avatar-optimization

[heady basin]

my avatars too small to upload and i dont know how to fix it

[solid smelt]

Make it larger, min shoulder height is 20cm iirc

[dusk badge]

How can I export a unity asset to fbx and have it load correctly in CATS/blender?

[proper grail]

import it into a unity project? If youve already done this and its an unity serialized fbx than the window -> package manager -> fbx exporter can help

[calm spade]

Make sure to select binary as blender doesn't read ASCII

[dusk badge]

I did and CATS still gives me an error

[calm spade]

an error for what ?

Did you ask in the cats plugin discord ?

[dusk badge]

an error idk what its for tho

[calm spade]

https://discord.gg/Q7fFwdCQ

[steep brook]

not sure what channel to put it in so guess I'll put it here
anyone know a good tutorial/program for editing normal maps?

[stray tangle]

@steep brook texturing of any kind is typically best done using programs like Substance Painter

you can sign up as a student to get it free

[steep brook]

ill check it out, ty

[regal cargo]

what would be better: a lot of tiny images (read: 4x4 pixels) that can be swapped via animation or a single large image (i.e. 32x32, for 256 4x4 pixel images) where you adjust UVs / pixel offsets?

[buoyant holly]

a larger singular picture is better than lots of little pictures

as lots of little pictures requires lots of materials

[regal cargo]

i didn't make it clear then: single material, swapping out the texture in that material

i.e. this isn't many tiny images for different parts of the avatar, this is a tiny image for the whole avatar.

that happens to be swappable with an animation.

[calm spade]

That's still a lot of textures, which is worse

[buoyant holly]

that would still make your avatar rank go up having multiple materials you swap between

[regal cargo]

i take it you can't animate textures like you can other material parameters?

and i thought all avatar rank cared about was how many materials can be active at once -- i.e. the number of material slots?

[buoyant holly]

nope that would involve swapping out materials and also 256 x 256 very small by Avatar standard so I wouldn't sweat the texture size going up

like you're not meaningfully saving terribly many meaningful Resources by going 4x4

[regal cargo]

yeah i didn't actually do the math before i started asking the question, heh.

it's less resources and more ease of use. context this is coming up in is a shader i made that uses a color palette, currently 8 colors but can go up to 16 colors for opaque materials.

so it's combining all palettes (that i'm probably still tweaking) into a single image vs having seperate images for each palette.

[buoyant holly]

256 kb would be the file size for your singular texture containing all the color variations

[regal cargo]

come to think of it it's probably easier to use a 16x256 texture or similar, then every palette ends up on its own line.

[crisp ermine]

Avatar material limits are pain.peko.

[heady smelt]

Nuu they are essential to lowering draw calls !!

[crisp ermine]

Frustratingly, I'm literally using the same material for 90% of all my stuff. It's just instanced along because I need plural meshes and the like.

[solid smelt]

Whats the reason you need multiple meshes?

[proper grail]

Materal instances are not supported on skinned meshes

[analog adder]

anyone know how to make a translucent material for quest? im making a mask and I need a part to be translucent

[buoyant holly]

you cannot use any transparency on Quest avatars

[analog adder]

oh

then is there any way i can render another texture over it, see i have a visor that I want my eyes to render through the mask, all i need is the eyes to be able to be seen through the material

[buoyant holly]

you would probably want to cut holes out in blender

[analog adder]

alrighty

[marble rain]

does having a few dynamic bone colliders actually cause you to drop to medium? or whasts the deal there?

[languid quartz]

4 colliders will drop you to medium, and 8 collision checks will also drop you to medium

So you could actually be dropped to Poor for one collider if there are too many collision checks.

[marble rain]

mhm if i have 2 colliders would that drop me to medium as well? because it does seem like Good status is also 0/0 for that. and i am just wondering if its suppose to be 2/4=

[languid quartz]

Not sure, you could check in the SDK after adding the dynamic bones and colliders to see if that's the reason it's medium (if that happens)

[crisp ermine]

Sorry, meant "game objects" not meshes. I'm running into an issue where the setup of all this is making it so I may be forced to join all meshes and ignore shapekey stuff. I hope that doesn't happen, but I'm not sure what else I can do.

[solid smelt]

Well if it has a material on it its technically a mesh, but yeah what I usually do is merge all my props and then manipulate the bones (ie if you have a static prop, just give it a single bone that weights all of it)

[crisp ermine]

The issue with that is appear/vanish. I have a prop I have to apparate and disappear at will, or I have to work out how to set it up so that it can be temporarily effected by dynamic bones.

Tbh, that would be the preferred solution, but I'm not sure how to make it do the thing.

I have a censor bar, it's attached to my hip on a dynamic bone, and then I can "snatch" it to whack people on the head. If I could set it up so they're the same mesh instead of hiding one and showing the other, that'd save me a lot of bother.

And at least one material slot.

[lime iron]

Don’t disable the object, disable the mesh renderer. Scripts get wierd when they are disabled

[solid smelt]

Just have the censor bar's root bone parent constrained to your hip, then on toggle/gesture the constraint swaps to your hand.

[lime iron]

You can animate the disabling of the dynamic bone script, but only the first script on each object/bone, you can’t animate it’s values

[crisp ermine]

Hm.

I'll have to look into that more.

It'd save me a whole material slot.

Same with me replacing my outfit swap with a dissolve effect, which I'm also looking into.

[lime iron]

And patent constraints will allow you to move the object between hips and hand

[solid smelt]

Yeah ever since constraints got added you should not do the old "to move an object from one point to another you need two objects" thing anymore

[crisp ermine]

Hm. Alright, that saves a lot of bother at the outset.

And fixes an animation issue I had, to boot.

I'll experiment with that tonight.

I still have to set up the constraints for all my fixobnes...oh lord.

[jagged turret]

ok new here

is there a hard poly cap because everwhere i look says something different for different dates

are 30k tris acceptable

[forest fable]

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

[jagged turret]

danke

[smoky summit]

Im More Concerned about the Polygon count... when you have at 70k uploading into Unity and it multiplied roughly 5-7 times... why?

same thing happened to the Particles too

I honestly believe that the System that generate Poly Count and Particle count broke due to conversing from 2018 to 2019...

[calm spade]

you have mesh particles ?

[smoky summit]

hmm i tested without the particle stuff... which has some mesh particles which indicates rock debris... and the Poly count still at 200mil when my Whole model is at 62k

as in i moved the particle stuff outside the Hierarchy that the descriptor is assigned... and it still give me that high poly count

was it because of the Read/Write thing?

[calm spade]

Yes

[atomic grail]

hey guys, so im trying to edit my avatar's radial menu on unity but i cant seem to find the command to change what shows up under expressions

[errant dawn]

should really go in #avatar-help , but what exactly are you trying to edit? facial animations? toggles?

[jovial grail]

i'm guessing the default one

which is there as more or less a placeholder, you can only entirely replace it

[shy orbit]

For some reason, my avatar says it’s 214,783,647 polygons, but i had the model in blender where it should only be at 15,000 polygons , what is going on?

[royal pilot]

Does anyone know a clear guide of how to optimize an avatar for quest?

[languid quartz]

If you updated to Unity 2019 ensure your SDK is up to date. You'll get an auto fix button for this.

[minor dome]

Total noob question: All the tutorials I've found simply are "Step 1: Do the Thing" type.

How do you import the ActorDescriptior thing? I've created a new Unity Project, and imported the SDK3 package into it.

[shy orbit]

Thank you, I’ll check

[vapid bear]

Is a polycount of 100k tris okay if half of it is just my character mesh duplicated for backface culling?

[sick timber]

No, I recommend only duplicating faces that need the backfaces.

[vapid bear]

ah, bummer. I've removed the face already and it's still a little over 100k 😦

[sick timber]

100k tris is a lot, even for PC, I would recommend cutting down the amount somehow

[silent slate]

Question there is a way to use a light source without being penalized by avatar performance?

[buoyant holly]

no

[silent slate]

Ok ty

[buoyant holly]

because real-time light sources are expensive

because you're basically causing everything to be redrawn again

[silent slate]

Yeah I got it

I just would add a Minecraft torch

Also a glowing shader will affect it?

[buoyant holly]

you would probably be fine with a emissive material as that doesn't actually cast real-time light just makes it to where it stays right when it starts in the map

[silent slate]

A light that follow the avatar like

Or is the same?

[buoyant holly]

if it actually cause lighting that affects the world and that are avatars yes that would be a hit the performance

[silent slate]

I see a avatar that have a working torch but I don't see any performance issue with it

And what about if the light is client side?

[buoyant holly]

my suggestion if you must have it would be to have a second Avatar with the real-time light so you don't take the performance ranked hit when you want to be in big crowds

[solemn juniper]

so im trying to optimize but some of the bones are part of model like if i delete them things change rather than disabling movment how do i go about deleting those without killing the model

[acoustic latch]

Blender, and merging bone weights, straight up deleting them in Unity can cause all sorts of problems if you are

[calm spade]

Dissolve them instead

[humble heath]

use CATS

it will delete the bone and the weightpaint will go to the parent

[calm spade]

(that's what dissolving is FYI)

[solemn juniper]

is that a program if so whats the full name?

