avatar-optimization

[stray tangle]

what do you mean exactly as "separate layers"?

[keen rain]

Im still new so i dont know the lingo but one fbx can have multiple meshes and im wondering if these should be separate fbx's or in the same fbx and toggled from there?

[stray tangle]

that's just considered separate meshes in the same model (fbx)

[keen rain]

so it does not matter?

[stray tangle]

there's a balance here between real-world performance and what the SDK thinks is best for performance

for clothing, I opt for separate meshes that I add to my model in blender

for props, you could do multiple things

since they don't need to deform with the armature, you could just throw them on the model in unity, which would add +1 mesh renderer and +X materials

assuming each prop you're adding is already 1 mesh

alternatively, you could add them to your model in blender, create a bone for each prop, weigh the prop 100% to that bone, and then join the mesh

that way, you can toggle the prop by scaling that bone

good for your performance rating, but causes that geometry to still be rendered

[keen rain]

ok, thanks. even though i have them already in blender im just gonna toggle them off. Also. for cloth. does it behave differently if i just put all cloth parts into one mesh instead of keeping each cloth separate?

[stray tangle]

if you're referring to Unity's cloth system, it has to be a separate mesh. every vertex in the mesh becomes a cloth vertex

would recommend using bones + dynamic bone (or Phys bones when they come out) for better performant cloth

[keen rain]

is there a setting to simulate only a percentage of verteces in a cloth component? i still want my main mesh to be high fidelity however it would add way too many cloth verteces.

[stray tangle]

nope, sorry. has to be a separate mesh

you can just separate that in blender by selecting it and doing P > Selection

[keen rain]

I have experimented with physbones but i cannot use them until they come out and they constantly swing through everything as the bones themselfes are going next to the legs. and for the cloth. i have it in a separate mesh but it is relatively high fidelity and way to many simulated verteces area added so wanted to ask if they could be reduced

[stray tangle]

you can try decimating the cloth mesh to reduce its polycount

[keen rain]

so there is no setting that says simulate only 20% of verteces?

[stray tangle]

no, how would that even work lol\

you'd have parts of the cloth that would just be stuck

[keen rain]

i would say just treat them as one big polygon or something similar. i would like to use physbones but as i said it just swings through. do you know a fix that kinda retains accuracy?

[stray tangle]

did you not add colliders?

[keen rain]

i added some but the bones went around them

[stray tangle]

make the colliders bigger and move them outwards

[wild monolith]

Hey I have an avatar with under 20000 polygons. I should just be able to upload it to oculus vr chat right?

[onyx harness]

You could have a model with 200,000 polygons and upload it to the Quest platform. Could, but shouldn't.

[wild monolith]

Oh?

Interesting..

I thought there was a minimum polygon count

[onyx harness]

no minimum, no maximum. You'll just have a worse performance rating and be a menace to those around you if you push the values up

Quest hides Poor and Very Poor models by default so you can rock 20k you'll just need to request to be shown

[wild monolith]

Ah nice

Thanks man

[willow tiger]

oh yeah, gimme that fallback goodness

[undone moat]

I am surprised you can have an avatar with 8k textures and Still make it of Excellent quality for Quest

[ruby isle]

Yeah there's a lot of ways to get around the performance rankings

[plush kestrel]

Cut the part you want to be affected by cloth

[plush kestrel]

You'd have to select/weight the cloth component (like in the script) very specifically but yes it's possible

[undone moat]

Any tutorials (up-to-date) on bone merging and reducing the number of bones for the purpose of making a fallback avatar?

[keen tundra]

Gotta ask, Has the material Atlases updated to work with blender 3.0 yet? or a different one so I can optimize this thing?

[stray tangle]

if you're talking about the CATS plugin's Atlas feature, you need to be on the dev branch for it to work. even then, it's only compatible with up to blender 3.0.1, NOT 3.1

even then though, there's a better thing you can do

CATS also has a "Bake" section

there are a lot of options, but the gist of it is that it can:

• merge your meshes
• re-pack all UV's
• bake all original textures to the new locations on the packed UV map (including PBR textures like metallic, roughness, etc, something that Atlas doesn't do)
• smart decimation
• Normal bake from the original to the decimated version to preserve detail

think of it as like a "1-click make optimized model" button

although you'll probably want to tweak some of the settings

[keen tundra]

Noted, thank you very much!

[sudden horizon]

How is it possible to have more meshes than skinned meshes?

[buoyant holly]

you attach a rendered object to the to the avatars hierarchy that's not a skinned meshes like say you import a sword model and just directly parent it to like the hand bone to make it move

[sudden horizon]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/stupid-question-of-the-day-whats-the-difference-between-a-skinned-mesh-and-a-non-skinned-mesh.379701/

Oh, incase anyone else has the same question as me this is the answer

Thanks!

I'm helping my buddy with an avatar and I can pretty clearly see it has two skinned mesh renderer components even though the SDK seems to say there is only one. I wonder if there is some quality which allows them to count together as one.

It may just be that the beta SDK is not paying attention very closely since it also won't whine if I swap to a non-mobile shader on Android build target.

OH, that object has EditorOnly tag

[plush kestrel]

Why not just use older blender tho

Heck vrchat isn't even using the most recent version of unity 🤷‍♀️

[heady smelt]

If I use standard lite, will that dramatically improve performance of an avatar instead of using poiyomi when uploading?

[heady smelt]

It should. I imagine Poiyomi's more heavy

[radiant shadow]

if its a old poi without locking , its gonna be considerably heavier then newer

[stray tangle]

Poiyomi is actually lighter than standard in a lot of cases

since the lock in system throws away so much of the unused code

[ruby isle]

This was posted by someone in #shaders a while ago. Poi, as long as it's locked, will have the same impact as Standard

[stray tangle]

Thry's performance analyzer can benchmark your materials compared to standard

[buoyant holly]

retro standard is performing horribly from the looks of it on that chart

and looks like filament would be a performance Improvement compared to standard

[heady smelt]

That is really weird, why is my performance going up with standard lite??

[ruby isle]

Standard Lite gives better performance than Standard

[heady smelt]

Neat, thank you.

[buoyant holly]

not surprised on that as it simplifies some stuff

[ruby isle]

Right and it's built for Quest in mind

[buoyant holly]

yup

out of curiosity how was that graph made so I can like check any other shaders I have for their performance

[ruby isle]

It's using the built in Unity Profiler

[buoyant holly]

cool

[heady smelt]

+-

[robust anchor]

on what materials? certain material settings can change which variant of the shader is used, and different variants can perform differently

[ruby isle]

I assume this is plain defaults for them all. Doing tests for each variant would take a LONG time

[robust anchor]

true, but heuristically you only need to differentiate between a few cases for standard that should all be independent of each other, so you should only need to make one baseline test and then one test per option
transparency type,
specular/metallic texture present,
normal map present,
emissions,
specular highlights,
reflections

[ruby isle]

Poiyomi has over like 40 options

[robust anchor]

I was merely talking about standard here

[ruby isle]

Standard yeah. that's not too difficult

The other shaders though would be a ton of testing

[undone moat]

what mobile shader should I use for a texture that I want to be fully lit at all times? like fullbright in source games

[high kiln]

toon lit

[undone moat]

is it actually lit though? I think I've used it before and didn't like it

[high kiln]

it's the most lit there you can also try matcap

[undone moat]

just tested one avatar I remember being fully Toon Lit, it follows the lightning of the map

[willow tiger]

that's how it works

[topaz hollow]

If you want a texture that seems to emit light you can use Standard Lite with an emission map.

[robust anchor]

I think he just wants an unlit texture. basically the color of the pixel on the screen will be the same as the corrosponding pixel on the texture regardless of lighting

[novel snow]

Standard Lite with an emission map

[undone moat]

Yeah thanks, I basically used an emission map that looks the same as the texture lol.

[novel snow]

Yep

If I want the avatar to glow I just throw the texture in the emission slot and set the color to white

[undone moat]

I planned to have a pop-up screen that was a screenshot of... ScrubHub for some instant comedic effect

but I scrapped that idea

[novel snow]

Gotcha

I usually just use emission for eyes

The only thing to note is your avatar could potentially be too bright for some PC players if the world has bloom on PC

[undone moat]

yeah, emission for eyes and lips

I gave up a bit on optimization because I have problems with CATS decimation. Model looks OK in Blender, but in Unity becomes an abomination

[novel snow]

I always try to optimize my content nowadays

Used to not care but now if it’s very poor I won’t upload it

[undone moat]

Oh I haven't made models, too hard, I just edit existing ones

[old thorn]

Issue with saving atlas to get my 15 materials into 4 or less. When I select similar materials to atlas together, ie face, eyes, body. It stretches the material of one of those selected over nearly the entire model. I have tried rebuilding the model from scratch and cannot seem to make it work.

