats good

[calm spade]

You could see some noticeable change, but that's the price, 50% compression is usually a very good middle ground

[tough warren]

1 8k texture is actually equivalent to 4 4k textures

it's also really dumb considering the actual resolution of the screens it will be rendered on.

[regal glen]

Are Quest avatars REQUIRED to be under 20k polys? It says it doesnt meet minimum requirements but I've uploaded several quest avatars with 30k polys before

My avatar atm has 39k

the only thing that isnt considered excellent quality is the poly count and 3 materials instead of 1

[lone tiger]

"Show Avatar" for Very Poor avatars functionality may be removed in the future, and Very Poor avatars may be removed from Quest entirely. Please keep this in mind when creating avatars for VRChat on the Oculus Quest.
https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-performance-ranking-system#quest-limits

[regal glen]

😔

[amber hemlock]

If it’s above 20K only you will see it unless people manually chose to force-show your avatar specifically - this is not a recommended action as there is no real limit to how many triangles the avatar could have in that case. It could be in the multi-millions and have a super high amount of materials instantly crash you.

Only force show avatars on people you trust to not change into a lag bomb

[scenic sierra]

If I edit the mesh of my character to have less polygons, then I replace it in unity, does the rig stay in some way?

because you used to be able to do this with MantisLOD but it's not free anymore

[stray tangle]

as long as you never did "unpack prefab", you can just replace the FBX in the project from the file explorer and unity will update it in the scene aswell

[potent mirage]

is 'load in background' a good thing to check on audio import settings? 🤔 the way its described when i look it up sounds like it might reduce avatar loading slowdown but im not sure if i understand it right

[scenic sierra]

is there a free alternative to Mantis LOD?

[lone tiger]

You can't have LOD levels on avatars

[scenic sierra]

Mantis LOD could straight up just simplify the model and keep it that way

https://youtu.be/xT-MM1716VM

[leaden hamlet]

why not just.. do it with blender. tons more control

[scenic sierra]

fine

[amber hemlock]

Keeping in mind any values you turned to bold will not update. Right click them and revert to get the new values

[heady smelt]

only a phycopath would do that

[scenic sierra]

ok so

I have a "this avatar has mipmapped textures without 'streaming mip maps' enabled" warning on the builder tab when trying to build my model for Oculus Quest devices

problem is, when I go activate it, every fucking option in the tab just straight up disappears

when I uncheck it, it comes back, with the error still there

what the fuck do I do

It's on a texture I imported on the project because there's no transparency rendering in Oculus Quest apparently so I made a replacement

[stray tangle]

click on Auto fix?

[scenic sierra]

the exact same thing happens

it just does what I do manually, check the stream mip maps thing

man how I wished I could upload a video of this now

do I need a different Unity version?

I exported the pc version of the model just fine

turns out if I delete that texture itself, it still becomes blank

it's like it won't allow me build it once I've fixed everything, but it will still show me the errors that need fixing

I just wasted an entire afternoon!

[stray tangle]

@scenic sierra what unity version are you using?

[scenic sierra]

2018.4.20f1 Personal

[stray tangle]

good

[scenic sierra]

the one VRchat recommends, I used, and I exported with yes

[stray tangle]

not just recommends, absolutely required or it will not show up in game

check the unity console for any errors

shortcut is ctrl + shift + c

[scenic sierra]

there is indeed one error

"MissingComponentException: There is no 'Animator' attached to the "decimatedglorkon2" game object, but a script is trying to access it.
You probably need to add a Animator to the game object "decimatedglorkon2". Or your script needs to check if the component is attached before using it."

don't really know how to fix that

yep it was thad

I had to add the animator

fuck me

unity crashed when building it

I hate this

nevermind it worked on the second try lol

[amber hemlock]

Blender and Unity can be confusing before you understand their language but it gets easier with experience. It may not be intuitive, but it’s consistent.

It can only go wrong in so many ways before you’ve seen it all

[sick pelican]

Hey quick question out of curiosity:
For avatar toggles in general, is it more optimized to have separate meshes that are toggled, or swapping the material of an object into an invisible shader? And with mesh toggles, is it better to toggle the object in general or just the mesh render component

[buoyant holly]

the invisible Shader would still have you processing the triangles so probably better just to turn off the mesh render

[marble ledge]

hey, on blender I have faces, tris, and verts. Which of these represent the number of polygons?

[buoyant holly]

faces but the triangle counted the number you should probably be paying attention to as all quads are just two triangles as far as the rendering is concerned

[amber hemlock]

The answer is it depends. If the object is usually going to be missing it’s better to just be a separate mesh render that’s not usually visible. But if it’s some thing that’s going to be visible most of the time you should probably make a material that just goes invisible sometimes

That way you have one less mesh render. Especially if it was a skinned mesh render. Always take an extra material over making a separate skinned mesh render.