[humble heath]

Blender Addon

[humble heath]

I know but the person looking for help might not

[humble heath]

I dont have the file rn but looking for it wont be that hard, DM once you get it so I can show you

[buoyant holly]

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

[solemn juniper]

ok so i was able to get the addon and get it running now the issue is figureing out how to export from unity

[calm spade]

cats has an export feature as well

[solemn juniper]

see my problem is my avatar is in unity i need to get it over to blender yet i dont know how to export it out of unity something about a fbx exporter and package manger but theres no info on how to download or even install this addon

[acoustic latch]

You shouldn't need a plugin for Unity to get a FBX, the model should already be available in your assets as a fbx

[solemn juniper]

so i go to assets then i do what?

export package?

[acoustic latch]

your assets are already on Disk, find the model, then just browse to that folder in windows, or right click in the folder and click on "Show in Explorer"

[buoyant holly]

you wouldn't do anything in unity to export it you would just in blender click import fbx and go to the location of the asset to important

[ionic echo]

Does anyone know how I can replace the current face on my model with the one on the left?

[remote vine]

Hmmm maybe there's an easier way to do it but the way I know how involves deleting the original face mesh then carefully stitching together the vertices of the new face to the body mesh, like some kinda messed up digital surgery. But if the model has facial expression shape keys they'd need to be remade.

[heady smelt]

In that case you'd hope the new face has shapekeys of her own

[ionic echo]

Oh heck well thats going to be fun

[normal nova]

You can probably preserve the expressions as long as the welded vertices aren't affected by them

[silent slate]

any idea how i fix these?

[unreal plover]

Go into blender and prefix the roll bones with x, i.e. xHandRoll01RT_01

[radiant shadow]

There is a small script you can add to unity that easy fixes that for you

Does not break prefabs either

https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/silenttools

[heady smelt]

My project dosen't seem to let dynamic bones function, is there a way to fix that?

[acoustic latch]

Did you buy Dynamic Bones from the Unity store? Are the scripts on your avatar and the root bone set? Do you have dynamic bones limited in VRChat?

What isn't working

[heady smelt]

no, it's just all my plugins in my project aren't working

If I put it into a new project, it works

It works all good in unity, but when in vrchat, it refuses to work

[stray tangle]

you probably have the in-game dynamic bone limiter on

Safety > Performance options > Dynamic bone

disable it

[heady smelt]

nope

it's been off for awhile now

I got 2.8k hours, lmao, I've never ran into this issue making avatars

[unreal plover]

Are you on the latest SDK? Also check for build errors

[heady smelt]

Is there a really efficient way of say carving out the black a mesh designed for use with a texture on a material with cutout? So yknow I can NOT have to use cutout becuz I want to also have a quest variant and this is making it difficult >:((

I can't figure out a remotely good way to do this properly even at the cost of some of the detail where the real texture meets the black

that wasnt worded very well but I hope you can understand

[upper yacht]

Either make hair or trace with polygons and have 2D hair

[heady smelt]

So I have to do it the long way ughhhhh

I cant find any youtube videos on it either, they just show how to tell blender to render it as cutout basically

[sick timber]

There's not many resources on it, you'll just have to trace it.

I'm surprised that no one has made something for that yet.

But why would you when you have an alpha channel

[heady smelt]

Because mobile shaders

I also forgot knife tool existed so that will make my life easier

[sick timber]

People still probably opt for transparency on mobile, but I wouldn't trust non-full-time 3D mobile game artists (most people who make avatars) to make sure it's effectively done.

[heady smelt]

Yea this model is extremely lightweight besides that but I can't upload this as an avatar to quest and have the black fallout with any shaders they let me use

unless there is now?

[sick timber]

I don't think there is

[buoyant holly]

nope you'll have to cut out the geometry as apparently transparency shaders are expensive on mobile Hardware

[sick timber]

I once made a testing Quest app where you could spawn a bunch of cubes with cutout with the UI Sprite default texture, gpu instancing was turned off, after at least 50 cubes, looking down the line of cubes still resulted in 90fps, but I doubt that's a proper test. But I still don't know what to believe anymore.

[buoyant holly]

those aren't skinned mesh renderers

[sick timber]

True

I'll test some dancing character with the same texture.

[normal nova]

@heady smelt you're aware of the Knife Project op in Blender right?

[heady smelt]

Im aware of the knife tool, not aure what the project op is

Is that like some super duper efficient way to knife stuff

tell me how pls

[heady smelt]

I need help im trying to make a avatar for my self but i play on qeust and my computer is not vr readdy

And im not good at this stuuf

[pure bridge]

i heard taht if your avatar is small enough it just straight up returns a downlaod zize of 0

i should get there

[buoyant holly]

yeah but you probably couldn't make a terribly good-looking Avatar under a megabyte

[white badger]

Yea, quality comes with a cost, even if the cost is just a non-excellent ingame overall performance.

[cosmic plover]

has anyone made a tool that models where transparency is a texture for quest

[cosmic plover]

ig knife works

[normal shoal]

i have never seen a transparent texture in quest ngl

[cosmic plover]

cus you cant

it just goes black

[onyx harness]

yep, knife is friend.

I've never heard of something that does it for you in any accurate manner. If you come across one I know enough people that could fill a small city that would like access to such a tool.

[normal nova]

If you stylize it and vertex shade it it wouldn't be too hard I think

[buoyant holly]

FairPoint mostly made that simplification because that would require making a model from scratch

[glass ibex]

fake alpha ftw, though I can't say how or it'll get nerfed like my fav shader. xD

[normal shoal]

imagine xD

[radiant apex]

any unblocked shaders with twoface shading? like the polygons show on bothsides

maybe something unlit or toony

[onyx harness]

for quest or pc?

[radiant apex]

quest

[acoustic latch]

Quest is stuck with the VRChat included mobile shaders, if you want a double sided mesh you will need to do it yourself in blender by duplicating the faces and flipping the normals for anything you want double sided

or something like that

[radiant apex]

oh okey

[indigo portal]

anyone know how to do a blush effect for Quest? Apparently the Multiply particle effect doesn't work, and nor does the Alpha Blended. It's a transparent material that has a gradient alpha, it's already set up for PC.

[heady smelt]

The only way to get it with the tranparency-esk look that I know of is to just make a face texture swap, one with blush and one without

[indigo portal]

ahcrap...

[heady smelt]

not the most optimized in terms of materials but yeah

[indigo portal]

wait fuck...it's using two different FX controllers then...

[heady smelt]

?

[indigo portal]

one version would be the on and off of the objects themselves to make the blush, and the other one (which would technically be in the same animation) would be the material change

[heady smelt]

you wouldnt need 2 fx controllers

do you know you can add more layers lol

[indigo portal]

yes, but the menus are shared between the Quest and PC variants

so there's a toggle button that activates it, which would go directly to the toggle animation

in this case, it would need to either be 2 different menus, or 2 fx controllers for the quest and pc respectively

[heady smelt]

I believe you can add a transition condition that can detect what vr you are on but it is an integer value unfortunately for your memory

[indigo portal]

hm, i think that would be needlessly complicated...

[heady smelt]

I forgot what integers meant what type of vr (or desktop mode) its probably in the docs somewhere oen second

I dont think it would be that much

aww the thing I was thinking of just can tell if its in vr or not meaning quest and pcvr is grouped together fuck

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/animator-parameters

[indigo portal]

ah well shit

no worries, i'll remove the middle pane and have circles instead

[radiant shadow]

You can detect the vr type and use same FX controller, but if its a quest it does material swap instead of a blush blendshape (just a random idea never tried it)

[indigo portal]

well, its not a blush blendshape, it's literally a show-or-hide control

[radiant shadow]

🤔 eh nevermind it only detect vr type, so it would go derp both are VR

[heady smelt]

yeah i swear it could detect what one specifically

we are from the same parallel universe dude

idk how we got here

[indigo portal]

nevermind, the Additive particles in movile can work

it's not as dark as i'd want, but it should be fine

[heady smelt]

additive works? you sure?

pretty sure it just does a funi haha no transparency 4 u when you go ingame

thats what it does for my quest particles anyway

[indigo portal]

yea probably. it might be the same case as multiply, where it works enough to export, but doesn't work in vrchat

honestly im just gonna make circles, and remove the middle plane

use a standard lite toon shader emission thing for the blush

[robust sphinx]

Hi! I've got a bit of a question when it comes to like... joining meshes together in Blender for optimizing.

I'm trying to get my model down to as little meshes as possible but I'm not sure about the face.

When it comes to rigging the face, should I keep the eyelashes, eyes, teeth / tongue, etc. separate meshes?

These are all the meshes I have currently lol

[proper grail]

for rigging and weight painting it makes it easy, but after its been assigned vertex groups there is not much reason to keep them separate. Fully finished model should be in as few pieces as possible

[robust sphinx]

Ohhhhh

Thanks!

Now I gotta figure out what vertex groups are... I'm lowkey like learning everything about blender as I come by them haha

[shadow ore]

See that green triangle icon?
In the right hand pane, there should be an icon just like it. In the menu it opens there should be a box labeled “vertex groups”
When you go into edit mode on your model, you can assign parts of your model to vertex groups.
So for example, join all the parts of your avatar’s head into one mesh, then select them in edit mode by clicking on one of their polys and pressing “L” then find the vertex group for your head bone and press “assign”

Really your entire avatar should be one mesh save for things you want to toggle

[robust sphinx]

OHHH

oh wow that's super helpful! thank you

[shadow ore]

Np!👍

[proper grail]

Not everyone makes the connection. So if youve got a bone (or whatever) named case sensitive exactly as a vertex group and an armature modifier linked to that whatever, than the vertex will rotate and move exactly as much with that thing as much as the normalized/percentage value between all assigned groups! (vrc has a limit of 4 groups tho, keep that in mind)

[robust sphinx]

That's a good warning, only 4 vertex groups.. ok ok

[hexed vale]

Question is there a way to upload an avatar with more than 20k polygons to vrchat??