[old thorn]

Issue may have been resolved by another user. Will know if it works when I get home.

[normal nova]

Yeesh, maybe I shouldn't be using rero

[ruby isle]

Yeah definitely not xD

[normal nova]

Though, I guess it's not unexpected. It adds basically a realtime light (but only to you)

[ruby isle]

How it is only for you? Aren't shaders running locally for everyone

[normal nova]

I should say 'only to your avatar'

[ruby isle]

But shaders are run locally on all machines

[normal nova]

yes, that's not what I meant

[ruby isle]

It still takes up that much performance

[normal nova]

Yep

How many of each material is that profiling with?

[ruby isle]

I assume just one

I didn't do this profiling myself

[normal nova]

ahh

[final osprey]

if your paid avatar creator gave you a non excellant avatar report them and/or ask for the cash back or to optimize it

why? because it is a scam and most of the players won't see your avatar

[tawdry venture]

You just described 90% of paid avatar bases.

Getting Excellent rating is hard if you want to make a good-looking avatar that has anything other than the default emotes. I'd say you shouldn't complain unless it's Poor or Very Poor, if it's at least Medium, it will never be perf-blocked.

[stray tangle]

to add to this, the performance ranking system does not perfectly reflect real-world performance of the avatar. some things that aren't as bad for performance like poly count are rated pretty harshly, while things that actually have a more significant impact like shape keys on high poly meshes and texture resolution aren't even accounted for at all.

hitting "excellent" or even "good" as a matter of fact can be pretty difficult, especially if you're also trying to add any level of functionality to an avatar, such as some clothing options.

saying that every avatar creator that doesn't strive for an "excellent" rating is a scammer is bullshit

[tawdry venture]

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[stray tangle]

@final osprey ^

[solemn owl]

I am working on a fallback for an avatar, for some reason I have these black lines on it in Unity but in Blender it does not look like anything like this.. What is the problem ?

[onyx harness]

check the uv map against the texture

[solemn owl]

I edited the UV mapso there are no black spots like that

[stray tangle]

uhhhh those fingers will not work well at all lol

how are they supposed to bend lol

[onyx harness]

I'd give the texture a bit more padding around the uvs. it's getting a bit close to some of those seems

[stray tangle]

there's nothing to bend

[willow tiger]

CLAWS

Decimate did a number on the poor fallback

lelz

[onyx harness]

If you're buying a model from someone that's not telling you any basic information that you care about such as Poly/Material/Bone counts, total compressed and/or uncompressed size of the Avatar before you purchase it, why are buying it from them?
That's like buying a loot crate and expecting to always get something good.

[willow tiger]

Sometimes you get SS tier results

Sometimes you get 270432/75000 polygons

All in the luck baby

[onyx harness]

mutually exclusive toggles be like

[willow tiger]

That's quite yeeee and a little haw partner

[solemn owl]

I'd say majority of avatar buyers do not know much about these things

The average consumer is not a creator

[willow tiger]

I think that at least demanding poor quality be the minimum is good enough

Meh

[solemn owl]

For Quest I'd agree

[onyx harness]

Oh yeah, for quest if you're not at least medium please work on the model a bit more

I see so many avatars designed for Pc just slapped into quest

[solemn owl]

Poor is fine

[willow tiger]

It'd be nice to have a little more nuance in very poors, like one rank for the reasonably unoptimized avatars

And a "oh lordy Jesus save my frames" rank for the ones where the creator didnt give a shred of a fuck and is completely out of the expectations of being reasonable

[solemn owl]

I agree with that 100%, I'd appreciate a new rank between poor and very poor

[willow tiger]

Some avatars straight up make my 3070 chug just by existing

I wouldn't mind hiding those monstrocities, but keeping the other crap

[solemn owl]

Also, what's the deal with poly count being only good or very poor and nothing in between ?

For PC

[willow tiger]

Idk, all my avis are excellent/good 😎 never noticed

Fallback gang

[onyx harness]

I'm the opposite xD
I am the issue described above

[solemn owl]

My avatars are very poor now usually because of cloth and poly count

Speaking of my latest uploads

[onyx harness]

I get a lot of people hiding me just by default. The difference is if people are lagging I just tell them to hide me straight up

[stray tangle]

make a fallback?

[willow tiger]

My game just worked so much better once i make poor the minimum rank to be shown

But then ye

You dont see 90% of the lobby 😂

[stray tangle]

mine's "Very poor" only because i'm at 90k polys

[willow tiger]

So i went back

[stray tangle]

everything else is poor or under

[solemn owl]

Yeah that's how it is in publics

[stray tangle]

and I have like 10 pieces of clothing lol

[onyx harness]

I know they can be an issue and tend to use the more optimised versions in publics but if we're in a friends or Private I'm not holding back

[willow tiger]

See? Thats one of the "fine" very poors I'd like to have on

Not the guy with 69 materials and 378 hair bones

All of them dynamic

[stray tangle]

sorry, 84k

[onyx harness]

I do need to make a fallback, hopefully using at least the base I use so it's somewhat similar. I only recently got a Medium Quest version working

[distant jetty]

I'm genuinely surprised how many people manage to make very poor avatars on pc

[solemn owl]

I use a Kon as a fallback lol

[onyx harness]

a bit late considering vrchat is mostly Quest but better late than never

[distant jetty]

Like how

[solemn owl]

? Literally everyone I know makes these exept like 5 people

[onyx harness]

It's not hard, just take all the functionality from like 12 models and put it on 1

boom

8 very poor sections

[willow tiger]

Start adding props and features and you very quickly fall in ranks

[solemn owl]

Oh you want your hair to move really nice ? Booom 5000000 collisions bro

[willow tiger]

If you have dedicated avatars for pieces of wardrobe or w/e you can stay on a better rank easier

But those swissknife avatars aint ever staying out of very poor

[onyx harness]

Das' me

:3

[willow tiger]

And then once you fall into very poor you have very little reason to try to optimize

[distant jetty]

I mean I guess, but the ranking limits for "poor" are extremely lax already

[willow tiger]

After all, not like you're gonna fall in ranks

Who cares

[solemn owl]

Kinda true

[onyx harness]

you're not going to go to prison for adding a second jacket and another pair of pants to toggle between

[willow tiger]

There aint a rock bottom auto hidden minimum tier rank to scare people away into optimizing, like quest avis

[onyx harness]

and that leads to 8 tops and 12 bottoms with 6 pairs of shoes

[distant jetty]

I've seen very poor avatars that were literally just an image on a plane without anything else

[solemn owl]

Bounds ? xD

[onyx harness]

nah, you can inflate super easily

[willow tiger]

owo

[distant jetty]

Nah somehow that specific avatar had like 50 material slots lol

[willow tiger]

venezuela be like

[distant jetty]

It's like how the fuck do you even manage to do that

[onyx harness]

lemme find something that'll make people cringe

[solemn owl]

I might make an medium or good avatar that looks like a crasher aesthetically, if people like them and start using them maybe public lobbies will get a bit better. Lmao

[willow tiger]

Lol

Do crashers have a typical look? Edgy?

[onyx harness]

I have an Avatar that is Pc and Quest compatible, uses the same fbx on both but is Excellent on Quest and Very Poor on Pc

[willow tiger]

What

[solemn owl]

Yeah, usually hovering mid-air too, I got the animation

[willow tiger]

Literally how

[onyx harness]

it's Very Poor in every section of the Performance Rating

Inflation

[solemn owl]

What

[willow tiger]

Inflate me da-

[solemn owl]

I thought inflation is only happening IRL with our currencies

[willow tiger]

I knew it all along

Quest avis were responsible for inflation

[onyx harness]

It shows as Very Poor but preforms like an Excellent model. It's all just an illusion

[solemn owl]

So it's not war in Ukraine, Covid, etc, it's actually quest avatars

Nice

[willow tiger]

Lmao i have an avi called "average vr chat avatar" too lmaoo

[onyx harness]

I delete 1 gameObject and this is the result

[stray tangle]

lmfao

[willow tiger]

Its some public avi i downloaded with a billion polys, mats, bones etc

[solemn owl]

Lol what

[willow tiger]

Works horrid

[willow tiger]

Tf

[buoyant holly]

wow that was a very bad object

[onyx harness]

I made this for all the people that would cry about my model being Very Poor when everything is mutually exclusive so it preforms like a Poor model

[willow tiger]

Here, this is my own "average vrchat avatar" one:

😂

[solemn owl]

I can't speak

[onyx harness]

Just to show the the performance rating wasn't the be all end all to the actual performance

[solemn owl]

After seeing that

[onyx harness]

bro, the dynamics must look sick though

[solemn owl]

And also perf rating does not rate shaders

[onyx harness]

I'd love to play with that hair on Phys though

[willow tiger]

It's a free avi, i can give you the link later if you want

Not very impressive but the hair sure is bony

The bone zone

[onyx harness]

Nah I wouldn't use it I'd just play with the hair if someone else was in it xD

[willow tiger]

Oh yeah, the unmentionables

[willow tiger]

😂

[onyx harness]

"1 gameObject"

yeh there's 256 of those

[stray tangle]

what's that hirerarchy addon again

qhirerarchy or something

[onyx harness]

yep

[solemn owl]

What is even going on

[onyx harness]

it's so helpful. Maybe even better purchase than Dynamics

[stray tangle]

oh wow look what's on sale

[onyx harness]

oh sick

[heady smelt]

just wait till the avatar dynamics are on public :3

[stray tangle]

there's a bunch of stuff on sale rn

[onyx harness]

When Phys drops those 30 stand long lair models with 15 bones per chain will triple in density

I promise you that

[heady smelt]

._.