[quaint venture]

Add decimation modifier, see polygons, remove decimation modifier

[amber hemlock]

When VRChat says polygons, it means triangles, or tris. If you give it 20000 quads, which is technically 20000 polygons, it’s going to say it’s 40000 polygons, because 1 quad is 2 tri.

So, use blender’s tri readout

[marble ledge]

Thanks!

[blazing ingot]

So what does Unity consider as additional material slots (while using Poiyomi)? There's the obvious ones that are made in Blender for example, but there is often additional ones reported in the VRC SDK panel.

[stray tangle]

any material slot on any mesh on the model counts. particle systems count as 2, since there is one material for the particle, and one for the trail, even if the trail is not used.

if you are using the same material on two different meshes, it still counts as 2.

since that is still two passes the GPU has to do

[blazing ingot]

Hm I can see how that could add up quick

[onyx harness]

Particle systems count as 1 material slot unless you have the trail module enabled in which case it counts as 2.

[proper grail]

Oh, with my experience the trail module is added automatically and breaks the particle system when removed

[onyx harness]

interesting, breaks it how?

[proper grail]

Stops existing. But if youve had luck with getting a particle system down to 1 material I believe you

[onyx harness]

99% of the time I'm using particle systems for triggering logic. Renderer disabled and whatnot so I can't be sure from a visual standpoint.

[grizzled compass]

do the faces or the tris count for character optimization?

[lone tiger]

tris

[grizzled compass]

does poor still get shown without getting perf blocked?

[lone tiger]

On Quest by default no, but you can optionally show all Poor rated avatars. On PC tris count only limits you to Good (max 32k) or Very Poor (max 70k) rating.

[grizzled compass]

I'm making a character on quest, and poor limits seems to be at 20000 tris

guess i gotta aim for poor, because getting this model low is tricky

[frank silo]

Okay so i dont like double posting but im finding similar discussion here so maybe i shoudl ask here instead of #avatars-mmd as people here have discussed this issue recently here.

---

I noticed this above suggestion #avatar-optimization message

Maybe this would help me with my issue im having as described here?: #avatars-mmd message

whats texture/material baking and how can i find resources about this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/VRchat/comments/fhb5ci/im_trying_to_export_separate_materials_using_the/fpq8e8b?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 wait what?

[stray tangle]

@frank silo the number next to each material in the materialcombiner allows you to atlas materials with matching numbers together, while keeping those separate from those with different numbers

[frank silo]

strangely when i set three similar materials with a seperate layer number to test this it sitll combined it into one texture and didnt UV map some fo the pieces using the same texture source following the combining

im trying baking (instead?) hoping this works better than my tries at manual and materialcombiner atlassing

msaybe it did do what it suppsoed to but ..it ended up jsut deleting the uv map for the other ones rather than jsut keepign it as a seperate material

[stray tangle]

make sure all of your UV maps across all meshes have the same name

and make sure that all of your materials have textures, they cannot just be simple colors

[frank silo]

luckily all of my mats are textures. im importing an MMD so all the mats are MMDShaderDev which im guessing is the reason CATS bakign doesnt work.

thers a lot fo perameters that vary for the same texture source resultign in three similar materials that i cant combine but if 4 is the preferred limit, thsi suprisingly simple lookign character in terms of model compelxity..is gonna end up fairly unoptimised

[heady smelt]

can someone help me, when i upload my model to vr chat it makes it pc only, how do i make it all platforms

[stray tangle]

you have to build and publish the model twice, one for each platform

it's like expecting that by uploading your game to steam, it will magically appear on the apple App store

the only thing that makes it "cross platform" is that you upload both to the same avatar ID

to make the quest version, make a new project, and switch the build target to Android

[heady smelt]

so how do i make it upload to vr and not pc

[stray tangle]

"to vr and not pc" what...?

[heady smelt]

how do i make it not pc only

[stray tangle]

PC includes both desktop and PCVR

if you mean quest support then like I said, you need to upload another version of it made for quest

[heady smelt]

ok thanks, in unity is there a option to upload it to quest or what?

[stray tangle]

make a new project

switch the build target to Quest

import the VRChat SDK

then copy over the required files for your model

[heady smelt]

ok thanks

[stray tangle]

and switch over all of the materials to be using one of the shaders provided by the SDK under VRChat > Mobile

[frank silo]

im curious, does this allow you to have two different models or does that still mean it has ot have the same exact model? would be prety aweosme if you coudl have esentially a lower 'lod' model for quest

[stray tangle]

that's the whole point

[frank silo]

:O

[stray tangle]

the quest is a much weaker piece of a hardware than a gaming PC

thus the avatar needs to be optimized to run better for it

but it technically does not even need to be the same model

there is also the "fallback" system

[heady smelt]

yea

[stray tangle]

that allows you to upload a good rated Quest avatar to show to quest users when your PC avatar is not quest compatible

[frank silo]

but would that mean the higher one woudl show for PC and then the quest build would show? i literally thought this was jsut a missing feature on vrchat

omg thats so awesome

[buoyant holly]

yes the models don't have to be identical

[frank silo]

mind blown. well now i reallly wanna get this working

woudl be awesome if vrchat implemented a LOD thats agnostic to paltform, that way a mdoel coudl have like 3-4 tiers isntead of jsut quest and desktop , but thats just a dream.