[buoyant holly]

are you talkin PC or Quest

[hexed vale]

PC

[buoyant holly]

that hasn't been a hard cap for avatars in a long while

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

[hexed vale]

Thank you very much, for pc then there is no defined limit, that is, less is better

[buoyant holly]

less people are going to see you if you're over the 70,000 number but yeah it's not going to stop you from uploading

[silent slate]

question how i wanna use the same material but different color for this hat

how i "optimize" it?

[lone tiger]

Animate hue change (if shader you use allows that) or do material swap.

[unreal plover]

change the texture with paint/photoshop

[manic depot]

I don't even think Quest has a cap

I've seen 198k

But going over 100k isn't recommended

Also anyone who needs to lower polycount. I highly recommended against using CATS decimation

Though that's my experience

[crisp ermine]

Tbh, you shouldn't need more than 70k tris

Unless you're doing something really weird

Especially with normal maps

[pure bridge]

id say actually giving a shit about trying to optimize really fucking massive MMD avatars for vrchat is a great exercise in learning how to optimize animation-ready models for use in actual game engines, but when you start running into assets that for some strange reason look like low-poly triangle backgrounds, you also learn fairly quickly that the answer to all of your problems is either going to be "learn retopology and re-bake your texture maps," or the conclusion that literally just learning how to 3d model is less effort than trying to optimize sketchy assets

[crisp ermine]

Agreed

Sketchy assets will always be more annoyance than they're worth if you have any kind of personal investment in your avatar

[pure bridge]

still

[crisp ermine]

They can be useful for blocking stuff out, tho

[pure bridge]

i miss using all of my god tier kitbashes

which is why i plan on redesigning them

[crisp ermine]

Ye I feel that.

[pure bridge]

except now i can model, which means that they wont be kitbashes

[crisp ermine]

TFW you get the topology juuust right

[pure bridge]

mine on the left, 1 mesh and 1 material

if it were me today i would have done 2 and 2 to account for blendshape lag and because i dont like having alpha textures on the same material as opaque textures

no toggles so i didnt have to worry about that noise, i used poiyomi's old RGBA shadow ramp mask feature to control things that i would have otherwise needed at least 3 different materials to do

[crisp ermine]

Yeyeye

It looks pretty darn good

[pure bridge]

i think i used something like 10 different assets to do this

last kitbash i ever made

[crisp ermine]

I have to do a deep dive on Poi later this week, add decals and other stuff.

[pure bridge]

i use SCSS now because the inventory system is fucking cracked lol

[crisp ermine]

Oh?

Wozzat

[pure bridge]

its an inventory system thats only really good for outfit toggles because reasons

but otherwise is the most performant out of any other option

because its not a material swap or mesh toggle

what it does is, get this, "stops" rendering geometry depending on its position on your UV map

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

[crisp ermine]

Hm. I'll look into that later.

I've been looking for an option to do that for clothing meshes, either was gonna use dissolve or just deal with a drop to medium.

(yuck, medium...)

[pure bridge]

no shame in medium

only thing that bumps my avatars up to medium is dynbones

which doesnt matter

[crisp ermine]

Ah, fair

[pure bridge]

since most people just have them off

[crisp ermine]

Dynbones are a killer

I only have the one dynbone, for my censor bar, lmao.

I just realized I have like...no pics of my new avatar.

Oops.

[silent slate]

any alternative to particle?

i just want simulate smoke

[calm spade]

Shaders

[silent slate]

nvm

i just have to disable trails

and my avatar go from yellow to green

[proper grail]

I asked cats plugin peeps if I could get a "Separate mesh by blendshapes" button standalone/similar to the one in the bake panel and they said maybe ^^

[pure bridge]

that would be interesting

i just do it by hand >u>

[proper grail]

How do you tell! some move like a mm

[pure bridge]

i just isolate the entire head

[proper grail]

ohh, just the head

ye ez pz

[heady smelt]

So an avatar in theory had 2 meshs, each 100k polys with their own material. If in VRChat I had a toggle that could toggle off the entire gameobject (for 1 of the meshs) with the mesh component on it, what performance impact would it still have ingame?

Poorly worded I have having a hard time with explaining a hypothetical

[buoyant holly]

https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Manual/Inventory-System not that it would completely answer it but here are some notes comparing different methods of toggling objects "How does a shader-based system compare to other methods?
"Seperate meshes
It's one less draw call per toggle, and draw calls end up being more expensive than just sending more polygons through in the first place. In practise, this is the most obviously expensive way of doing it, and merging things together will save a lot of performance in tight scenarios.
However, if you have shapekeys on meshes, combining them will make a mesh with more polygons which could be worse for performance. For that reason, it's best to keep faces and bodies/clothes seperate.

Shapekeys
Each active shapekey makes a mesh a lot more expensive to render, regardless of how many verts it affects, and the more active shapekeys, the slower the skinning process gets.
Surprisingly, this gets much slower than you'd think. Tests showed framerates getting crushed with high-poly meshes using a single shapekey, and the costs increased dramatically as more keys were active. This is not ideal if all those extra polygons are just there to be hidden.
Also, even if you use a shapekey to shrink your clothes, the armature movement will still move it and cause it to spike out. Not ideal!

Bones
Even if you shrink something with bones, other bones affecting it will reduce the effect of the controller bone without some weird trickery in Unity.
One workaround people use is to set up a second armature for items and then constrain them to the main one, but they'll lag behind in your perspective and the constraints aren't free.
Another workaround is to generate a bone with un-normalised weights from within Unity that can shrink a vertex group to zero by itself."

[heady smelt]

I will read for sure thank you

[buoyant holly]

and 100k polys is lot for and would pretty much automatically put you in very poor

[heady smelt]

Yeah I ask because someone in another channel was justifying using 200k polygons saying that if it was split up into different outfits and only 1 was active at a time, it would be perfectly ok

which I didn't believe was correct but I wasnt sure of it

#quest-optimization Most recent message there for context

[buoyant holly]

the performance rank system operates under the assumption everything's on at the same time

so you're not going to have a terribly good performance rank having two-and-a-half medium avatars of triangles on your avatar

[heady smelt]

For sure no

[buoyant holly]

then again I'm probably also not the best to ask about wearing many outfits as I just have a couple of VRoid Studio clothing that I could easily dissolve Edge loops on

instead of Marvelous Designer triangle soup

[heady smelt]

lol

[buoyant holly]

yeah I've seen some of that on Twitter

and the person who uploaded it bickering to people who dare to point out normal maps exist so you should optimize your stuff

[heady smelt]

How would N maps be involved in optimization?

[buoyant holly]

you don't render a several million Polly piece of clothing as you bake all of that detail into the normal map

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/เปรียบเทียบโมเดลที่ใช้_normal_map.png

[heady smelt]

Oh right yeah the thingy where u make a normal map of the super high poly render and do a thing to make it on the low poly one

[buoyant holly]

that's pretty much how like pretty much most video game models are made that aren't like anime

so releasing a ludicrously high-poly piece of clothing is a bit inexcusable

[sullen lotus]

How
can I find all the materials on an av? All I can see ~5 or so but vrc shows 17.

[buoyant holly]

every separate mesh counts as a new material for vrchat because it's a new draw call

[sullen lotus]

Thank you but that is a why

[buoyant holly]

so you'd probably want to combine meshes together

and potentially see if you can combine materials

[sullen lotus]

I have 3.

[buoyant holly]

3 meshes?

[sullen lotus]

Yea. For accessory toggles.

[buoyant holly]

okay then something else is up as that total wouldn't add up to 17?

[sullen lotus]

I found 6 in blender. And I have 1 for the eyes. Maths out i guess. The eyes also count as 2.

mm guess it dupes all materials

[calm spade]

You should use bones for toggles, for actual optimization

it's just a bone scaled up/down

[buoyant holly]

there is also a Shader that can do toggling that even performant compared to the bones https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Manual/Inventory-System

but I suppose it does have the downside of if people are blocking your shaders you'll show up with everything turned on

[zinc monolith]

did someone have 200k avatar on quest ?

what a gamer

[crisp ermine]

Shader method is lit, tbh.
The more I learn about shaders the more I'm like 🅱️ ruh.

[stray tangle]

that's the reason I don't do that lol

mesh toggles or bone scaling are the only two I will use

[heady smelt]

Bone scaling 4 life

[solid smelt]

I always aim to do bone scaling just to keep the materials combined

[lone tiger]

It's not that usable for things like weapon toggles or having multiple outfit versions, but for other cases I find it perfect.

[solid smelt]

Weapon toggles are actually perfect for both scaling due to them either being a non skinned mesh or easily compressed under 1 scaling bone. Outfits however are more difficult

[crisp ermine]

Ye.

Outfits are pain.peko

[heady talon]

Ill show you pain if you dont show up to HS in like 5 minutes for a bit O_O good boy

[quaint venture]

I've been using nara's avatar tool constraints for awhile now, but on the newest version of my avatar they don't work. Anyone have any ideas?

Like I have the dynamic bone script on the constraint root, and I can see it moving, but none of the bones constrained to it are moving

[oak cypress]

Hey, I'm currently making a new Avatar, just modelling it now. Question; how much can I do with the model before I need to use unity? I can think only Modelling and texturing but that's it.