[onyx harness]

once anyone can touch it it'll be smoother than water

[heady smelt]

I just want to make my tail all fluffy and touchable and stuff 😄

[onyx harness]

oh yerah, the normal person thing

I respect it

[heady smelt]

and I think I can still wait for stuff being on public because my avatar still needs longer arms, better looking hands (need some proper paws) and proper looking feet

(although I did spend yesterday and the day before on adding avatar dynamics and it works nicely on the beta 🙂)

[onyx harness]

it's always an improving process. We all can relate to that

[stray tangle]

tempted to buy all these

since they're all on sale

[heady smelt]

Then people here maybe also can relate to the problem of version control etc. 😂 ? Biggest roadblocker for me is that it's not really possible to easily decimate a model while also keeping visems 😅

[stray tangle]

you can

not even hard to do

[heady smelt]

oh how so? 🤔

[buoyant holly]

vrchat cats can do that

[stray tangle]

create a new shape key, do your decimation on it, then apply it to basis

[heady smelt]

That sounds super useful

[stray tangle]

or use CATS's smart decimation

[heady smelt]

Because currently I'm stuck with my decimated head

it doesn't look bad but adding details etc. isn't really that easy anymore

[stray tangle]

you can also use CATS's Bake feature to decimate your model and then bake the normals from the original to the new one automatically

if your model already has a normal map, they will be combined

[heady smelt]

I should probably make more use of cats 🤔

[stray tangle]

definitely should

people only think it's good for mmd models and vroid

[buoyant holly]

definitely a decent way to make a fallback version

[heady smelt]

I think I ran into some problems due to me using Blender 3.1 but not exactly sure anymore 😅

[stray tangle]

but it's just a big toolbox of super useful stuff

3.1 will not work

[heady smelt]

I like my up-to-date blender 😄

[stray tangle]

either use 3.0.1 with the dev version of CATS, or 2.93.8 (LTS) with the release version

staying "up to date" is not the way to go when you need to use addons

you want to use a stable version

[heady smelt]

Hm downgrading a minor version is bearable

will do that then

I just like using the new blender versions because the updates often enough include useful things

i.e. performance improvements for sculpting

my future workflow probably really will be to not start making any visems before every proportion and detail is right 😅

[stray tangle]

shape keys should be the last thing you do

if you want to do any mesh edits when you already have shape keys, you should do those changes on a new shape key, then apply it to basis

[heady smelt]

well at a certain point I wanted to see more improvements to keep my motivation up 😄

[gilded viper]

I'm trying to make my avatar quest compatible, and i've gotten most of the materials changed to quest shaders, but I can't find the ones giving me these errors. Is there a way to search an entire avatar for materials? I've checked all my meshes, and can't find them.

[stray tangle]

click Select

it'll highlight the meshes

[gilded viper]

I did, but it only selected the avatar. I switch to the inspector after that, but nothing pops up

[final osprey]

the perfect avatar should be seen by quest 1 users to be 100% perfect

[willow tiger]

Do quest1 users have a different performance rating?

Well anyways the q1 is underpowered to the point of being silly, I wouldn't particularly care if it didn't work on that version

[final osprey]

but if it can run it, anything can

[willow tiger]

sure, if a nintendo gameboy runs it, anything can

its a matter of being worth the effort

[final osprey]

i have a quest 2 but a i'm sure that a quest 1 will have lower settings

[final osprey]

is there vrchat for nintendo?😂

[vernal sorrel]

I'm trying atlas with matcombiner but when i click "Save Atlas to" it doing weird stuff to the face... never had this before (Blender 2.93)

[coarse vine]

You just saved me so much grief, thank you.

[stray tangle]

👍

[loud delta]

how is silent's crosstone shader 6.8 MB lol

[ruby isle]

Not well optiimized

[loud delta]

what could possibly be in a shader that takes up that much space

[tranquil glen]

unpack all texture to a designated path first

[vernal sorrel]

Yeah i was laying in my bed and I thought oh shoot… that was the reason 😣 Thanks!

[valid knoll]

Hey so I have a model for PC that I want to make a fallback version of. Is there a way in blender (not unity) to disable transparency so that I can more easily see where I need to cut meshes?

[void echo]

quick question is 140,000 polys okay?

[stray tangle]

that's definitely on the higher side, I would try to reduce that a lot if I could

[void echo]

managed to lower it to 104,699 which is a bit better

[ruby isle]

Anything over 70k is pretty horrible IMO. Unless you split your face and body

[tranquil glen]

okay if the target fps is 40fps and below

[nova hornet]

Depends on how much of it is seen at any given time

[willow tiger]

😂

[void echo]

Well I've just met someone with over 500,000 polys, so I suppose it's not bad. They had a full stage system and a flying star destroyer outside.

[heady perch]

Alright so I asked in other chats as well Im not sure where to go here

Uh Im not exactly sure how to combine meshes while keeping textures intact

Mostly because it'll help optimize the avatar who is under 70000 polys

(Just a little over 9000)

And because it'll end up removing seams, making the verts stretch instead of just having seams

[buoyant holly]

then don't remove the edges that contain your seams

[heady perch]

The model is actually split into each separate part, I'm just not sure how to keep those parts together is all

I'm most likely going to keep it the way it is for now, I just need to add the eye movements and I'll be done since the model wasn't made for an fp game 😅

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73REcZVWMhA

[languid wave]

if it’s one mesh, cut that number in half

[heady smelt]

any fix to this

or is this just not quest compatible?

[onyx harness]

Jump back to blender and recalculate normals on the polygons

[languid wave]

what is the performance impact of dynamic bone transforms vs components

[languid wave]

because I managed to get down to 64 transforms but I’m still at 16 components

[calm estuary]

How do I make the insides of my sleeves and skirt visible? (Exported from Blender using CATS)
Tried enabling backface on Poiyomi Settings and also disabling backface culling in Blender

Seems to work in Blender, but not in Unity

[radiant shadow]

Backface culling on material (poi=rendering options) , the other backface option is if you want a different texture on it

[calm estuary]

That was it, thank you so much!

[dusty otter]

hello im trying to use the cats plugin to merge my materials together using the atlas but for some reason my model only stays white and the atlas generated has none of my textures in it

[dusty otter]

i also ment material combiner 😛

[calm estuary]

You haven't selected the textures, check all the checkboxes

[willow tiger]

You gotta, you know, actually select the materials

[dire forum]

not sure how people end up with 100+ Mbit avatars, i got 3 outfits with a 30+Mbit texture, 500k polygon and the final download size is only 7.5 Mbyte

[stray tangle]

because people don't know how to reduce their texture resolutions and use compression lol

a lot of people don't care about optimization in general

really stupid

[dire forum]

i only got 2 atlas materials, 1 for occupent the other for transparent stuff, no special effects or shader something like that, just normal pyomi

[onyx harness]

When people put 100 textures on a model for their 10 different outfits plus particles and don't know how to optimise them, even if the largest are 1k/2k max it stacks up

[runic gorge]

That and people don't know that they put in too much effort, for something that isn't viewable at all even at close distance.

[languid quartz]

I know some people set the texture resolution to 8k in Unity because the atlas is fucked for whatever reason so that's the "only" way they see to fix it from looking low resolution

[willow tiger]

Ya, because they have 4k textures or a billion smaller ones so it ends up with the big ass 8k atlas

Setting max sizes per material to be atlassed? Noooo, i need my 2k eyeballs

My 4k earrings

[upper yacht]

I'm sorry, my 4k big toenail texture is important to my avatar. It's the lynchpin in the entire setup, plz and thank.