[stray tangle]

that would also be a ton more work

unless those LOD's could be generated on the fly

[buoyant holly]

and like no AAA Studio has figured out Auto LOD that of usable quality for avatars you're standing right next to

[frank silo]

maybe not LOD maybe more like jsut a setting that stic cks

[buoyant holly]

like typically they're Auto LOD systems are only used for avatars that are like half a football field away

[frank silo]

that woudl be nice though, that way im not rendering someoens shimmery butterfly wings and hair swaying froma football field away

[buoyant holly]

also not sure how much help it would be would be most of the time as a lot of vrchat maps are too small for lod to be much help

[frank silo]

but rather than a distance-based LOD honestly jsuta static LOD selection, like game settings avatar quality set to highest woudl jsut be watever the user set as its highest, and if someones set to Draft, itll chose eveyrones quest avatar isntead. (repeat for levels between if they were to exist.)

[buoyant holly]

most folks don't even make Quest versions for their avatars so I don't think they would be inclined to make like 3 more of them

[frank silo]

in that case it jsut wouldnt render them like it does now, right?

it fallsback to default mannequin if someones on quest and thers no quest ava right?

[buoyant holly]

these days they typically see whatever someone's fallback Avatar is

so you're probably more likely to see one of the generic avatars from the Avatar menu if somebody is being lazy with their uploads

[frank silo]

well ididnt know that fallback existed until now lol so im sure all the avas i use jsut show up as the mannequin im guessing on quest

but once i figure out this texture atlassing shit maybe i can finally hav e awquest and desktop ava ;-;

is there a way ti poost n image in this channel?

trying to show an example of materials i cant merge without having issues, im not sure how to do this but it seems very unoptimal to ahve 3 materials and material combineer just makes the mesh turn white im some places after combining these mats

[unreal plover]

Technically Unreal Engine 5's Nanite is auto LOD :P

[buoyant holly]

yes but the way that works involves having the triangles be so small the auto LOD problems aren't noticeable

and it also currently doesn't work for skinned mesh renderers

[heady smelt]

we made a LOD systems on avatars back then when we were messing with particles stop action systems, it can be ported easily to avatar 3, you have full control on the range, even make your mesh render turn off entirely if players are X units from you... stuff like that... animate on distance from other players basically (local to them only)

[onyx harness]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who did this. PC players 15m away get the quest version.
There were others but listing everything would be a long read let alone typing it all.

[amber hemlock]

It’s hard enough getting people to make two versions of their avatars, there’s no way you’re going to get people to make four.

Even when you have quest support the trend is to just upload the quest version to PC, instead of making a higher quality version

[heady smelt]

😔 if only if something like run-time LOD was possible for VRChat

[buoyant holly]

nobody has really done usable of runtime LOD generation not even the AAA Studios on character models

[calm spade]

Even if you could have them generated ahead of time, i can't imagine what multiple LODs on dozens of fast moving skinned meshes would feel like

[buoyant holly]

constant pop in

[calm spade]

I meant in term of performance but yeah, visually it'd be super disruptive

[normal nova]

I mean... At a big distance my auto generated quest avatars would be basically indistinguishable

Even at a medium distance on Quest its hard to notice any difference from the original

I could even pack it so only the normal map and mesh change

I'm this close to writing a Unity plugin that literally just calls Bake and reimports it to the scene

[calm spade]

With every headset it'll become a lot more noticeable

The difference between Quest 1 and 2 is already drastic

But it's most likely the best option yeah

[unreal plover]

LOD isn't going to do much anyway when the worst offenders are materials and dynamic bones

[amber hemlock]

I thought the worst offender was texture size

[buoyant holly]

yeah but it's easier to squish texture size down automatically then reduce materials

[proper grail]

Texture size really only stresses gpu memory size and gpu memory speed. Causes a lil stuttering if either of those two are maxed out but they rarely are. I guess avatar download size too

[unreal plover]

4k RGBA mipmapped textures are only 90 MB each (uncompressed). Then again those who use 8K textures also don't really care about material slots and dynamic bone counts 🤷‍♀️

Tho with streaming mipmaps even multiple 4K (and 8K probably) textures shouldn't be an issue

[calm spade]

Mirror sitters

[amber hemlock]

I’ve always wondered: I enable “streaming mipmaps” to make the uploader happy, but I also disable “generate mipmaps” which means my textures don’t add or use mipmaps on the first place. Is this bad? I prefer how my textures look without mipmapping (they usually are mostly solid color blocks with hard edges, mipmapping just makes them blurry at a distance)

[unreal plover]

Mipmaps are basically lower resolution versions of your texture (which roughly increases download size by 33%). The streaming parts allows dynamically loading and unloading mipmaps according to distance and priority. So your 4K texture would only be using the 512x512 pixel version at a distance, saving VRAM