[pure bridge]

unity is a game engine, where you start to actually use your assets rather than create them. if youre creating a 3d character then youre probably using blender, or a number of different 3d programs. in any case, before you move to unity you should have a fully rigged, fully textured 3d character

so modeled, textured, and rigged (including weight painting) for animation

for vrchat specifically it also helps to create blendshapes during the rigging process since you can use those for mouth movements and gestures, depending on the style of avatar (for most humanoid avatars that aren't hyper stylized youre going to want this)

[oak cypress]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for letting me know. I'll be looking for someone to help me get it onto the game once it's done. I can handle those parts myself. Including blendshapes.

[pure bridge]

👍

the vrchat sdk is like night and day between sdk 2 vs. sdk 3, so sdk3 alone makes it much easier to get your avatar ingame and make it more complex. plus, the avatar tools that have come from it (avatar emulator and combogestureexpressions) make it even more powerful. so it wont take you long to get a basic avatar in game

though you may spend forever on materials like i do if you want funny stuff

[oak cypress]

Materials? I'm not aware of that but I do know what I want from the character

the question is getting the right person who knows how to implement it onto the character, THEN making it quest compatible.

[unreal plover]

Are you on the latest SDK?

New unity has different update order regarding Dynamic bones and constraints. Latest SDK should fix this and it'll work in game regardless

[quaint venture]

I was on the latest one as of the 2019 update but not the newest newest

[unreal plover]

Update to the newest newest, and it should fix it :)

[quaint venture]

I'll give that a try, thanks

[solid smelt]

Yeah unity broke constraints to fix some edge case, thankfully VRC undid it once you have the newer SDK

[silent slate]

question i downloaded a avatar and i noticed too many materials

i tried to use cat for atlasing it but it just output black and white texture

any idea why?

this is what i get

[buoyant holly]

what kind of material setup you have going for the avatar

as the cats texture combiner grabs the diffuse material which it seems to be doing from the little landscape in one of the corners

[silent slate]

these are material with normal map

texture + normal map

[buoyant holly]

currently it looks like it's grabbing ambient occlusion

[silent slate]

there are some way to fix it?

[buoyant holly]

make sure your color textures are hooked up to the color slot

[buoyant holly]

that's a screenshot from Unity so that's not going to help

I need the screenshot of your blender materials

[silent slate]

whrere i see that?

ah ok

this?

[buoyant holly]

okay something's up with your materials that there's no colors in the little circles

https://i.imgur.com/rpZPrdk.png can you show me this tab

[silent slate]

where is that

[buoyant holly]

to the right

[buoyant holly]

click on one of your objects so it shows the material as you currently have the Armature selected

[silent slate]

oke

now it popup, sorry i am still newbie in this matter

[buoyant holly]

it ok the fact that you're asking about material combining at all is a good sign

[buoyant holly]

would it be okay if I Discord called you so you could share screen so I can point stuff out easier

[silent slate]

sure

in private?

[buoyant holly]

yes

[mossy condor]

so i was making my avatar more optimized in blender and all that so i could port it to quest, but when i put it into unity this happened. How can i fix it so its not see through on the inside

if i use a solidifier mesh, it doubles the polygon count and affects the rating which im trying to avoid

ok nevermind actually. All i did was reduce the polygons down a lot and added a solidifier modifier and it worked perfectly without going over the limit

[heady smelt]

also looks like your blender camera and light imported with it, id delete those before exporting so you dont have to unpack your prefab to delete thme

[mossy condor]

yea i did delete it eventually

[crisp ermine]

On the subject of dynamic bones; does distant disable function properly in vrc? I'd like to help peeps by reducing dynbone calcs if I can.

[lone tiger]

That option is forced on in-client.

[languid quartz]

This is forced on by default and uses a distance of 20 meters.

[onyx harness]

Do you know if you were to change the distance value to lets say 5 or 10, does vrc overwrite that and set it back to 20?

[languid quartz]

Pretty sure you can change it and it won't be overwritten. Some users have changed it to 0 (on accident) and wondered why their dynamic bones don't seem to work at all even with the dynamic bone limiter disabled.

[crisp ermine]

Good to know. 20 is rather a bit far, especially for most stuff I use dynbones for.

I'd say that if the bone set isn't mission critical, I'd keep it at 10, imho, that's 30 feet, which is quite a distance.

[heady smelt]

just hit autofix

why havent you hit AUTOFIX!!!!??

[acoustic latch]

because it says you can't upload until you do it in the text next to it

[heady smelt]

^^^

one click fix brotha

the polygon count fixes

Even if it didnt, you still need to solve problems one step at a time, meaning if there is a big "Auto Fix" button you try that

[pure bridge]

day 1068 of people posting screenshots with autofix buttons and the cause of problems listed right there and wondering what to do

[acoustic latch]

or asking how to fix a thing that is fixed in the current release of the sdk

[silent slate]

i can use cloth without triggering this?

is just a small band

[onyx harness]

Using context clues, maybe if you apply cloth to something that has no vertices. So I'm gonna go with no, you can't avoid that.

[silent slate]

sad

i don't think that cause "lag" is not much stuff

the stuff will cause lag are particles shit or special effects

[onyx harness]

Everything still has an impact but the vertex count is very low so it should be relatively alright in terms of performance. That's just my opinion though.

[silent slate]

it froze also my high end pc

[silent slate]

i think under 100 should be marked green

[onyx harness]

I will have to disagree there. I've seen some really nice particle effects that don't lag at all. They built with optimisation in mind

[silent slate]

yeah i say i am ok with particle but stuff like make you feel dizzy, fast colors ecc

[onyx harness]

if you want to lag people you can turn anything up to 11 and get the result

[silent slate]

i am speaking about anoying stuff for crash you

nothing the other nice thing

[onyx harness]

well then yeah, if it's designed to close your game it'll be bad for you. It's not really great to compare your models to those things as even 500k poly 250 material avatars would look good in that light.

[silent slate]

like this

[onyx harness]

yeah they makes some... interesting stuff. Though I can safely say your cloth band won't do that.

[silent slate]

and a question about the guardian how i block special like that ?

[silent slate]

i think also limited use of dynamic bone shoul be fine too in low quantity, there are no reason to mark the avatar as "yellow" for that

[onyx harness]

disable animations and/or particles and/or shaders. That's usually what they are.

[onyx harness]

considering I have avatars which are green and use dynamics you might have to rethink your bone structure for those things you want dynamics on

[silent slate]

so they use special bones and use limited dynamic bones for triggering that?

[onyx harness]

Bottom line, can't have a lot of transforms being affected by dynamics, but you also don't need 10 bones per chain. 2 would do for a lot of things. My ears use 3; base, middle and end. That plus weightpainting to smooth out the bends and it looks fine.

you don't really need a lot of bones to have smooth movement.

[silent slate]

that is cool but i still don't know how manipulate bones

i see like is used for b00bies

or butts

[late quiver]

this isn't a excuse to not optimize
But a lot of VR chats optimization ticks are very very intense. I've had models with upwards of 200 cloth vertices and it was still fine for everyone involved.

What I mean even if it tells you that your model is very poor, it very well may not.

[heady smelt]

^

But if you see like a bunch of in the builder tab in PC builds then ur doing something wrong

[lone tiger]

Cloth specifically has recommended limits that are very out of date. They were based upon Cloth in Unity 2017, where it had a severe performance regression: https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/redo-performance-rank-values-for-cloth

[solid smelt]

Here's hoping they worked on their own cloth system for avatar dynamics

[solid smelt]

Thanks for the extra details, was just going off of what they said in the dev stream 👍

Unity cloth is alright but I avoid using it since everyone calculates it locally, causing it to clip around colliders or get stuck for individual people and not others

[late quiver]

Thanks! I know only the basis of how unity works.

I used to use cloth a lot. The secret with cloth is having just enough moving to create the illusion of cloth but not enough where it over simulates and ruins the effect.

[tender sundial]

I just want cloth to render correctly with transparency

is it so much to ask

[heady smelt]

hey

[nova hornet]

Hey, is there anything (besides VRCQuestTools from booth)
to easily convert stuff like matcaps, emission, color/alpha, etc from a shader like Poiyomi and bake them into the texture itself?

with some stuff you can put the material on a cube and take a screenshot of it and use that as the texture

but I don't think that really works for matcaps

[proper grail]

I mean, matcaps ara screenshot of the material on a sphere

[pale pollen]

I'm very new to avi creation, so excuse me asking. In unity I've found making toggles for different clothes is easier when the model has different meshes for different clothes. Although I could make a transparent shader instead. So question is: is it better for performance to toggle off the mesh and toggle another on or making it all the same mesh and making them transparent. Or is there yet another way to do it?

Oh, and I've also been wondering, a bit related: how much of a performance hit does the amount of materials on an avi have?