[onyx harness]

Considering how close some people keep toes to their viewpoint, this could be a legit argument

[halcyon niche]

whats the current quest polygon limit?

[high kiln]

20k

[halcyon niche]

okay, thank you. i'd read some places it was 10k, and others 20k

[high kiln]

if you ask in terms of max poor perf

yeah its now 20k

[bright scaffold]

Question. Alber and me are currently working on a new base and we somehow ended up with 300+ blend shapes for customization etc.. The majority won't get 3.0 control but are to be adjusted in unity before uploading. Since we can expect a decent bunch of that base being around: How much does the amount of blend shapes impact runtime performance?
(pls @ me in response so i get a notification)

[willow tiger]

i dont think anyone has numbers, if that's what you are asking, it depends on the avatar

but its not exactly performant and 300+ might be a little too much if your avatar is high poly lol

[buoyant holly]

would probably help performance to split the face from the the body has separate meshes so it's not having to do blend shape calculations on the body that's never go to move

[bright scaffold]

Surprisingly we are still talking sub 70k. Most of detail is done by normal maps. This is mostly for stuff like horn shapes, wing shapes and all like that.

If you are making avatars that are gonna be picked up by a few thousand people you really have to balance stuff like ease of use (changing blend shapes is easy- we use spacer blend shapes to make categories in there, making the user put a new set of wings or horns on the hierarchy is hard and a support load we just can't really commit to).

I guess the better question is: What's probably worse
5 extra mesh renderers or that huge amount of blend shapes

[ruby isle]

Blend shapes are worse. They constantly incur CPU performance hits while they're running (not to mention it's still rendering those polygons too). The extra mesh renderers take no hits to CPU or GPU when toggled off.

[loud nexus]

That's actually interesting, so do you recommend separating the head mesh?

[ruby isle]

Absolutely. If you're over the 32k limit for Excellent polys I recommend it 100%

[loud nexus]

Good to know, ill do that from now on.

[buoyant holly]

like even the vrchat documentation recommends it

[ruby isle]

50k is IMO the cutoff where you are hurting performance excessively if you don't split the head

[loud nexus]

I'll have some more reading to do then

[buoyant holly]

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

" except when you're using shapekeys!
There is an exception here! Calculating shape keys can be expensive, especially on avatars with more (>32,000) polygons or when running on lower-spec hardware (Quest). If all your shape keys are on your face, it can be beneficial to split your face mesh from your body mesh, and delete all shape keys from your body mesh. This can be a more advanced technique. Because you have more meshes, it may negatively affect your Avatar Performance Rank, but in reality you'll be slightly more optimized. Remember, the Perf Rank system isn't perfect-- it is just a surface-level recommendation system."

[loud nexus]

This is some cool stuff, surprised I missed this part.

[ruby isle]

It was added maybe like 6 months ago or so

[loud nexus]

I noticed, if I separate the mesh and rename it to "Head" unity then renames my armature head bone to "Head 1"

[ruby isle]

That won't mess anything up, but I recommend naming the mesh "Face"

[loud nexus]

Good idea

[bright scaffold]

thank you

[languid wave]

it's 10k for fallbacks

[hoary peak]

I've got a question about performance: I've got an avatar that has a hat/clothes I can turn off and on, is it better (performance wise) to have this be part of the same skinned mesh as the rest of the model, and use a shapekey to shrink it into the model, or have it be a separate mesh that I turn off. I know that shape keys have a downside in VRchat, that they calculate for every vertex, so even the verticies that aren't "affected" by the shapekey are taking processing power.

also, along that same line of questioning, does separating the face of my model (which uses speech shapekeys) improve performance? I'd heard it does but I never know if it's bs or not.

[buoyant holly]

don't use blendshapes for hat/clothes toggles that's one of the worst methods & and ya separating the face does help because then the blendshape calculations only have to consider the face not the entire Avatar when doing blendshape calculations

[hoary peak]

Ok cool, thats good to know

[buoyant holly]

like bone scaling would probably be a better idea than blendshapes to toggles accessories

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips#-except-when-youre-using-shapekeys

[hoary peak]

gotcha, I'm just gonna do separate meshes, Its what I wanted to do to begin with, I just didn't want to make something inefficient that would lag other ppls computers

[willow tiger]

make a new upload for each clothes set if you dont wanna lag people

you didnt hear that from me

[hoary peak]

I was reading about "crunch compression" reducing texture sizes drastically, but only if the hardware of the computer running vrchat supports dtx (otherwise cost performance as the program uncompresses the textures at runtime). Is there a general consensus on if its the right thing to do? (I have no real idea of what dtx is, or how ubiquitous it is/isnt)

[buoyant holly]

generally I've seen folks go with go with crunch compression on like everything

[proper grail]

To not support compression, you would need a gpu that doesnt support DirectX 10. That means a GPU about 12 years old phew

[buoyant holly]

and a twelve-year-old gpus not going to be running vrchat to well so I wouldn't worry about it

[dusty otter]

Spoke with the creator and had to unpack the materials to the location the program was trying to grab them from and it worked

[willow tiger]

crunch all

people that dont have hardware support for that in 2022 are asking for it lol

[hoary peak]

Thats what I wanted to hear, makes the idea of an atlased 8k texture less intimidating

[willow tiger]

not like that ever stopped the average egirl avatar before

[hoary peak]

hah

[buoyant holly]

I would point out the crunch compression only helps with download time not the size in vram so a 8K texture would still be a bit Overkill

[hoary peak]

yeah, im probably going to scale it down to a 4k, i'm just gonna see what the visual difference is once im testing the avatar

[somber heart]

are physics bones going to be allowed on opti avatars and if so is there any word on how limited they will be? for anyone who doesn't know the current limit is 4 DB components.. since Phys. bones are supposed to be a lot more optimized i wonder if that will open up possibilities for opti avis.

[buoyant holly]

yes you can use physics Bones on Quest avatars

[unreal plover]

Only exception to not use crunch compression is when you only have clean textures (i.e. flat colours or gradients). Then you can get by with a very low resolution texture (64x64/128x128) and let the pixel interpolation do the heavy lifting. It's usually smaller in file size, VRAM, and looks better

[somber heart]

not what I asked at all

[hasty mantle]

Does anyone know how to make the transforms for the new Phys bones get to the limit they set it for quest?

[buoyant holly]

basically merging physics bones in blender

[high kiln]

better word dissolving

[ruby isle]

Crunching those textures actually helps the most. They can crunch to incredibly low filesizes (I'm talking mere kilobytes) and basically don't change in look

[unreal plover]

A 64x64 crunched gradient looks like ass compared to 64x64 compressed texture. No matter how large te texture, crunching will give artifacts

It's more a case of know when to use what

I can whip up an example in a bit

[robust anchor]

crunching tends to mess up the most with regular sharp patterns in my experience [such as a pixel aligned grid of black lines on white background]

[willow tiger]

Yeah i think crunching is overall good, but it really "unsharpens" textures sometimes

[robust anchor]

I think it's mostly because crunching was intended for "realistic" textures, not for simple icons and such

[willow tiger]

Yeah i have some anime textures with hard color/lines changes and you can really tell the crunch in between these

I can get away with high quality on pc, but questers get the cronch lol

[fierce lotus]

no matter what i do to this avatar its always barely above the quest size

[willow tiger]

lower texture resolutions, crunch harder.

no way around it

[fierce lotus]

i lowered them as low as possible and it still won't upload for quest

[willow tiger]

do you have enough 32x32 textures to go over the limit? 😄

what else is weighting your avatar so much

[fierce lotus]

i have no clue

i tried decimating it and it didn't work so idk what to do

[willow tiger]

decimating wouldnt really help you with file sizes

when you mean quest size, do you mean the 10mb size limit or something else?

[fierce lotus]

yes

im trying to bake it now so lets see if that works

[willow tiger]

maybe you have lots of animations or whatever?

[fierce lotus]

all it has is very basic mouth movement i don't get why its so big

[versed saddle]

I have a sick avatar coming, but need to wait for a new trust rank before uploading, just wondered if anyone knows if there is an Avatar checklist they use before uploading into VR chat?

[willow tiger]

like a personal checklist or

there are plenty of rules for making working avatars, if that is what you're asking

[versed saddle]

Yeah a personal checklist

My ava is rigged up and ready to do, just want it to work as soon as my rank status goes up

[hoary peak]

Regarding performance, if I have three 2k textures, is it better to just combine those into one 4k texture, even though I wouldn't be using 25% of the texture space?