[amber hemlock]

I wish I could generate streaming mipmaps with nearest neighbor downscale so it’s the same as not having them

I hate that it blurs textures at a distance due to the interpolation from downscaling

[unreal plover]

If it's only flat color it might be better to have the different colored polygons on separate UV islands. Then you can get away with a non-mipmapped 32x32 texture 😂

Or vertex colors

[amber hemlock]

It’s got vector curve color boundaries but otherwise it’s flat color

To difficult to model it with topology, it would be too many triangles for quest

I’m already relying on not having mipmaps keeping the texture size down

Example of texturing i feel is better off without mipmaps: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/861825848788254772/864601275886469120/image0.png

[unreal plover]

Honestly I don't think it's worth trying to get it to look good with mip mapping. If you run out of VRAM there's probably something else taking up a majority of that

[amber hemlock]

My understanding was the main reason for mipmapping was to de-noise textures that would normally require multiple samples for an accurate reading when far away. By having smaller sizes you prevent static noise on high-detail textures when viewed from afar.

[unreal plover]

Yep, streaming mipmaps only allow you to reduce vram footprint on top of that

[amber hemlock]

So I disable it on textures when a single sample is good at any range

Wish I still had the benifit of smaller ram usage

[unreal plover]

with mipmaps textures are 33% larger on downloads :) so you're saving a bit there

[normal nova]

you aaabsolutely should have mipmapping

One area where you don't really think to look is shape keys: if you have every part of your model combined into one, the keys all multiply the size of the mesh

CATS Bake now splits every shapekey-affected tri into a second mesh while fixing the normals in place, so only they have the shapekey size multiplication. I've seen it reduces some uploads by a few MB

[amber hemlock]

From a visual standpoint in many cases it looks far worse with mipmapping

Sometimes it looks better

Depends on the style of texture

If you use streaming mipmaps but don’t generate them it should be smart enough to make mipmaps using nearest neighbor downscale to still save on vram. But hey, it’s not my game engine

[normal nova]

Worse because of blur? You should probably use a non-box filter

[amber hemlock]

I’ll investigate

[normal nova]

(I'm of the opinion that Box should absolutely not be the default, hence why I outlined it on the Bake page x3)

[amber hemlock]

Yes I use textures with large flat color areas and sharp color transitions that mipmapping destroys

I suppose this box thing is what destroys it, I’ll check

Really I just need an option to not generate my smaller mipmaps using bilinear downsample

I’d prefer nearest neighbor downscale to keep the colors sharp

[sick relic]

I found recectly that mipmaping will look worse because of UV island can breed into another island if margin is too close. Currently I have an avatar with 4k atlas texture, and have to have 32px margin between island to look decent enough at far range.

[heady smelt]

to the more shader literate: how performance heavy is double sided shaders / culling off? my model doesn't have any flipped normals so i could easily have culling turned off, but is the performance increase noticeable enough to warrant it?

[stray tangle]

@heady smelt you render twice the amount of polys

[buoyant holly]

it's better just to duplicate some of the faces of the stuff where you want to see the backside then double sided shaders / culling off on the whole Avatar

[unreal plover]

I'd say it doesn't really matter if you're <70k

[slate thunder]

What is the best way to even start optimizing an avatar with almost 900k polygons and 64 material slots. I am at a total loss and not very skilled. It appears the reason is because there are a lot of clothing toggles and each asset is like 20-50k polys

I am doubting the answer is putting the fbx in blender and pressing decimate?

I bought this avi and I was like holy shit my avi has more polys than everyone else in this entire lobby

[grave folio]

@slate thunder do u try to create a texture atlas. When ur using the same shader on difrent materials, than combine them and make one out of it. This will not effect the mesh or the funktionality of it (toggles as an example) pls make shure to take a save point before

[buoyant holly]

out of curiosity what's the triangle count of the Avatar without any clothing

[slate thunder]

I haven't tried anything, my blender skills are pressing the the import model button and a + del to start a new scene

D:

I just bought an avi from a creator and it's just absolutely terrible but willing to pay for someone to help

@buoyant holly do you want me to just click the mesh of the body and hair and tell you the count?

it's a few separate items in the list

[buoyant holly]

yes so I know if it's case of unoptimized Avatar or just too much accessories

because those are two slightly different problems as you can just upload a version with only like one set of clothing

[slate thunder]

The body was like 32k polys i think? and the accessories were each like 30-60k

[buoyant holly]

how much was the hair

[slate thunder]

dang I cant post pics, well for exmaple the jacket is 53k polygons

[grave folio]

I bet it have much doubles too

[slate thunder]

there are several hair toggles let me look

let me look at the hair styles for you

I'd really like to preserve some of these assets, I really like them. I just don't see why they have so many polygons

Some others can be removed

legs = 1900 poly face = 3200 poly torso = 16200 poly foot = 3700 poly

[grave folio]

Most 3d files have double sidet poligons. U can start to remove these doubles, on all points where there aren't necessary.