[pure bridge]

depends depends depends. this article offers another inventory system, though the second half of it talks about the cons of every other common way you can do toggles https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Manual/Inventory-System

ultimately, toggles are going to incur some performance cost

acknowledging that is important. if you want optimized avatars, have multiple copies of the same avatar, at least two where one is a low-fidelity and basic avatar for events and large instances, and a high-fidelity avatar with all of the toggles and features you could have, reserved for small instances and friends

with that in mind, the best toggle is the most natural, which is to just have multiple game objects (meshes).

material swaps to transparency is sketchy because overlapping (and lots of) transparency will cause even PCs to lag

and shape key toggles, apart from being just as bad performance wise, are terrible to work with

[pale pollen]

So basically no way is really much better than any else? You just have to remove toggles if you wanna optimize? tysm anyways lol 😛

[pure bridge]

pretty much. if you want toggles its going to cause performance

the real sin isnt unoptimization, its ignorance of unoptimization

be conscious of where youre going to use a given avatar

[pale pollen]

Right, makes sense

[pure bridge]

having a stacked avatar is fine if you dont bring it out in public

worlds are designed in a similar way. worlds meant only for like a handful of people have a lot more stuff on them than worlds meant for meany, and would likely start lagging if you brought in the average number of players (20) in a world meant for four, two, or one

that being said, as i said, a lot of pretty interesting methods of changign toggles themselves have cropped up in order to try and get around vrchat's safety rankings without a deeper understanding of unmentioned factors that cant really be as easily measured

for that reason, mesh toggles have an edge over material swaps and shape keys

[pale pollen]

Now that fallback avis have come out for real, I wanna make a highly optimized ver. of my avi, but it's alot of work XD

going form my stacked avi to a bare-bones one

[minor dome]

How do you reduce polygons in Blender 2.93?

I'm only finding tutorials that deal with 2.7, which has a different UI

[buoyant holly]

blender 2.8 tutorials would also work as it's in the same UI family as 2.9

[minor dome]

Still doesn't change the fact I can only find 2.7 tutorials

[buoyant holly]

try putting 2.8 in your search terms

[minor dome]

This is why I hate using Blender.

Tutorials are either outdated, or "just do the thing, 4head."

And in order to get a good tutorial, you need to sacrifice a goat to Todd Howard.

2.8 UI:

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MkgXcidxg4 here's a short tutorial that uses a current version of blender on decimate

[minor dome]

My UI:

There is no wrench.

There is no "modifier" tab

[buoyant holly]

do you have any object selected

as those parts of the ui don't show up if there's no object selected

[minor dome]

Yes

I have the entire thing I want to decimate selected.

I am in the modeling tab

[buoyant holly]

could you take a screenshot of your whole blender screen

[buoyant holly]

you have the Armature selected not the actual mesh

[minor dome]

There we go.

So now do I need to do something extra for it to actually reduce the polygons?

[buoyant holly]

not that I can think of besides for putting on the decimate modifier

[minor dome]

Because it's unchanged.

Setting the ratio to 0% even does nothing.

[buoyant holly]

you would need to be in object mode not edit mode

[minor dome]

That means nothing to me.

[buoyant holly]

the top-left where it says edit mode it needs to say object mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34FBeC9mktE

[minor dome]

Right. Got it. Thanks.

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1qEhBSfq4&list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6 might recommend giving this playlist to watch for covering basic vrchat UI later

[minor dome]

I have VR Chat stuff down.

I can use Unity.

Blender just never wants to work with me, and 99% of tutorials out there just blitz through stuff, or simply are "Just do the thing."

[buoyant holly]

yes because the video would be like twice as long if it's having to cover you've never touched blender before

[minor dome]

Legit, when trying to find a tutorial on how to texture a model, it was three parts.

Import the textures.
Append the textures.
Profit.

And the accompanying screenshots were just the scene. No UI at all.

[serene bronze]

Hey does anyone know how to add a prop that’s accessible through a emote dm me if u can help

[modern moth]

Is it possible to export textures from Unity that've been modified with shaders?

Trying to help a friend optimize their avatar and it'd be hard to do so since they have multiple textures they recolor/change up using shaders.

[calm spade]

Well, the texture hasn't been modified so no ?

Can't they change parts specifically with a mask ?

recoloring takes 5 minutes in gimp, not sure what "change up" means tho

[modern moth]

Maybe? I have minimal experience with recoloring/shaders in Unity, I personally try to keep such changes outside of it so I have more control over them.

The main issue here is that I'm having trouble figuring out how the shader is modifying the textures in-engine. Is it simply overlaying a layer w/ the color? Is it recoloring the texture itself? Those grant totally-different results based on execution.

Since there's several textures, I'd like to Atlas them but if multiple have different recolors, kinda hard to do.

[calm spade]

Gotta recolor them in an image editing software

[winged forge]

do you mean you want to bake out a texture that is currently procedural?

[modern moth]

I suppose that'd be the technical explanation for it, yes.

[winged forge]

so in something like Blender what you'd do is create a UV map for your object (might be different than the UV for the original shader, because the original shader might rely on mirroring, tiling, etc) and then bake the texture into the new UV map. it looks like people have tried it before in Unity: https://github.com/sneha-belkhale/shader-bake-unity

I guess that's a little ambiguous: Even if you do this in Unity, you'd still make the new UV map (if needed) in Blender.

[modern moth]

That's the spice.

Appreciate it, my technical knowledge is admittedly pretty limited when it comes to texture-related stuff.

[minor dome]

Speaking of UV Maps, is there a way I can justify a bunch of UV rounded points into a straight line?

[stray tangle]

the Follow active quads function can help with that

along with straightening lines using S -> (X/Y) -> 0

[minor dome]

Active Quads doesn't work for me. Throws up an error.

[stray tangle]

what does the error say?

(screenshot)

and what unity version are you using

[minor dome]

x.30f1 for Unity.

And here's the error message:

[proper grail]

No selected face found to follow..?

Thats odd usually just says "Select quad" in the lil bottom right warning bubble

[distant osprey]

Does anyone know how heavy the shader Unity Chan Toon shader 2 is? I like this way more than poiyomi and i like to use like every feature of the shader ... two colors for shading shadows, the high color, rim lightling, outline, emission and of course a mat cap ... is that a big deal in terms of optimization? Or is this just marginal? Whats the best way to test the framerate of an avatar if youre having a decent pc?
( i tought about creating a private world and placing your avatar with a dancing animation like 60 times and see whats happening?)

[proper grail]

In the top right of the game window theres a stats button, the number of batches is the stress placed on cpu and tris drawn is gpu. For a fair measurement turn off shadows in the scenes default directional light. 1 mesh 1 single pass mat and unity ui will come up to 3 batches, the lowest you can get it

And the average limit to get to 90fps is 450ish batches for single core rendering

Very general, including world and other avatars

[distant osprey]

And this also takes heavy shaders into account? Like mesh shaders like this flame shader one? :0

[proper grail]

Can open up the gpu debugger window to see all that fun stuff, cant remember exactly how rn discord mobile

[distant osprey]

okay i will search fpr that terms, thanki

[silent slate]

question where texture with _S should go?

i know these are specular, where i have to put it? and which shader i have to use?

[heady smelt]

I think autodesks shader supports that its built into unity

might not its been awhole

[silent slate]

i already fixed that i just used specular shader

now another issue, after using cat "optimization"

it messed the leg

any idea how to fix it?

fixed was some twisted shet

[silent slate]

😦

[silent slate]

fixed the head but why is going under the floor?

[heady smelt]

the origin point of the armature is at the point that meets the floor, make it at the feet

ud do this in blender

[sacred cloak]

Hey all. II hope this is the right place to ask... I was wondering how I can optimize long hair properly? I merged bone weights to reduce the number of bones, but it makes the hair move like crap/look like a wig. Is there something I am doing wrong, or a better approach?

[silent slate]

that is fucked... xD

[unreal plover]

If you don't need colissions you can use a single chain of dynamic bone on empty objects and then have rotation constraints from the hair bones to the dynamic bone chian.
https://github.com/Naraenda/NarasUnityTools#dynamic-bone-constraints

[sacred cloak]

ive used this before and was definitely considering it. tried it on a skirt a while back, but I think hair would work way better 👍

[unreal plover]

I always avoid skirts. It's either gonna show the world what's under when sitting, or it has clipping problems, or it doesn't perform well.

[sacred cloak]

weight painting is the only thing ive seen that works well and frankly idk if i have the patience to do that lol

[unreal plover]

I think the best i got was with 4 or 6 bones and just not letting it move a lot. Hopefully the new physic bones allows for some new tricks (or just more colliders without hurting performance that much)

[sacred cloak]

coming summer 2021

[unreal plover]

I suppose if you're lazy you could the same as with the hair, just with multiple sources on the constraints

[sacred cloak]

thats what i tried to do, use the side as its own constraint, then the front and back as their own as well. just alot of clipping issues

[unreal plover]

I was also thinking that it would also probably be able to have the skirt always render infront of the legs with some shader magic. No clipping issues

Just a lot of work 😅 (and an extra material slot)

[buoyant holly]

not as I'm not aware of any like games that do that?

[unreal plover]

Nah, it's more an idea that has been floating my head around to get around some the clipping issues with multiple layers of toggleable clothes. Without doing a lot of weight painting

Most games either just scale parts of the limbs down or just have it done properly in the first place

[unreal plover]

See BlueProtocols beautiful scaling lmao

[sacred cloak]

just wanted to say thanks for this. got it down from very poor to medium by removing colliders and using the constraints 👍

[distant osprey]

Hello I would like to know more about the dynamic bone skript and how it drawns performance.

1.) Does the size of the Radius matters even when no collider is assignet to the skript?

-> I Mostly assign a radius even when i dont have any colliders just in case someone wants to interact with my charakter using a mod

2.) Does the size of the radius matters when a collider is assignet?

someone told me that this would draw performance but i dont really believe that ... i guess its the interaction no matter how smal or big the individual spheres of collider and dynamic skripts are ...

3.) When does the performance drop? Does the performance drop if there are colliders assignet, even when an actual collission maybe never will happen because the collider is too far away and will never hit the bones

or does the performance drop when the collission is happening?