[buoyant holly]

personally I'd suggest turning it into one 2k x 4k & a 2k as you would probably want the face separated for blendshape reasons anyway so you might as well use two materials

and your textures can be rectangles that are powers of 2 @hoary peak

[hoary peak]

oh so a 2k x 4k texture works? I always assumed they had to be squares, this is great news

Regarding the face, why "might as well use two materials" is atlasing textures from multiple meshes not helpful?

[buoyant holly]

because if you separate the face it's going to incur another draw call

[hoary peak]

That makes sense, ok

[dusk badge]

how to make toggles for vrchat quest/pc

[balmy scaffold]

thats a question for youtube

[dusk badge]

yeah but i mean i need to do like altas and do toggles

Substance does not show any of the new items i added textures, how do I put them in the texture file to be textured?

[silent jetty]

has anyone ever had an error with material combiner where it makes an atlas with just 3 solid colors

something like this

[fierce lotus]

for some reason my avatar is black

and see through, like a shadow

only on quest tho

[silent jetty]

so its probably a shader thing

might try switching the shader in unity

[nova hornet]

Before atlasing make sure every material is set to Principled BSDF
Fixes most cats weirdness for me

[nova hornet]

I recommend using Matcap Lit or Toon Lit on Quest if it's an anime/toon style avatar

[silent jetty]

ok ill try that

[silent jetty]

none of them are Principled BSDF and changing the material to them removes the texture

[nova hornet]

Ah you've never messed with BSDF okay
You just need to add the texture back
the option for it is near the top of the material options

I'll send a screenshot in a sec of where

[silent jetty]

ok ill mess with that

[nova hornet]

That's where the texture goes with Principled BSDF

[willow tiger]

we're on the atlas boys 😎 lets go

[silent jetty]

im importing from a VRM and all I needed to do is change it to image texture

I still have to do it to all of them then try the atlas

[nova hornet]

Good luck especially if you want it on Quest with all the transparency/cutout VRoid uses

I've done it once but it took me a bit to make it look right

[silent jetty]

ive made plenty of VRoid avatars before but for some reason my plugin decided to stop working even after a full re-install of everything

[nova hornet]

CATS?

[silent jetty]

yup

[nova hornet]

I've heard CATS doesn't play nice with Blender 3+ did you update Blender?

I use 2.93.9

[silent jetty]

ive always used 3.0.0 do you think it would be worth a shot going down to 2.93.9?

[nova hornet]

Maybe? I haven't tried 3 so I don't know what you'd be losing by going down to 2.93.9 LTS

[silent jetty]

ill try that first since itll only take a few minutes

[nova hornet]

👍

[silent jetty]

I just think the weirdest part is it just stopped working all of a sudden on all blender files

[nova hornet]

Maybe CATS updated?

idk

stuff wonky sometimes

so many moving pieces

[silent jetty]

2.93.9 isn't letting me open my 3.0.0 .blends?

[nova hornet]

^

Apparently the ability to load those blend files

Guess you'd have to import just the fbx/vrm if you wanna use 2.93.9

[silent jetty]

ugh

thats gonna be a pain to redo

[silent jetty]

I dont know if this helps but I always seem to get this error as a part of material combiner:

[nova hornet]

Export fbx from new blender import to old one so you have less to redo

[nova hornet]

Hopefully helpful to someone but not me sadly
Best I could do is ignore material combiner and send stuff on baking/atlasing textures manually

[silent jetty]

I honestly might need that

[sly olive]

Does anyone use a model with a cape in Quest? I have a Batman model that's all rigged up and ready to import into Unity but idk what to do with the cape. (I already know cloth physics don't work on Quest)

[nova hornet]

You could animate it using the Velocity paramters in 3.0 to move when you move forward,backward,left,right
blendtreess

[nova hornet]

So this could be used if you've made a new UVMap for a texture/mesh/etc to transfer a texture designed for the old one to the new UVMap
https://app.gumroad.com/d/d00d59785b8ce01b1e7f3c508c565481
I don't think it handles transparency or margins though
they did make a version with margins that I could send if you need

[willow tiger]

Physics bones got released for the quest, like, yesterday

Go make that cape king

[sly olive]

oh fr? Epic

Is there a tutorial anywhere?

[flat rapids]

Uhh, but I am using a shader in the VRChat/Mobile O.o

[proper grail]

All shaders, such as ones in animations or on toggles

[flat rapids]

I swapped all shaders to that one... every single one, and it errored on that one which makes no sense

Weirdly there is an animation with a different shader that it did not error on 🤔

how does that make any sense, it doesnt let me use a vrchat supplied shader on quest versions but does allow another one 😂

[buoyant holly]

not all of the vrchat mobile shaders are usable on avatars as they made that folder before the sdks split up into two sdks

[ruby jewel]

How do I turn on physbones

[flat rapids]

There should really be a distinction between avatar allowed and avatar not allowed...

[fluid marten]

So I think somewhere along the lines my avatar went to the moon and uh.. Yeah.. Might need to get this fixed somehow.

[buoyant holly]

there under "Meshes" there's a checkbox called "Read / Write Enabled" ensure this is checked on for all meshes on your model

[sly olive]

is the triangle count still the same for Quest?

[buoyant holly]

yes they haven't increased the triangle count budget and that's unlikely to change anytime soon

[sly olive]

or did they update it

oh ok

[willow tiger]

the quest didnt get any stronger 😄

[mellow geyser]

could anyone help me with a problem i am having with blender and atlasing the materials?

[willow tiger]

its easier to help if you actually describe the issue

[mellow geyser]

sorry

when i try to atlas the materials they merge and change

the clothes became the shoe texture

[copper plover]

I'm working on my quest/fallback version, and when I get to the Cats Atlas part, it seems to only be atlasing my shirt/shorts and everything else turns white. Checking the atlas it does only have my shirts/shorts... it shows all the materials in the list when I click save atlas. Am I missing something?

[balmy scaffold]

you have to go into the UV editor window and select the vertices of the clothes and move them on top of the clothes, theres a way to do it, i forget

oh the fancy way is to scale it .25 then move it by a quarter of the image like pressing G then x then 512, if the image is 2048

if its in the right side

[mellow geyser]

thank you for trying to help i just started the bkender bit again and it has worked

[crisp monolith]

what is the requirements for an excellent avatar?
up to 75 bones
up to ? polygons
up to ? materials

[stray tangle]

https://docs.vrchat.com/v2022.1.2/docs/avatar-performance-ranking-system

[crisp monolith]

thank you!

[heady smelt]

Hey! Trying to optimize an avi or two so my quest friends can see me lol. Anyone have any easily explained videos or tools to help? I mainly wear pretty demanding dancer like Avis so I don’t even know if those can be compatible. Any help would be sick.

[mossy cargo]

probably not best practice but I just decimate the hell out of everything to get it under quest poly counts. depending on the model though it might not work very well at all. take it into blender and use ctrl+L to select linked verts and seperate out the face or anything else with shapekeys you want to save, decimate the rest, join all the meshes again

[unreal plover]

https://www.uv-packer.com/blender/

^Free UV Packer that isn't Packmaster

[crisp monolith]

How do I convert particles to Quest?
Or some asset I can buy that is for quest and has effects. What I really wanna do is make a gun shoot.

I know it's possible withing it's limits cause I have seen a lot of kids in Quest playing with anime avatars filled with these effects/animations

[keen rain]

how do i make prop toggles with just one mesh? i made some animations in blender that change the scale (0 and 1) and in the unity preview they look functioning but in the animator(emulator) and vrchat itself they do not work. the one that moves the fingers and ive placed in the gesture layer works

[willow tiger]

how did you setup the layer?

[keen rain]

the one that functions has a hand mask. do i need a mask for it to work? when using anims where the mesh gets toggled off and on it works without one

i am new but if i understand correctly shouldnt it if it is the mask just make the whole body tpose instead of doing nothing at all

I know why it did not work now. i still have it in the fx layer and this does not accept transforms. im gonna move it into the action layer

[keen rain]

Action layer also does nothing

I apparently cannot read for a second time

[keen rain]

In gesture layer it also does not work

can someone help?

i really dont want to rely on mesh activation

[willow tiger]

I only know how to setup props as toggles, can't help you with gestures

[keen rain]

yeah, i also know that but when i will join all meshes into one this wont work anymore

(i know how to change them with gestures but cant get the animation to work)

i only want to know how to get toggles when all are one mesh

[willow tiger]

How did you setup the prop

I only ever used one mesh ever

Did you map the prop to a bone in blender?