These are the inside of ur model as an example. Pls exclude ur hair mesh from this process

[calm spade]

That's not how it works

It just means the mesh is disconnected

[slate thunder]

Would love to hire an optimization expert here for an hourly rate to teach me while we optimize it together

but like someone who actually knows what they're doing

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/GiveMeAllYourCats/cats-blender-plugin/wiki/Bake this tool might could help out if you're wanting something quick

[calm spade]

You can commission people here too https://ask.vrchat.com/c/commissions/avatar-commissions/35

[buoyant holly]

I would suggest like checking out a blender Basics tutorial so you know enough of the basic you are so folks could point you in the right direction

[unreal plover]

Might be easier to retopologise the the high poly assets

[buoyant holly]

could you take a screenshot of the wireframe of like the clothing to see how much of a mess it is @slate thunder

[slate thunder]

Let me open the fbx in blender

[buoyant holly]

because you might be able to just dissolve Edge Loops if it's proper topology just heavy

[quaint venture]

What size do you use for each texture before atlasing/what percentage do you fill with each part? Like I've got a face, upper clothes, lower clothes, upper skin, lower skin, hair. I had previously with less knowledge resized them, and I'm now going through and fixing them, but still not sure what size is recommended for each

[slate thunder]

like i am not dumb btw i am a computer scientist for a living lol, just no experience with 3d modeling. I only do programming

let me take a look

[slate thunder]

I can't send screenshots here apparently, okay if I DM you?

[buoyant holly]

go ahead

[normal nova]

@slate thunder if you don't wanna put in the effort Cats Bake can spit out both desktop and Quest versions, it might make the topology worse but it'll work

Its also just two button presses, can't go wrong

[slate thunder]

currently trying to learn what topology means lol

I'm quite the beginner but eagerly learning

[fickle atlas]

topology refers to how the surface of a 3D model is structured, like where the vertices/polygons are and such

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_03N-e1h4

[slate thunder]

Thank you!

I'll check out that video

[supple cedar]

Yo that was me 6 months ago! Now I’m an obnoxious optimization snob who won’t shut up about drawcalls. Keep at it and give it time, the learning curve gets easier as you learn more dots to connect.

[slate thunder]

I don’t even know what that is 🥴 I need to watch some more basic videos I guess on blender or any other suggested resources. I just want to make sure it’s good stuff to learn that can be applied to VRChat avis

[slate thunder]

From what I am reading an example of a draw call would be 4 materials = 4 draw calls.

Or in the case of this shitty avatar I bought, it has 64 material slots (the most I’ve ever seen in 2800 hours of VRChat) which is equal to 64 draw calls (how many objects are drawn to the screen)

With a caveat, small meshes using the same material and scale could potentially be batched using Unity’s Dynamic Batching

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/DrawCallBatching.html

[proper grail]

Each mesh is a draw call, each material is a draw call, each material pass is a draw call (commonly fur shaders are multi pass) multiply that by how many times it has to be lit by light sources, multiply that by how many times its reflected.
Batchy no worky for skinned meshes.

a normal 4ghz within the past 6 years cpu can do like 600 draw calls on one thread before it starts to dip below 90 fps

[slate thunder]

Are you referring to the skinned mesh renderer

Or skinned mesh meaning it is a mesh that is weighted

[lone tiger]

Quoting from that document, unfortunately it has limited use on avatars:

Currently, only Mesh Renderers, Trail Renderers, Line Renderers, Particle Systems and Sprite Renderers are batched. This means that skinned Meshes, Cloth, and other types of rendering components are not batched.

[slate thunder]

That interesting I didn’t read that whole thing

And my main, or only use-case/interest at this time is modification of avatars.

Perhaps a small bit of sculpting of an existing avi if something is fucked but I have no desire to sculpt a body or pair of pants for example

I think unfucking this avatar with 900k polygons and 64 material slots that I bought would be an excellent learning opportunity

For example, a crown/tiara in this avi has about 1/10th the volume of the head, yet has 235k polygons…..? Why. I guess it’s just super unnecessarily detailed. I’ll have to take a look and see what I can do. It’s a bunch of small circular diamonds with multiple faces stitched together. Not quite sure how I can optimize that

I don’t think the easy hits like deleting edge loops in good spots is the answer here

[stray tangle]

is the lipsync on the rigged model done using bones or shape keys?

better yet, could you move to #avatar-rigging and post a pic of the rig

[jovial ibex]

Oh i thought i postet it in the rigging channel. sorry 😅

[supple cedar]

The next concept for you to look up would be “normal map baking”. That’s the way to capture fine details without needing tiny, intricate geometry. The baking system in the CATS blender plug-in seems to be able to do this automagically, but I’m not sure how it’ll handle an avatar with a bunch of accessory meshes

[slate thunder]

Thank you my friend! You are a wizard

[buoyant holly]

yeah definitely give the cats baking tool a go

and it automatically duplicate the model so you don't have to worry about the original getting damaged

[slate thunder]

ok let me google it

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/GiveMeAllYourCats/cats-blender-plugin/wiki/Bake

[supple cedar]

This is the nice thing about optimization, everyone who knows about it is sick of the 300k polygon 30 material hot messes that keep lagging our PCs so there’s a STRONG incentive to freely share the knowledge

[slate thunder]

laughs in 900k polygon 64 material slot avi that I bought

*without knowing beforehand

[onyx harness]

With this avatar in particular, is it even possible to have everything showing at one time? Like if you have 4 different shoes only 1 can be active so the total number is higher but the actually performance would be better. Unless it's all on/off toggles and you actually could have it all on lmao.