[unreal plover]

Performance is directly dependent on the amount of bone transformations and collision checks. The radius of the colliders do not matter

[distant osprey]

That means the check wether a collision is happening or not is always playing and therefore it does not matter if theres an actual collision, the performance will drop as soon as there is a collider assignet?

[heady smelt]

dynamic bone colliders are checking rapidly even though there is no collissions happening yet yes

[distant osprey]

ahhh iseeee thanki!

[stray tangle]

the only way for it to know if it's colliding or not is to check

many times a second

[heady smelt]

collider scripts could instead check less frequently until they do start colliding but if you reduce the frequency of the checks (while not colliding) too much there would be a noticable delay in the initial reaction

but i think its a good comprimise

[heady wind]

how to add an animator?

[slow flame]

You have to add the Avatar descriptor on the top object of your model. Yours is called "ruv" dont add the avatar descriptor on the "Body" or "Armature"

[heady wind]

here?

[slow flame]

Yes, make sure you delete the other one on "body" Also, is your avatar humanoid? It doesnt seems to have an animator (setting to humanoid adds one)

[heady wind]

yeah i was gonna talk about it

it says i need to make it humanoid

[heady wind]

how to do it

[heady wind]

thx mate

bruh i hate my life

i solve a problem there is another

[calm spade]

It literally says auto fix

[heady wind]

when i press auto fix the whole builder ui disappears

[calm spade]

screenshot of your unity window ?

[heady wind]

nvm it worked this time

sorry for being dumb and thx for your time

[radiant shadow]

careful what you actually post , cause 🤦

[heady wind]

why?

[fierce seal]

I've been looking for someone to help me with making a avatar of my sona but im dirt broke and i dont know how to rig, use blender, or anything like that

if anyone is willing to help me (which i really really doubt) ping me or dm me about it

I can try to pay you back in art trading or scultpures

[acoustic latch]

This isn't the place for that, if you want someone to make an avatar you really should be on the VRC Traders discord, and even then the chances of getting someone to do anything for free is low. The best thing would be to find an avatar that is already made and modify it to be close to what you want until you have money or enough skill to do it all. #community-servers-old scroll up until you see the VRC Traders discord

[calm spade]

Have you tried learning Blender ?

[fierce seal]

alright thank you

[acoustic latch]

A good place to look is on https://www.vrcarena.com/ for furry avatars, humans are all over the place

[fierce seal]

thank you for the help i appreciate it

[jovial garden]

hey, which is better, 4 2k textures, or one 8k texture?
i dont know if 8k is too big or something along the lines of that

[buoyant holly]

4 2k textures would result in a 4K texture not a one 8k texture

But to answer your question using less materials is better so a single texture that has everything

[stray tangle]

one material with a 4k texture is best here

[minor dome]

Why is it when I decimate an .fbx in Blender, Unity doesn't recognise the face count decrease?

[stray tangle]

when you import a file in unity, it makes a copy of the file and stores it within the project

you need to replace the file in the project to update it to the new version

[minor dome]

That's what I've been doing

[stray tangle]

either do that through the file explorer, or by directly exporting from blender into the new spot

also, make sure your model isn't unpacked

if you unpacked it, you will need to drag the FBX into the scene again

to copy components over to the new one, you can use Pumkin's avatar tools

[minor dome]

It's not unpacked, and I've been exporting into a folder, then dragging the edited .fbx out.

[stray tangle]

where are you dragging that fbx to?

[minor dome]

Into where the .fbx is stored in Unity

[stray tangle]

you might need to alt tab back and forth after doing so to make Unity realise the file changed

[minor dome]

It does.

[stray tangle]

in that case, everything's fine

[minor dome]

I've culled useless polygons, and it updates fine.

But when I decimate what's left over, it doesn't.

[stray tangle]

it's most likely the SDK not updating properly

try saving your project and reopening it

[blazing temple]

how many texture sets can you use on a quest avatar?

[acoustic latch]

That depends on if you want it listed as good or not https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-performance-ranking-system#removed-categories

[manic depot]

You can use as many as you want but it's two will get you medium, and past that is poor and very poor.

I've personally not noticed much performance loss on Quest with alot of them but I merge the textures anyway.

Honestly feel bad for people on Quest 1

[exotic fulcrum]

I'm trying to combine my materials but they either go all white. or they turn into an odd material i didn't even select.

like my model has chest hair. if i try to combine only the hairs. it turns into the pants material that i didn't even select

[acoustic latch]

Are you talking about doing an atlas? Check to make sure that all of your materials actually have an image assigned, if they are just using the shader color, that can cause issues like this when doing atlas

[exotic fulcrum]

yes. they all have an image assigned. but it gets messed up.

[acoustic latch]

how many materials are there for this model

[exotic fulcrum]

27 materials.

a lot are same png but just for different vertex group

[acoustic latch]

are all the ones using the same image file named the same?

[exotic fulcrum]

actually there is no duplicated png. they all have their own.

[acoustic latch]

so all materials are using a different png

[exotic fulcrum]

yes

[acoustic latch]

you might want to do some manual UV combing first depending on how the images are.

Have you run the Cats Fix Model script yet

[exotic fulcrum]

ok. and yes

[acoustic latch]

To figure out if you can easily do some manual combining is look at how images are laid out for different parts, like face, body, hair, see if they could be combined into a single image and not overlap, like they are just cut out pieces from what could be a single image. If so, you could combine them all and merge the UV's for each of them without having to move things around

27 materials is a lot for the atlas scripts to figure out

[exotic fulcrum]

this is what they look like

[acoustic latch]

every image is like that?

[exotic fulcrum]

I don't get why the atlas won't work either way. Like i pick say shirt pants and shoes. and it still doesn't work.

and yes. every image is like that

And this is what his shirt looks like

[acoustic latch]

go through each material and disconnect anything that isn't an image attached to Base Color, then try again, or if you want, share what the shader looks like in shader editor

[exotic fulcrum]

Here is what the shader looks like for the shirt

i'm going to try what you said

i guess the shader that it is using has no base color option. so do i need to change the shader

[acoustic latch]

could be the XPS shader causing the problem, I think atlas is set up more for the Principled BSDF

[exotic fulcrum]

if i change it to the BSDF it just goes white.

[acoustic latch]

what does the shader editor look like though, Shift+F3 to open it

with the XPS Shader the active one

[exotic fulcrum]

Looks like this. i'll put closer pictures.

[acoustic latch]

Yep, that would do it, if each material is like that, that could cause it to just go wacky.

[exotic fulcrum]

makes sense. it has a lot of things. it's really detailed texture wise

Model is pretty detailed texture wise.

[acoustic latch]

If you want to keep all the extra shader stuff you will need to do extra work. You could try using the Bake option in Cats but uncheck Decimate, see what happens.

it might take a while to process if it doesn't just outright crash on you, which it shouldn't if you are using updated blender and updated cats

[exotic fulcrum]

ok i'll try

anything i should change

i took off decimate

[acoustic latch]

uncheck decimate

not just set a high number

[buoyant holly]

you would want the smoothness and metallic if you do have those textures

[exotic fulcrum]

should of put the updated picture

[acoustic latch]

Click Desktop first, then uncheck Decimate, forgot that

[exotic fulcrum]

so it has a diffuse shader, lightmap, specular, and micro bump. should i check metallic and transparency

and here's what it looks like originally

[acoustic latch]

I think you have to keep transparency on to get metallic, but set the transparency to be the metallic, it should tell you when you check Metal

[buoyant holly]

I don't see any metallic Maps so I don't think you'll need that

[exotic fulcrum]

ok

here's what the settings are so far

[acoustic latch]

if you want smoothness on you should probably set the Diffuse Alpha to be smoothness

Hover over Smoothness, it should say

[exotic fulcrum]

i see

i'll try baking it then

[acoustic latch]

each option should give you information on what it is if you hover the cursor over for a moment

[exotic fulcrum]

ok i'm checking them out

[acoustic latch]

you should set the texture resolution to the max, which is 4096

[exotic fulcrum]

ok

[exotic fulcrum]

if blender isn't responding is it doing the baking correctly. I'm doing a gpu bake. and looking in taskmanager it's using only like 6 percent

it's been like 10min

[acoustic latch]

there are a lot of nodes for it to work with and 27 materials, it can take a while

[exotic fulcrum]

i'll leave it going then

i guess it did it. but when it finished a window popped up and looked like errors but it went away.

also some stuff is missing

actually only 1 thing is missing which is the holster.