Then you just animate the bone to turn on/off, but its only a faux off, you scale it to be tiny and hide it somewhere

You cannot "disable" it as a single mesh

[keen rain]

yeah, and then i made a blender animation that sets the scale. it doesnt change ingame but unity recognizes it since it gets shown correctly in preview. just not in the animationcontroller

i thought fx did not work since it does not allow transforms and action since it needs to be specifically treated, so i put it in gestures

[willow tiger]

I use fx

I made the animations straight in unity, just scale the bone and drag it into the main mesh to hide

Make a parameter in the expressions, a menu toggle, add the parameter to fx layer, then just make a new layer that goes from the any state to off / on depending on the parameter

[keen rain]

whenever i make these animations in unity it says that the rig cannot be used for transform animations

i know how to deo everything besides make these animations show up

the controller works correctly but the animation assinged to the state does not get played

[willow tiger]

I mean, if the animations are created right then the fault is in the layer logic

[keen rain]

i use an avatar emulator to see what the controller is doing and its doing everything correctly and it works with the mesh toggle animations so it could only be a problem with the animations but i dont know what since it looks correct in the preview

and since the docs for fx say that it does not allow transforms i put them in gesture layer

nevermind. suddenly the animations in unity are not working. but only scale. the ones with modified rotation are working as intended

@willow tiger i think it is not just scale. the animations of those bones are not transferred. finger animations are translated into animator commands but these extra bones are not. do you know how to get these into unity?

[willow tiger]

From blender?

[keen rain]

yes

[willow tiger]

Sorry i only ever did animations in unity

Never had that issue of yours

[keen rain]

now it suddenly no longer spits the error. idk. my unity is behaving really weird or im incompetent

[unreal plover]

So I was thinking of a better way to do toggles for skinnes meshes with weighted bones: add an extra bone and assign it with a very low weight (e.g. 0.0001) to all vertices you want to toggle. To toggle it off move/translate it to some silly large value (i.e. 3e38) so it'll never get rendered. The only caveat is that you can really only have 1 other bone controlling a vertex since the max skin weights on on low graphics/quest is 2.

[ruby isle]

It would still render it if it's the same mesh, it'd just be offscreen

[unreal plover]

Wouldn't clipping prevent any pixel shading from occuring? The same as modifying vertices in a vertex shader to produce degenerate triangles (NaN values). The costs of still running the vertex shader part is negligible compared to another material/mesh.

[ruby isle]

It would still render the mesh as a whole

If it's the same mesh, as long as that mesh is being rendered (aka the bounding box is still in the camera's view) the entire mesh would be sent to the GPU to render regardless if a piece of it is sent to that silly large value

[unreal plover]

On itself, yes. But it'll be a small extra cost if the mesh is merged with something that should be rendered.

[ruby isle]

If the mesh is separate, just toggling the mesh renderer is the best way. If it's combined, the method you're describing would offer no performance boost

[unreal plover]

It will give a performance boost since you will only be rendering 1 material instead of 2 if they are atlassed together and both are enabled.

[ruby isle]

If they're atlased isn't there only 1 material regardless?

[unreal plover]

Yes, but toggling on a single material requires either a blendshape (more expensive than bones) or a custom shader (not always guaranteed, i.e. quest, trust & safety settings)

[ruby isle]

The proper method to toggle an item on the same material is to weight to 100% to a bone and scale that bone to near 0 so it's not visible

What you described is sort of similar to that but with extra steps

[unreal plover]

Doesn't work with multiple bones affecting the prop, like clothing, unless you add extra bones which is even more tedious

[ruby isle]

For clothing, you're SOL. You have to use blendshapes

Moving a bone really far out would just be the same as scaling a bone to 0

So if the scaling method doesn't work, the movement one won't either

[unreal plover]

Well that's the thing... It does work c:

[ruby isle]

If you truly wanted to toggle clothes properly, why not give it it's own bone hierarchy and use constraints when it's active, and scale to 0 when not active

[ruby isle]

So does scaling then

Also for future reference, if you're toggling clothing it's way better to just make it a separate avatar for each outfit. Avatars shouldn't really have togglable outfits in the first place

Especially since the IK Beta allows calibration saving. There's no excuse to keep making it all in one IMO

[unreal plover]

Already knew that don't worry 😅 Just brainstorming alternative ways for people to get the fancy things without affecting performance too much.

[ruby isle]

I doubt many people would even understand how to do that =P

[heady smelt]

there a specific channel to helping teach others how to make avatars?

[frank falcon]

dont know

[frank falcon]

pnada uploaded a series on it

[heady smelt]

could you send in dms?

[frank falcon]

yea

[heady smelt]

alr ty

[stray tangle]

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk5rOzOFIIX5tjozbU9hWZg I recommend watching all 3 videos here in order to learn about terminology, and how to upload an avatar

[heady smelt]

ty

[unreal plover]

Hair-head colliders without a head collider:
https://twitter.com/NaraWithVR/status/1518955332340531205
https://twitter.com/NaraWithVR/status/1518955335322673153

NaraVR (@NaraWithVR)

You do not need head colliders for #VRChat #PhysBone hair. By rolling the bones in Blender such that the Z-axis points way from the head, you can fake collisions with rotation limits. Less colliders = more frames! 1/2

▶ Play video

Twitter · Apr 26, 2022, 2:09 PM

NaraVR (@NaraWithVR)

If you enable Axes in viewport display in Blender you can easily roll the bones with Ctrl+R. You can then setup rotation limits with curves in Unity. If you use polar you can control yaw as well: the rotation that runs parallel to the "head" (xy-plane of the bone in blender). 2/2

Twitter · Apr 26, 2022, 2:09 PM

[willow tiger]

Wowie

[calm spade]

Excellent

[radiant shadow]

wanna see what happen if someone grab that and its locked to one orientation 🤔

(zero radius on that so not gonna happen)

[buoyant holly]

that'll be very handy for performance in general and the quest users

[versed saddle]

Just wondering if anyone has advice on the best way to prep and avatar for VR chat? Combine into a single mesh etc?

[buoyant holly]

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

[radiant shadow]

Also look up limits, you can easy get medium-good with the changes https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-performance-ranking-system , excellent is abit strict

[tacit sparrow]

in vrchat and blender my poly count very highly differs

[lone tiger]

In SDK above polygon count you should have an autofix.

[tacit sparrow]

this is what i see above it

[high kiln]

you have read/write disabled

[vast depot]

Find the fbx of your avi and make sure read/write enabled

[tacit sparrow]

ah i see

works now

[high kiln]

click on avatar in assets go to Model and enable it

[vast depot]

Beat me to it

[tacit sparrow]

thanks

<3

thank you both so much

[lone tiger]

You should update your SDK if you didn't see this:

This auto fix has been added long time ago to SDK.

[tacit sparrow]

i did see it

new question though

when i fix this (with autofix or poiyomi) my whole build menu goes blank?

example

[high kiln]

did you set rig as humanoid?

[tacit sparrow]

i did but then restarted and forgot to

ty

[tacit sparrow]

new question

this is how it looks

[high kiln]

it probably takes lower neck as upper chest

u need only one neck bone

[tacit sparrow]

so should i just dissolve one? if so which one?

[unreal plover]

Dissolve the top neck into the lower neck (keeping the lower neck)

[tacit sparrow]

is there any new parenting that i need to do?

ok it seems to work!
ty for all the help

[heady seal]

I've never had my avatar show up as anything other than very poor even when it's the only mesh and texture

it's the rexouium

oh I had hair on it too which had like 200 polygons max idk

oh I have a monocle I created in blender with very little polygons but each seperate shape has its own mesh and material. should I be worried about that?

the texture is a flat one so I don't really think so

[stray tangle]

bro, material slots are one of the worst things for performance

your monocle should have a maximum of 2 materials; one for the glass (transparency), and one for everything else

[heady seal]

ok I'll alter that in blender

what if the texture is default resolution

I don't really understand compression that much

[stray tangle]

you should always enable Crunch compression, since it tremendously reduces the file size of the texture at a minimal quality hit

textures get decompressed when put into VRAM though, so compression doesn't help with that

for that, you want to reduce the resolution of the texture as much as possible

for a monocle, 1k should be the max you need

[ruby isle]

Not exactly anymore after that Graphics Jobs update ages ago

[stray tangle]

do you have a link?

[ruby isle]

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/vrchat-202111#client-changes-and-fixes

Graphics backend optimizations that may help improve performance. Testing showed an improvement in frame times of 20-30%, depending on your system's setup. If you are CPU-bound (and have GPU room to spare), you are likely to see the most benefits. If you are not CPU-bound but are instead GPU-bound, it is unlikely you'll see much improvement.