[slate thunder]

Some of them logically turn things on and off, like pants to skirt

Others such as the tiara just put the tiara on the head

And putting on the pants turns off the legs

[supple cedar]

The annoying part is, if you go further with optimization to make all the accessories blendshape-toggled sections of the same mesh to reduce drawcalls, that ends up meaning all the polygons have to be rendered at once anyway. I wonder if that means if used in conjunction with Silent's vertex masking shader toggle system, the avatar would perform better with the custom shader on...

[normal nova]

Toggling with blendshapes is actually super bad

[slate thunder]

I wish I knew what that even meant

[unreal plover]

If you want it pc only you can do multiple toggles with 1 material with some shader magic

But honestly, just have multiple versions. It's easier to manage and avatar loading has been improved significantly

[fickle atlas]

wait, for real? how do people usually handle it then, disabling individual meshes?

[stray tangle]

typically

[fickle atlas]

ah ok that makes sense

[proper grail]

Might as well give a nice limit. Say active (not 0) blendshapes on meshes with over 32000 tris is super bad, per.

[bitter garnet]

not sure if this is the place to ask but if I wanted to make my avatar compatible with both PC and Quest would I just have to open the old project and switch build target to android?

most of them are shitpost avatars, not very complex with bones and animations and etc

[calm spade]

The sdk will tell you how performant it is

[bitter garnet]

SDK2 and performance is poor, again, shitpost avatars I made quickly

there's nothing really to "break" if that's what you are hinting at

[stray tangle]

@bitter garnet performance restrictions for quest are much stricter

[bitter garnet]

true

most of the issues I get are polygons and size

[stray tangle]

"poor" for PC will most likely be over the limit for quest

[bitter garnet]

ah damn

[stray tangle]

you can always try

or

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

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

[quaint venture]

Is there any downside to removing doubles outside of making l to select connected less useful?

[calm spade]

If those edges we re disconnected for a reason then you might make the shading worse

[quaint venture]

Thanks

[jovial grail]

You can keep the normals the same even after joining stuff

[marsh cairn]

hey uuh
i tried the VRCSDK3 for like, one unity project
without loading the VRCSDK2 along with it at all

and i think it may have fucked up VRCSDK2 somehow cause now when i make a new project and load it it tells me to delete the fucking avatar descriptor when i try to make an avatar

y'know the thing thats kinda critical to the whole process?

so when you load a unitypackage, does it tend to seemingly permanently affect the unity client itself like that?

i always thought that whatever you loaded stayed in the one project you were working on

[calm spade]

These two are not interchangeable

If you want to make an SDK3 project, make a new one

[marsh cairn]

thats what i did

i made a new project with nothing on it and o loaded SDK3

[calm spade]

"and i think it may have fucked up VRCSDK2 somehow"

How does it fuck up the SDK2 if it's a new project with the SDK3

[marsh cairn]

i don't know but its happening somehow
look i'll try making a new project and see what happens
maybe i unwittingly loaded it onto a project that already had SDK3

okay its fine now

guess that might have been the case before

[slate thunder]

An avatar creator released an avatar named "optimized version" that went from 880k polygons and 64 material slots to 409k polygons and 69 material slots 🙂

Truly incredible

I guess I will optimize it myself

[lone tiger]

If their name starts with G and ends with l I wouldn't be surprised.

[marsh cairn]

okay now its happening again
i think its failing to connect to the VRC servers or something

okay i opened vrchat and its working now?

[onyx harness]

I don’ think so. Their worst is like 450k because of the cloning/puppet things.

Plus the optimised versions are, well, actually pretty optimised. Like it’s no quest avatar but not sacrificing looks and getting down to orange and green, I’m glad someone is getting that style of model out that doesn’t one shot my cpu.

[onyx harness]

How’d the material slots go up? Did they add features?

[slate thunder]

Can I PM you and attempt to explain this witchcraft? I am just honestly speechless and it's going to take a lot more than one sentence or picture to even begin to explain this to you so I can figure just what in the flying fuck is going on with this avatar

[onyx harness]

oh absolutely

[slate thunder]

Okay, just give me some time, I am working from home

[slate moat]

For the past nine months since I started playing VRC heavily I've been uploading avatars with PC and Quest-compatible versions.