[acoustic latch]

is that on the original or the clone it made to the right

or left, somewhere

[exotic fulcrum]

well the original isn't there

[acoustic latch]

it should still be in the scene somewhere if you left Quick Compare on

[exotic fulcrum]

if i click the shirt i can move it.

i don't see another

it's definitely the baked one though

[acoustic latch]

oh yeah so it did do it's thing at least. What does the material panel thing look like on the right, the one you shared first when I asked for the Shader Editor

[exotic fulcrum]

says cats bake at top

[acoustic latch]

find this and set Blend Mode to opaque if it isn't, for the bake model

[exotic fulcrum]

i think it just duplicated everything

the shader node thing is the same for both shirts

some things are messed up when i move it. so i'm gonna try again

[acoustic latch]

before you do you might want to change one setting that isn't in that

[exotic fulcrum]

like the shirt to the left is connected to the shirt on the right by the button

ok. which setting

[acoustic latch]

Click the little TV icon and change the two sample settings to 1, that might speed up the bake, it might not

could also cause a slight loss in quality in the image it outputs, might not

[exotic fulcrum]

ok i'll try that

[acoustic latch]

I do know this has made baking textures a different way go many times faster for me. You can always change it back later if you save over, or just revert your project/scene whatever, later

[exotic fulcrum]

ok i'm trying again

now to wait

i think the reason it was missing the holsters was because it was a seperate mesh. So i made sure to combine them this time

so it's all one mesh

here's the error. sorry it's dark. tried to take the picture with nvidia but i guess it didn't get rid of the overlay.

my drivers are correct. let me check blender and cats

[acoustic latch]

you might need to restart blender

[exotic fulcrum]

ok

so i'm assuming the baking bakes all the little effects and stuff into a simpler version.

my blender is 2.83.5 so i'm going to update it

My CATS plugin is the latest though

[acoustic latch]

That could be it, 2.9.3 is latest? Something 2.9, just not the first release of 2.9, and not 3.0

[exotic fulcrum]

ok. round 3

here's the settings i'm using

[acoustic latch]

you could probably uncheck the 2 shape key options

[exotic fulcrum]

ok i took those off

[acoustic latch]

I am attempting all of this as well now with what I am sure is the same model source as you

don't link it though

[exotic fulcrum]

ok

yeah the model works after i cleaned it up. just wanted to optimize it better

[acoustic latch]

I get that, I'm trying to see what needs to be done manually, and if you can even get the results you want using Cats without making changes to the shader setup first

[exotic fulcrum]

something seems to have happened with the belt. it's transparent. and the buckle. do you happen to know how to fix it?

backface culling fixes the belt.

nevermind i got it

[acoustic latch]

well it isn't too hard to switch the shaders to BSDF manually, don't know if this will allow cats different things to work better though

also you lose detail

[exotic fulcrum]

i don't mind trying the BSDF. i'm just waiting for the bake to finish

but yeah. i assume it loses all the normal maps and stuff and any extra detail. which i was expecting.

[acoustic latch]

yep, if you go through and add the Principled BSDF shader and attached the "Diffuse" to the base color and the Specular to the Specular, and the Alpha to any that have alpha I guess, then attach the BSDF output to the Material Output, you can atlas without problem it seems, so manual cleanup needed before automatic things

[exotic fulcrum]

ok. i'll try that. after this other bake. the bake i did worked. i just need to take of transparency. since it made him somewhat see through.

Is that something i just do in the material window. or in the nodes?

[acoustic latch]

yeah, I had that problem when I did a couple tests, the Islands that are automatically created end up being too small or it runs out of space for them, I don't know which. You would do what I suggest doing in the Shader Editor

[exotic fulcrum]

yeah i'll do what you suggest in the shader editor

almost worked

[acoustic latch]

See how I have the nodes connected to both the XPS shader and the BSDF Shader? That was what I was talking about with connecting the Diffuse on XPS to Base on BSDF, Spec to Spec, and you would do the same if there was an alpha. I'm only leaving them connected to show as example. Then once you do all of this you should be able to atlas

[exotic fulcrum]

ok i see

i'll try that

[acoustic latch]

You could also do the Bumpmaps to the Normals on BSDF, but I'm not even going to figure out that Mess. Once you do this then you can at least optimze the Material count, and we finally complete what the channel is for

You can do Shift+A to bring up the Add menu, then go to Shader and then Principled BSDF, when hovering over the Shader Editor window

[exotic fulcrum]

yeah. bump map would be cool. but i have no idea how to do it.

ok

[acoustic latch]

Make sure to connect BSDF to the Material Output Node on all materials before doing the Atlas. You could also delete the XPS shader when you go through all before doing atlas, you don't need to though as long as the XPS shader isn't connected to a Material Output node

[exotic fulcrum]

here's the first one i did for the shirt

shirt looks like this. is that right

[acoustic latch]

it looks correct without the Normal/bump map on it, figure out how to set that up and it should look like the xps shader does

[exotic fulcrum]

oh wow. so it's possible to make it look like the original. guess i'll play around and see if i can figure it out. atleast for now i can have it this way.

[acoustic latch]

the XPS shader is just a Principled BSDF with a lot of extra nodes in it connected to fix replicate what the game shader would be

[exotic fulcrum]

oh ok. never knew how shaders worked

[acoustic latch]

I figured out a little when I was working on getting a Destiny 2 model in to Unity, the community shader is crazy, if you want a mess, try doing that.

[exotic fulcrum]

what shader do you use for a vrchat import. at the moment i only have poiyomi

i used to use a toons one from a while ago.

[acoustic latch]

I only use poiyomi anymore, and just mess around with the different settings until I get something I like, not always what it looked like in blender, just what I like

[buoyant holly]

and you'd probably also be fine with the standard Shader doing apbr realistic person

[exotic fulcrum]

ok. yeah poiyomi looked pretty good with the model imported.

[acoustic latch]

I can't help with doing PBR image for the Unity shaders, never used it, never learned it. All of this is just throw poop at a wall until it sticks and forms some basic shape of kind of what I want
Good luck with whatever you do after what I showed how to do, I'm off to sleep, which should have been like 3 hours ago at least

[exotic fulcrum]

Just wanted to let you know i actually figured out how to add the knit fabric pattern. took me a bunch of trial and error but i got it.

[minor dome]

What is a skinned mesh renderer, and how do you combine three into one?

Nevermind. Giving up on custom fallback crap.

[sick timber]

A skinned mesh renderer is any mesh that can be moved with armatures. To join them, import the mesh into blender, select all the meshes, and hit ctrl + j.

[minor dome]

What if the mesh can't be imported into Blender?

[sick timber]

What's the file extension of it?

And I'm sure there's some importer that someone made.

[minor dome]

.asset

[sick timber]

Did you buy the model?

[minor dome]

It's a free downloadable.

[sick timber]

From where?

[minor dome]

Booth.pm

[sick timber]

Oh, that's should be fine then.

[buoyant holly]

there should be the original fbx somewhere in the downloads

[sick timber]

But there's should be a model inside that file

[minor dome]

There's not an .fbx. Just a .asset

No .obj, no .smd. Not even an .stl

[sick timber]

In your Unity project.

After you import the .asset file

There should be a model

[minor dome]

There's the .prefab that gets dragged into the Hiearchy

The .prefab calls upon a .asset

There is no .fbx anywhere in the project.

[sick timber]

There should be a skinned mesh renderer somewhere on the prefab.

Or three, as you've mentioned.

Find one, then find the mesh's reference.

[cosmic light]

How tall is the average avatar? because 5' 8" or 1.1179m is too tall for the hub

[onyx harness]

If you have the .mesh and the .asset you don't need an fbx. It's something some creators do to deter people from taking parts of the models and redistributing them.

[minor dome]

I don't have either of those either.

[buoyant holly]

you can't import those into blender so you can't do anything about combining meshes together into blender

[sick timber]

There has to be a file containing the mesh somewhere, in some file format.

[minor dome]

Check your size by creating a 3D GameObject cube. The default cube is 1m on each side.

[onyx harness]

the skinned mesh renderers has a reference to the .mesh
it quite literally has to

[minor dome]

Where do I find it then?

Because I've been through all these shitting folders a dozen times looking for anything, and all I can find is the .asset

[buoyant holly]

then you might want to get a new model as that's not really serve serviceable

[cosmic light]

Yes but how tall is the celling in a regular room because it's clearly less than 1m in the VRChat home hub

[buoyant holly]

the ceiling in the vrchat home is definitely more than one metre tall

[onyx harness]

You can find it using the skinned mesh renderer but once you have it you won't be able to import it into blender whilst retaining any armature information. Either check the Booth files for a model file or you'll need a way to export a prefab as an fbx / something akin to that.

[minor dome]

Some models' native scale is different to unity's. If in doubt, just go to GameObject > 3D Object > Cube. Scale the cube to the dimensions you want it to be, then size your avatar to the cube.

[cosmic light]

I did and my character's head is sticking out of the roof in the hub

[buoyant holly]

can you share screenshots

[onyx harness]

what's the y scale of the cube you used?

[cosmic light]

...

1.7272

[onyx harness]

My model has a Y scale of 1.83 which makes it very close to 6 foot

[buoyant holly]

could you share a screenshot of your very tall model

[onyx harness]

I'm now wondering if the viewpoint is just being pushed up

[buoyant holly]

as it sounds like something is messed up on the scaling Factor on something

[minor dome]

That could do it.

[cosmic light]

Now the new cube I made is smaller than when I first did it

the model started out at 0.06 and I made a 1.7272 cube and upscaled it

Now the new cube that I just made is less than half the avatar's height and I used the same numbers

[buoyant holly]

could you share some screenshots

[buoyant holly]

no wonder you're hitting your head on the ceiling you're like 3 meter

[onyx harness]

I mean, we figured it out. I run my cubes with an X and Z of ~0.2-0.3 and then play with the Y scale

[cosmic light]

I made it the same height as the cube before

Unity is messing with me

[buoyant holly]

so how tall do you want the avatar

[onyx harness]

well, something scaled your cube up unless you managed to change the default unity scaling in the project settings

which is unlikely

[cosmic light]

5' 8" in Irl height

not including the ears or tuft of fur ontop of the head

[buoyant holly]

normally you would have that as a cube scaled to 1.727

can you show a screenshot of your cube with like the inspector

to make sure you're starting with a proper one meter cube

[sick timber]

When scaling the cube, keep the x and z at 1 to keep it approximately proportionate to a humanoid.