While I can't say for sure, this update most likely enabled the "Graphics Jobs" option in Unity which allows Draw Calls to be threaded a bit better

IMO, the biggest hit to performance now is from blendshape-driven Polygons (draw calls do still matter though a lot)

[stray tangle]

if they meant what I think they meant by "but each seperate shape has its own mesh and material", every chain link + frame + glass all have different materials and are separate meshes

so, many drawcalls

[ruby isle]

Yeah that can be combined so much better

I have a monocle on my avatar that is actually atlas'd with all my other toggles

And it's like 400 polys

[sly olive]

is there a cape tutorial for Quest?

[tender tree]

Any good crash course tutorials for optimization you guys could recommend?

Trying to ascend from the very poor trusted user

[buoyant holly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MkgXcidxg4

[loud delta]

Is there a difference between putting something in the armature and using parent constraint?

[buoyant holly]

well you can't use constraints on Quest

[loud delta]

Other than that? I find it easier to keep things out of the armature for organizational reasons

[buoyant holly]

not quite sure as I haven't really played with constraints much

[robust anchor]

the difference is performance

constraints have to manually update position every frame. regular parenting does not

the reason for why is that a childs position, rotation and scale are stored relative to the parent, so any movement or scaling of the parent does not need to change any data of the child.
a constraint cannot use that, so it has to update the position rotation and scale every frame.
it's almost negligible though

[ruby isle]

(Pretty much what M127 said)
Constraints do take up a small performance hit, although it is quite small (unless you're using hundreds). Regular parenting doesn't take any performance hit at all so it's generally the better option if you can

[loud delta]

Thanks for the responses @robust anchor @ruby isle ! It sounds like it’s not too bad to keep things I share between different avatars at the root level for convenience.

[ruby isle]

It's not too bad unless you're using hundreds, but I still do suggest considering to make them parented if you want the most performance out of your avatar

[robust anchor]

constraints have one benefit parenting does not though: you can switch between "parents" and even do so gradually

[ruby isle]

Before a recent update I would have urged you to not use contraints however an update fixed up the constraint performance to hit much less

[robust anchor]

I'd say a constraint is about as performance intensive as an animation that updates the position, scale and rotation of an object each frame

[heady seal]

quest users can cry more I guess

each gray box is a clothing toggle

pc users

I've just made a crasher I believe

imagine this uploads

there's no way

for demostration purposes only I guess. I have to show off the assets I have and gawdamn I have a lot

[tawdry drift]

why show something that tells people how to make crashers?

should delete imo

[heady seal]

it's not a crasher I was joking @tawdry drift

It would definitely be a lot more laggy if it behaved how I expected it to but it doesn't so that's good

for some reason I expected it to behave like how a quantum computer would handle ints

but obviously vrchat doesn't run on quantum computers lmao

(aka int values being multiple different numbers at the same time)

[swift copper]

anyone know how to remove a light prefab from an avatar fbx jeez

[ruby isle]

In the FBX settings uncheck "Import Lights"

[swift copper]

in unity correct? under the inspector i can't find the component to uncheck that.

[ruby isle]

Yep. When you click the FBX file itself

It's not a component it's in the FBX import settings

[swift copper]

jesus christ thank you so much lmao i was clicking on the avatar in unity then inspector instead of under the project files on the left haha.

im just learning trying to optimize an old avatar for my friend so she can use it on quest but the 24 materials were a big problem already turned them into a single atlas and now time to lower a 21k poly count to 10k somehow already at 17k with some moderate decimation.

[ruby isle]

Also take into account if your atlas is huge like 4 or 8k it's still going to demolish a quest

[swift copper]

ill check on that right now i believe it was 1440p

ok definitely 8k

[ruby isle]

Yeah definitely do not use 8k

2k should be the max you put for quest

Anything higher will detonate the VRAM

[buoyant holly]

honestly I even wouldn't recommend 8K on PC

[swift copper]

using 1k and it seems detailed enough, unfortunately in fixing the avatar on blender using CATS i replaced the original avatar/atlas but now the humanoid rig has no matching bones.

at least performance is rated good 👍

[modern star]

So im trying carefully to make a more optimized version of my own avatar. One thing that has been a little bit of a thing for me is how to handle hair so that I could maybe have a physbone or two in it to keep it looking allright. To take the highlighted chain of bones as an example, is it a decent alternative to merge weights on these so that its 2 bones rather than the current 7? Or do some of the more experienced ones here have a better trick for this?

[stray tangle]

I think 2 is not enough, but maybe something like 4 would be better

[gleaming glacier]

Not sure if someone can help me, but i get these 2 errors when trying to convert my model into a vrm model.

how could i fix it?

[unreal plover]

If you're not bone limited you can throw rotation constraints at the problem, see my unity tools in pins

But if you want to do it properly, merge both adjecents hair strands and child bones

Or just weight paint it from scratch

[modern star]

Thank you ❤️

[swift copper]

after importing my avatar from blender to optimize it a bit for quest i realized my bones do not match the model at all which leads to some nightmare fuel in game

any clue why

[balmy scaffold]

if its scaled at all in blender before u exported it

[swift copper]

thats probably why

[worn vault]

I think physbones dramatically affect the avatar size

[unreal plover]

No, I can get my avatar under 4MB just fine

[balmy scaffold]

Check your very poor rating on everything else

[daring badger]

the issue is absolutely the fact that your avatar has 36 material slots and 97k polygons on quest and not physbones

[willow tiger]

Lol dude has 36 materials and thinks phys bones are the issue

[stray tangle]

lmfao

can we get hard material limits for quest

[willow tiger]

Petition to delete very poor avatars

Lets see who doesn't optimize then

[swift copper]

you definitely need an material atlas then make sure it uses mobile version shaders like toonlit etc.

mine was poor with 23 turned it into one

and voila worked perfect on pc

LOL! 97k poly wtf im over here struggling with trying to get a 19k to 10k

[worn vault]

material atlas? idk why but blender refuses to let me combine the materials

some materials are on the same body parts which i don’t get

[swift copper]

do you have the mat combiner on the cats plugin?

[worn vault]

ohh its a plugin

[swift copper]

if so generate the material list then click save on a folder on your desktop then export your fbx file to your assets -> avatarname folder of your project then it should show up with no shaders on your unity project then just drag that atlas from the folder on your desktop into the project within unity and voila

[worn vault]

well that explains a lot lol

[swift copper]

yeah look up cats then matcombiner those work in tandem

[worn vault]

i’ll give it a try

[swift copper]

the fix option might help too but no guarantees

anyone know how to separate their avatar by materials in blender when only using an atlas it just selects the whole model since its One thing. i am trying to decimate the shoes and other parts a bit as well as dissolve some edge loops.

[quaint venture]

Before you atlas it, you can give each thing a vertex group and then you can select a vertex group. Also you can have multiple materials looking at the same image, and then use Cat's combine same materials whenever you're going to export the fbx

Unrelated to his question,

Does a shapekey that isn't active have any performance effects?

[swift copper]

yeah the problem is i atlas'd it a while ago unfortunately

didn't think i'd have to optimize the polys

guess ill just have to decimate the full body at once lol lame gonna lose some details

[ruby isle]

No if it's not active it doesn't have any performance impact other than increasing the overall filesize

[quaint venture]

Could just select the parts you want to decimate and hit p to seperate by selection

[quaint venture]

thank

[gaunt wadi]

So

Question

I tried Atlasing my vroid textures in blender but somehow it turned all the textures white for some odd reason

It did transform my 24 materials into one but its pointless because not a single texture popped up

Any help?

So far I created two avatars in the past with vroid and didn't have an issue until now

This avatar was made rom the beta version and not the current version

[swift copper]

i saw an article that might help im learning too tho

lemme see if i can find it

https://ask.vrchat.com/t/vrc-avatar-gray-in-blender/8787/2

@gaunt wadi see if that helps maybe

[gaunt wadi]

Sure

If I can

Click on this damn link

[swift copper]

lmao idk whats wrong with it

[gaunt wadi]

Il just search it up

[swift copper]

weird how it doesnt work

yeah just copy and paste lmao but its a similar issue i had cept it was gray

not white

[gaunt wadi]

Mine is complete white

Expect

[swift copper]

i had that issue in unity but it was due to the fact there was lights all around my avatar

[gaunt wadi]

The face

It looks weird but

[swift copper]

which i just did not import the lights

and it was back to normal

as for blender idk

[gaunt wadi]

Hopefully the article helps

[swift copper]

gl

[gaunt wadi]

Not having any luck

Im pretty much doing vroid->blender->unity

[ruby isle]

There are plenty of videos on how to do this

[gaunt wadi]

Seriously?