Recently, Questers have been telling me when I wear these avatars that they're only seeing a robot and no amount of showing, hiding, or adjustments of performance blocking tools seems to fix it.

I've had to resort to uploading a fallback and not uploading Quest versions of avatars I have been doing in order for people to see me.

I tried searching the chat history but I couldn't find a definitive answer. Is this a known bug or have the optimization requirements for Questers changed somehow?

Additional info, most of the avatars are in the Medium to Poor range for Quest, typically with regards to polygon count and number of materials which was recently increased.

[onyx harness]

okay, simple question first. Are you using the same ID's for the pc and quest versions?

[slate moat]

Yes. They're linked via the same Blueprint ID.

[onyx harness]

Which robot are they seeing? Error, performance, pc only?

[slate moat]

It's hard to get a straight answer out of some folks. But several have said "the green one".

I'm really hoping I'm just doing something dumb and I just need to like re-compile with a new SDK and re-upload or something.

[amber hemlock]

https://vrchat.canny.io/bug-reports/p/1110-quest-shows-pc-users-as-perf-blocked-if-they-use-a-pc-only-avatar-and-then

Tldr: if at any point a quest user sees you wearing an avatar that is not quest supported, they will no longer be able to load any of your avatars even if you change into one that is quest supported

[slate moat]

Okay. Excellent. Thank you for linking to the Canny. I'm going to drag a friend into VRC to try and reproduce this issue.

[waxen violet]

So I've just started trying to upload my first avatar. I'm running into all sorts of issues that I don't really understand, or know the solution to. Right now I'm trying to make my avatar compatible with quest. But I'm running into issues with the dynamic bones. Anybody wanna help a newbie?

[onyx harness]

Dynamic bones aren't allowed on quest models and all such components need to be removed from the avatar

[waxen violet]

Okay, so how would I go about finding the files I need to get rid of? Do I just need to delete them, or replace them with something else?

Like what kind of things should I be looking for and where?

[onyx harness]

Dynamic bones are a component you can add to objects just like the Avatar descriptor. You can search for them in the Hierarchy search bar. Using t:dynamicbone and t:dynamicbonecollider will show you all objects in the current seen with these components. Then it's just a case of selecting these objects and removing the component.

#avatar-help for an image example

[waxen violet]

And would just deleting them be enough? Or do I need to replace them with something?

And thank you for your help!

[onyx harness]

You can't replace them with anything, there is currently no quest compatible replacement for simulating physics on bones.

[waxen violet]

Okay thankyou! You have helped me a lot!

[stray tangle]

can technically use velocity parameters + blend tree + animations

lot more work though

[onyx harness]

huh, hadn't considered doing it that way.

[stray tangle]

I've not tried to do it, but it seems perfectly plausible

moving forward => animate hair to go backwards

[slate thunder]

I bought a non-game ready set of Ray Bans from CGTrader with 98k faces 😦

[buoyant holly]

I would suggest stop buying stuff that doesn't show the triangle count up front

[slate thunder]

Yeah it was my first purchase before I even used Blender, I didn't know what I was doing

[slate thunder]

Oh, I lied so these glasses have 223k faces

but I guess I'll learn how to fix it myself, good practice

[stray tangle]

might wanna learn Retopology

essentially constructing a new mesh on top of a high poly mesh

using the Shrinkwrap modifier helps with this

[slate thunder]

Holy crap

I did degenerate dissolve and it went from 527k edges, 214k faces, and 330k tris to 292k edges 97k face, and 97k tris

[slate thunder]

Me too... I swear someone posted a good video of that and I can't find it anymore

But this degenerate dissolve worked really good here. But it's still absolutely horrific

Way better though

[stray tangle]

still wayy too much for a pair of glasses

that should not be more than 1 or 2k

[slate thunder]

yeah it's insane im working on it, I just merged the vertices by distance and got another massive chunk off

Also removing all non-manifold geometry

[quaint venture]

This sounds like exactly the dumb bs I wanna try, got a guide?

[stray tangle]

nope lol

[proper grail]

I tried some dumb stuff with spring joints and constraints, its hard to get the velocity to rotate with you..

[unreal plover]

Constraints don't work on quest (yet)

[zinc flint]

What's with material slots?

it includes other skinned meshes with the material.

Say, you have 1 material and 8 different meshes that use the material which equates to 8 material slots.

[stray tangle]

yep, that's how it works

you should be joining your meshes

it's still a draw call for each material slot

[zinc flint]

Interesting, ill keep that in mind in the future.

thanks alot @stray tangle

Does it effect performance if it's disabled though?

[onyx harness]

I believe the answer is either yes, but so little that it's basically nothing or actually just none.

Everything has a cost when it comes down to it so I'm willing to bet on the first option. Basically the Engine has to render the material so when it's disabled, it's no longer rendering thus it's performance cost is minimal. This is why toggle for things like props/clothing (assuming they're using unique materials) are separate meshes over being hidden with bone scaling or blendshapes.