But yeah, that avatar is huge

It should be the same size as the cube

[buoyant holly]

okay looks like your cube is fine now and no wonder your avatar was hitting the ceiling

[cosmic light]

The avatar got bigger when I imported it to VR chat

[sick timber]

It's already huge, probably more than 4m.

[cosmic light]

Because that cube is the same size I used to scale it in the first place

[sick timber]

The cube's in-game size would be 1.7m tall

1 Unity unity = 1m in-game

And that's a constant.

You should make your avatar smaller

[onyx harness]

nah, taller. Look down on the 10 foot eboys

[buoyant holly]

https://i.gyazo.com/c797cf51c004e1db086f3bea83e3df9f.png

[buoyant holly]

yes now it should actually not be Giant

[cosmic light]

It started at 0.06

It was tiny

[buoyant holly]

hopefully it behaves better now

[cosmic light]

How do I fix sinking into the floor when crawling?

and how do I fix the hands crossing over each other when clapping?

[minor dome]

Remake those animations with your not-human model in mind.

[cosmic light]

non-human model?

[buoyant holly]

you have shorter limb proportions then a adult human which is what the animations are modeled off of

[cosmic light]

I'm not sure how to eddit that stuff

[honest lotus]

someone please help me optimize my avatar

[calm spade]

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

[manic depot]

I don't recommend decimating unless it's a prop

Almost everytime I've decimated a rigged model I've regretted it

[buoyant holly]

yeah Edge Loop dissolving tends to be a lot cleaner

[nova hornet]

I feel as long as you pay close attention to stuff like the face and fingers it's fine

[opal stirrup]

I haven't been having issues with my unity crashing when transferring to android but all of a sudden even if theres almost nothing in the world when I transfer it, it still crashes, what should I do?

[fluid sluice]

CATS does have a decimate tool that preserves shape keys as well. Kinda useful depending on what is being done and how much decimation is needed.

[normal nova]

Its also good for just having a throwaway Quest version. Ive been trying to make automatic edge loop dissolving work without much luck

What I came up with likes to just eat arms

[manic depot]

I manually do it

[warm cloud]

help. there is this model that only has colors as textures meaning it had like 5 material slots, but i wanna put it into one. i tried combining the materials in cats blender plugin but i'm left with these weird spots, idk what to do

[buoyant holly]

you would probably want to scale the UVS smaller in blender so you're not getting texture bleed ?

[warm cloud]

i have no idea how to do that.

[buoyant holly]

https://i.gyazo.com/b325cb1d3a348e3ced321bf9f9126328.mp4

[warm cloud]

hmmm...

i'll try.

hey it worked, thank you so much!

[buoyant holly]

glad to be of help

[warm cloud]

:D

[buoyant holly]

if you're curious why that's happening as you get farther away from the model it uses smaller versions of the textures and if your uvs are too close to the edge they might start sampling from pixels you don't want it to do

[warm cloud]

i know why it happens, just didnt know how to fix it

but now i do c:

[buoyant holly]

cool

[unreal plover]

disable mipmapping

and make it into a 4x4 texture :)

though at that point it might be more efficient to just use vertex colors instead of UV-coordinates

[dusk vigil]

So I have joined all the meshes of a model and in Unity it says there are 7 submeshes
Are the submeshes related to the material slots? I noticed the amount is the same as the number of material slots I'm using

[acoustic latch]

Yes

[dusk vigil]

I see, I'm going to atlas the textures then thanks

[near kettle]

I'm kind of clueless on where to even start on how to optimize this avatar I was provided. I'm new to unity but picked the bare bones basics up pretty fast but not exactly where to start with optimizing it. I doubt for stuff like this there is a 1 for all tool that I can use to solve all my issues. btw this is a 3.0 avatar

[calm spade]

What's your goal ? Medium or below ?

[near kettle]

With the avatars contents yeah. Basically enough for quest users to see it

I doubt I will get it too good, but want to if possible

[vivid night]

Take it into blender and turn the tris into quads, that should help a ton, also make an atlas of the textures, that would be great

[vivid night]

should really only take 5 mins max to do

[near kettle]

Luckily the avatar creator provided a blender file. I launched it, and immediately got lost. I have used Maya for school but haven't touched Blender. I'll look into it

[vivid night]

I'll be happy to help you, if you need it 🙂

[sick timber]

That doesn’t help with the end tri count

It helps with topology and working with the model

But yes, make a texture atlas

[calm spade]

That does absolutely nothing lol

The atlas part is great, but triangles is not something that you can do manually, unity does it automatically

[calm spade]

Look into the material combiner addon for blender, for polygon reducing i'd have to see what your model looks like

[distant osprey]

Does the size has any effects on how the game runs? When i duplicate a chair and scale this up to ... 500meters high but it has the exact same poly count / texture size. Does this affect anything?

[remote vine]

I feel like it probably shouldn't? Aside maybe from it having a larger bounding box, meaning it's just more likely to be on screen and rendered. At least, that's the case with avatars, IDK if bounding boxes are a thing for world objects.

I may be completely wrong though.

[solid smelt]

Bounding boxes exist for every mesh, a chair really should not have a mesh on an avatar so it wont effect the bounding box

[jovial tartan]

Does anyone know what would be best? Separate skinned meshes that will be hidden, or 1 big skinned mesh and then assign different material parts that will have an invisible material/shader

[onyx harness]

Separate the meshes but try not to use the same material across different meshes.

Each material is drawn individually. Using the same material on multiple meshes will cause unity to draw the same material multiple times, you can see how this is a waste of resources.

[pure bridge]

read "How does a shader-based system compare to other methods?" in this article, explains it well https://gitlab.com/s-ilent/SCSS/-/wikis/Manual/Inventory-System

also each material is goign to be redrawn per unique mesh anyway, you really dont need to worry about that (not to mention that if theyre small meshes im pretty sure they can be batched)

[onyx harness]

The idea is starting from a mesh with, lets say, 8 materials. I say ‘don’t use the same material on multiple meshes’ so you don’t end up with 14 material slots after separating for toggles. You can see why this’d be bad for the performance. Having 8 meshes with 1 unique material each means that if you were to join your meshes you’d still have 8 materials.
Then in both cases you’d be looking for changing the toggle method by merging materials and using the mentioned shader or something similar.

If you’re starting from 1 mesh 1 material then using separate meshes or separate materials is not great. In that situation I’d 110% look into that shader rather than adding 3, 4, 5 draws.

Also, can skinned meshes be batched in unity? I was under the impression that you could only do this for non skinned meshes.
(I may need to read up on it a bit more. Still have a lot to learn about for unity)

[pure bridge]

skinned meshes do not batch, but mesh renderers can be batched sharing the same material if they are <300 triangles, im assuming this will work for objects that are children of avatars

[onyx harness]

I see, okay. I’m not sure if I can apply it to any previous project immediately but I’ll definitely keep it in mind. Who know when it could come in handy.

[pure bridge]

and yes, having more than one material per mesh would be an issue for toggles, but for game objects with only one material slot per the performance cost would scale 1:1 as expected. in cases where your base mesh has a number of materials but you only need one slot per toggle then i would make a separate texture atlas and material for those. but most of the time i plan around that anyway, and most of the time your base avatar should approach or reach 1 material, and if it doesnt, it should at least have only 1 texture atlas so setting up outfit toggles is easy enough. i say this because although in theory adding drawcalls is going to always incur more performance load, in practice you cant really get around it, its the most sane option compared to shape key or material swap toggles which can easily result in worse performance if you are not careful. game objects are just easier to manage and measure; the only other things as optimized would be bone shrinking and SCSS (linked above), though they have specific use cases

[odd mortar]

So, I'm trying to cut down on the mesh renders of my avatar. I use the atlas material combiner thing that comes with CATS for blender and that works fine. The issue is when I put my avatar in unity I need to add accessories. adding these extra accessories adds on more mesh renders bringing my performance down fast. Does anyone know how I might go about combining all the mesh renders into one preventing this issue?

[acoustic latch]

Go back to blender and do atlas with the accessories too?

[odd mortar]

I did

I have two accesories added to the model

That's why there's three

One for the main model, and two for both accesories

[calm spade]

Why do these accessories need to be their own skinned mesh ?

[odd mortar]

Because they have multiple color schemes on them

Is there some other way to apply colors to individual parts of models?

[unreal plover]

write your own shaders

[odd mortar]

I don't even know where to begin with something like that

[tribal ruin]

Or just have them be one mesh and multiple materials

[acoustic latch]

Unless you mean have a toggle to switch materials, you are suggesting the thing that gives them the 3 Skinned Mesh Renderers

[tribal ruin]

Nope, not at all

[calm spade]

meshes and materials aren't the same thing

[tribal ruin]

You can have a single skinned mesh and have multiple material slots

[heady smelt]

Yeah I reckon you can have multiple materials in one mesh

[calm spade]

It's all about UVs

[heady smelt]

I dont see the problem with switching individual ones in the mesh render componenet where it has "size"

and lists the various materials

[acoustic latch]

I did not say what I meant, I was going for the multiple draw calls angle and not whatever it is I said

[odd mortar]

Well that's an idea, but do you have any resources that might help me figure out how to do that?

[tribal ruin]

Just add more materials in blender and then assign the faces.

[heady smelt]

I can film a demo in like 15-30 minutes ig

[tribal ruin]

This is perhaps one of the most basic things when it comes to modelling/texturing

[odd mortar]

That's what I did though

[heady smelt]

The thing I worry about is if those materials you plan to switch with animations get into the vrchat build