[ruby isle]

Google is a powerful tool

[gaunt wadi]

I did google

I didn't get alot

*results

[ruby isle]

Literally 4 immediate results

Sounds like you need to google better

[gaunt wadi]

Literally the first creator of the video

Said there's a bug

That she's searching

Look into those videos better

I checked the comments

[ruby isle]

?

If the video wasn't successful why would it be uploaded

[gaunt wadi]

Give me a sec

Someone in the comments had the exact same problem

And she said she tried to replicate it

[ruby isle]

What's the actual problem

[gaunt wadi]

Most of the videos didn't have an issue during the atlas part

Im having an issue with it

[ruby isle]

Well first, you don't have to atlas, but it is entirely recommended. Use CATS though to atlas. It works pretty well

[gaunt wadi]

I did use cats and I know I dont have to but really I have 25 materials :(

[ruby isle]

So what's the issue with Cats

[gaunt wadi]

Plus im adding some dynamic bones

[ruby isle]

Dynamic bones have nothing to do with atlasing

[gaunt wadi]

I have no idea its normal until the I picked the optimization tab

Yes but I'm trying to optimize alittle with my avatar

[ruby isle]

So what happens in the optimization tab

[gaunt wadi]

I selected all the materials and then clicked save atleas

[swift copper]

im paying attention to this as im trying to add some phys bones as well

[gaunt wadi]

Turned white

My whole avatar

[swift copper]

on blender? itself

[gaunt wadi]

Yes all happening in blender

[ruby isle]

You need to export the images. Usually when you import VRoids the images are baked into the file

Cats can't use the ones in the file so you need to export them

[gaunt wadi]

Where do I export the textures

[ruby isle]

The importer has an option, or you need to go to each material and export them there. Not sure how to do that in new blender as I use an older version

[gaunt wadi]

I see👍

[swift copper]

so quick question do i need to add spring bones to my avatar on unity before i add physbones? my hairs just not even animating at all.

[worn vault]

I used cats plugin to decompress an avatar’s polygons to 10000, and vrchat tells me this bs.

[ruby isle]

No, you can just add phys bones from the start

Spring Bones are only for VRM models. VRChat cannot use them at all

[gaunt wadi]

Holy shit

Those polygons

[swift copper]

lol

[ruby isle]

Click on the FBX in Unity and in the Import settings check the "Allow Read/Write" option

[swift copper]

that fixes itself on mine when i click fix the auto fix for mip maps

[worn vault]

oh that fixed it lmao

[swift copper]

then im missing a crucial basic step since the hair is completely frozen yet the parent bone "head" isn't immobile in force values.

[ruby isle]

Can you show the settings for it?

[swift copper]

yeah sorry i was right on it

i have it set to ignore eyes etc

[ruby isle]

And your hair doesn't move when you move the avatar in play mode?

[swift copper]

ill try again i did change something

hmm im not even loading them anymore unity crashes if click play

i think i don't have a camera in game view setup

this is a model i have been optimizing for a good week as a beginner and so far i got it to be good rating for quest which was a mission so im sure something very basic is missing which isn't giving the hair bones physics at all

[gaunt wadi]

Okay so I'm saying screw it and im not texture atlasing

But now I need to know why I can't extract textures

[swift copper]

gotta love these programs when you aren't a master at them

[gaunt wadi]

Im just gonna apologize for my shit optimized avatar

[swift copper]

lmao

we bit off more than we can chew

at least you aint homeboy from earlier with 90k polygons

[gaunt wadi]

Goodluck to that guy

Man had 38828202848 polygons

[swift copper]

LMAO

thats just a bug lol

[gaunt wadi]

Is it

[swift copper]

yeah for me i get the max amount possible

then i click auto fix

and its back to normal

its just the poly count is undefined to it

[gaunt wadi]

I c

[swift copper]

im over here dying to understand why my physbones won't work

and when i try to go into play mode my unity crashes

[gaunt wadi]

I have a long road with my avatar

First textures

Then edit the dynamic bones to attach to certain parts with my body

[swift copper]

you can cut your poly's down a bit

[gaunt wadi]

And finally physbones

[swift copper]

i wonder if thats why mines don't work

i can walk fine in game just the hair doesn't flow at all

[gaunt wadi]

[swift copper]

good times

[gaunt wadi]

Im a goddamm idiot

I wondered why my textures wont extract in unity

I realized I forgot to copy in path mode the whole time

Wasted 30 minutes on that

And my whole afternoon trying to work with atlasing

[stray tangle]

never do that please

you will blow up the file size of the avatar for no reason

you should always import your textures separately, assign them to materials, and put those on the model

[gaunt wadi]

yea i guess i wasn't patient with this avatar and decided to not look back at the mistakes I made

[quaint venture]

If your layout is root bone with one bone chains you need to add a leaf bone to the chains

[worn vault]

its about time I figured things out converting this pc avatar to quest compatibility , clearly if i can do it then anyone can

they just don’t want to lol who cares if the quality is a bit worse, you wouldn’t buy a quest if you’re into realism

[heady smelt]

I'm trying to optimize my avatar for quest, But when i try to make a material list it looks like this

[high kiln]

try file - external data - and unpack resources

also it is after import or after atlasing?

[swift copper]

took a two day break off it i was stressed i have all my bones layed out like so

is the leaf bone at the ends? i know ill have to do it in blender ofc

[quaint venture]

where is the phys bone script?

[swift copper]

sec

under head

[quaint venture]

then you should be fine as far as leaf bones

[swift copper]

yeah thats what im trying to figure out since i can't even simulate it in playmode as unity crashes

or it just does not play at all

[quaint venture]

does it say anything in the console?

[swift copper]

i believe this is what it was said let me find the quote

[swift copper]

.

not much else

i have to add a camera again as well

[quaint venture]

might be worth making a new project and putting everything back in

[swift copper]

o boy haha i was really trying to avoid that

im still fairly new so i gotta recall all the cube shaders and stuff i added

[quaint venture]

could paste the shaders from the old project folder to the new

[swift copper]

same issue but on console now i receive "there are two audio listeners in the scene please ensure there is only one"

i removed the audio listener and the error stopped but still no results im definitely skipping something crucial

[quaint venture]

it crashes whenever you click play?

[swift copper]

not anymore its just frozen though

unticking an audio listener off the main camera solved the issue

i assume because i did not export the camera from blender and had to add a new one i had two

but still the issue is the simulation is frozen

at least unity isnt

[quaint venture]

when you explort out of blender set your settings like thsi

you don't want the blender camera

[swift copper]

ok good i believe i did this

[swift copper]

ahh i see

[swift copper]

seems the same as far as i can see

[quaint venture]

I'm not really sure

[swift copper]

very strange

[swift copper]

yep just no way to interact with the avatar model in the game view

[quaint venture]

...game view?

[swift copper]

sorry

when i press play

[quaint venture]

you've been in the wrong tab my guy

[swift copper]

at this point im open to me having made even the most basic mistake

[quaint venture]

You need to be in the scene tab

If you don't have the tab, here's how you add it:

[swift copper]

i have had it sorry

but still i can try it again and see

lol...

so i had it paused

LMAO

[quaint venture]

bruh lmao

[swift copper]

paused and unpaused looks the same shade on my monitor i guess

[quaint venture]

I'd crap on you but when I first started I did dumb stuff like that too

[swift copper]

hey man i barely slept all week lmfao

learning all the other stuff i got like 40 chrome tabs open

i never thought id have more than 8 lolol

thank you so much regardless haha i told you

crucial first step

[quaint venture]

np lol

[swift copper]

at least i fixed the crashing issue

[swift copper]

i guess one last thing before i finally test it live is

seems like a false alarm i didn't see any creators in other guides have this problem with similar amount of bones

[random mountain]

When I atlas my hair it shows holes in it and tips on how to fix that?

[swift copper]

lol damn your hair has several materials within it? thats crazy

lucky me i only had one

[random mountain]

yeah

it has like 8

[swift copper]

mine had 23 but for the whole avatar eg one per body part or clothing accessory i can't imagine 8 for a single part i wish you luck.

[random mountain]

I still never have mastered atlasing I do it and hope for the best mostly

[swift copper]

have you tried atlasing the whole avatar at once?

and seeing if you get a diff result

[random mountain]

I want it seperate

[swift copper]

im somewhat new too but that works perfect for me

yeah i can see that

[random mountain]

so I can edit individual material colors

hair cloths

that sort of thing

[swift copper]

i do recall someone warning about atlasing with white gaps in between the png's themselves

but i doubt thats the issue here

[random mountain]

I guess ill try in the plugin discord too

[random mountain]

I fixed it

The view mode matched up to shading view when I atlased and I guess the hair was clipping through the head in that view