[solid smelt]

Yep, nothing is free but disabling it is your best bet for reducing load when not it use IIRC

[amber hemlock]

The answer is effectively no. Disabled objects don’t do much of anything. That’s why originally, disabled objects weren’t counted at all.

But what everyone started doing is hiding their entire avatar by default so they would be rated excellent, then enabling everything via an animation. So now everything is counted, even if disabled.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

[onyx harness]

Oh yeah I'm guilty of trying this. I saw that particle systems don't count towards material slots when the max particles is set to 0. Thus I wanted to animate them back to 1 at runtime for my trigger particles instead of having them count as 1 material slot each even when the renderer is set to none and the module disabled. But that's not something you can animate apparently. Was annoyed at having 150 material slots when the model only actually had like 12 that were ever rendering.

[amber hemlock]

Merge your meshes to share draw calls with identical mateirals

Having an identical material on a separate mesh doesn’t optimize anything, it still has to be a separate call. That’s why it’s rated like it is

[buoyant holly]

https://twitter.com/Silent0264/status/1418129444074496007?s=20 apparently this Shader has a decent one draw call method for toggling objects on and off

https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Manual/Inventory-System

[onyx harness]

Yeah my separate meshes all use unique materials. I don't let 1 material be on anymore than 1 mesh. The problem for that avatar was having particle systems for logic that have their Render Mode set to None with the Renderer module disabled inflating the performance rating causing individuals to believe their performance issues were due to my avatars.

[amber hemlock]

I just swap a material to a no-render shader. It’s still going to be one draw call no matter what, might as well be a quick one

[normal nova]

It can in rare cases! But that's an extremely case by case basis :p

[slate thunder]

Why can't we post screenshots in the avatar-optimization channel :\

[calm spade]

You can

[stray tangle]

@calm spade we cant

this is that channel lol

[calm spade]

what

Did that change ? I can find plenty images in here from a while back

[stray tangle]

maybe?

[calm spade]

Just fixed it

[stray tangle]

ty

[normal nova]

Recently discovered denoising is possible via Blender compositing nodes, and it makes ambient occlusion/emissive bakes suuuuper good

[sturdy pollen]

idk if this is the place to ask but is it possible to atlas normal maps and the effects will still be applied?

[acoustic latch]

as long as they are the same layout as the diffuse texture

[sturdy pollen]

ohhh alright thank you!

[calm spade]

Been using that for a year, it really does make an insane difference

[normal nova]

I'll have to integrate it into Bake

...I've started wondering if I should call CATS bake something else

cause calling it 'Bake' doesn't really help much

[strong rain]

quick question! crunch compression yes or no?

i'm hearing very very mixed opinions on it lol

i had my skin texture at 2k size and it was 2.7mb uncrunched, i crunched it with 100 quality and it made it just 270kb with no visual difference, good right?

also, with that in mind, would it be ok to set that texture size at 4k with crunch if it's only .7mb? it's still smaller than original right?

the reason i'm asking is cus i'm sure theres some sciencey stuff i dont know about of why it's actually bad to use compression this way, so i'm asking

[sick timber]

It's smaller in upload, file, and download size, but in VRAM it gets decompressed, so it would take up the original size in VRAM

[strong rain]

your name is crunch

do you... like crunch?

also thank you thats what i read a few times

[sick timber]

It's a nickname I got from the first D&D game I played.

[summer dragon]

Do you know where I can find a casual avatar

[strong rain]

you just have to realize how comical it is to me that when asking about crunch compression, a person named crunch replies to me it's like you were searching for me xD

@summer dragon ask in #avatar-search-old

[sick timber]

Yeah, it's pretty funny.

[quaint venture]

Is anyone familiar with cat's bake option? It just does not work for me and I want to make sure I'm not doing anything wrong. Whenever I do it it makes one model a single solid color and the other a bunch of random rainbow colors

The model is like 66k polys

[acoustic latch]

after it's done baking, switch your viewport shading to material view

[quaint venture]

Oh that does look a lot better

Thanks

[slate thunder]

Howdy all

I’m currently in Blender working on the material slots for the meshes my avatar has (particularly the corresponding mesh selections for each material assigned to a mesh)

I know that later, I will be using a somewhat universal pink material that’s all set and ready to go for this specific avatar in Unity.

While still in a blender, should I just make one material placeholder slot with a very generic “pink name” and add it to every mesh I plan to apply that pink material to (in Unity later) for performance reasons? Does this reduce draw calls?

….Or, in Blender, is it better to create material slots with specific, targeted naming dependent upon the material vertex selection assignment in Blender for that somewhat universal pink material that will be applied to the material assignments (let’s say pink hair, pink shoelaces, portion of pink shirt, etc) frequently in Blender? Does this increase draw calls by simply having more logically named and easier to follow material slots that were made in Blender, but ultimately using the same material in Unity?

[sick timber]

Every material you have will add a drawcall, per mesh the material is on. If you have two meshes, sharing a material, it will have two drawcalls. If you join those meshes, then it will use one draw call.