avatar-optimization

[stiff mauve]

Hi, I have a problem. I don't know the unity entities. including camera position

[radiant shadow]

enable your gizmo's if you are trying to find the viewball

[stiff mauve]

Oh thanks

[heady smelt]

Anyone able to optimize a 2-D Gorillaz Avatar for quest?

[light lion]

the standard thing won’t go away

[ivory sluice]

Do you have any unassigned material on your model?

Select the meshes one by one and on the inspector there should appear the material list, make sure all of these are not legacy and have a vtchat/mobile shader

Ah cool then

[urban storm]

does this work on all standard shaders? was just about to ask about how to remove or change it

[ivory sluice]

if the materials that give this error are not assigned to the mesh and are on the list's end, you can remove them by lowering the number on slots that appears above the list
tho the correct way to remove them would be importing the model on blender and on the materials settings click the arrow next to the list and click "remove unused slots"

[urban storm]

okay i'll try figure that out, thanks

[gray glacier]

is it possible to texture paint an object onto another to decrease polygon count? (For example: Having fishnets on the skin texture instead of its own mesh)

[ivory sluice]

yes

[ivory sluice]

ye but in the fishnet case i recommend another method to keep the base

first take the low poly mesh and put it over the high poly mesh
the low poly mesh should be uv mapped btw
on the material of the high poly mesh set the shader output as a white emission shader
then on the material on the low poly mesh put a image texture node, do not connect it anywhere
click on "new" on the node and create an image

make sure your render engine is cycles, not eevee
now select first the high poly mesh, while holding shift also select the low poly one
on render settings go to color management and change it from filmic to standard
then go to bake, set the margin to 0 pixels, make sure the output is image texture
also check "selected to active"
change the bake type to emit
also you don't need a lot of samples so you can just set the samples from the dafult 4096 to 64 or 128
then you click on bake, it should bake the image you created as a black and white texture

if you did that on the body mesh you can just use the texture as a decal mask or some overlay (ig poiyomi has it)
if you did it on a separate object you can go to the unity texture import settings (or the inspector better said) and set the alpha as the image's grayscale and then put it on a transparent material as the main texture, then with the material color you put it to whatever you want
or just using the texture as an alpha mask

tho it can be better done by making a separate low poly mesh, unwrapping the uvs on an ordered way, then just putting in a material with a transparent fishnet texture, you tile it and done

i think i need images to explain this fck

[sage latch]

So ive recently made and uploaded my avatar into VR chat from Vroid, and for some reason my Avatar moves its eyes even when im not moving. What do about dis?

[willow tiger]

...?

He looks at stuff?

Next you'll tell me he blinks as well 😄

Explain the issue a bit more

[sage latch]

basically i want my Avatar to not move his eyes around so much (?)

like uhhh how some avatars, if you look in the mirror and move your head the eyes will be looking where the camera is looking (which is the mirror )

[willow tiger]

go to your descriptor and make him more confident, the poor thing

[sage latch]

is that Unity Editor?

[willow tiger]

yes

[sage latch]

cool. Wheres that function in? Kinda lost :3

[willow tiger]

click your avatar in the scene

then check the inspector

[sage latch]

okie :p

so im gonna have to reimport?

[willow tiger]

Yes

Calm excited makes the eye dart around more often

Shy confident is how long he "holds" eye contact on something

[tawny escarp]

so quick question: how do i get material combiner back on cats if the download link is dead on blender

[lament garden]

is there an updated optimization chart for phys bones?

PC btw

[ruby isle]

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

[lament garden]

Thanks Slvr!

[wise dune]

what do you mean ? which version of blender/cats

If its just a link not working, afaik this is the repo for it and it should still work ,https://github.com/Grim-es/material-combiner-addon

[unborn glacier]

Some here that is good at using unity im new to it and need help@:>

[heady smelt]

the model i'm planning on using has 34k triangles, am i good to use it or will optimization need to be done?

[buoyant holly]

depends are you uploading a PC or a quest Avatar

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

[calm spade]

People will be able to help if you ask specific questions !

[gentle crown]

My textures aren't showing up, can someone tell me what i did wrong?

[stray tangle]

@gentle crown check your materials

they most likely are not using the correct shader

[gentle crown]

how do i do that?

Im new to unity so thats why im asking questions

[willow tiger]

unless he dropped textures/materials inside the vrsdk or scenes folder he probably straight up is missing them lol

[heady smelt]

ngl i fixed the above by straight up using the correct blender version because any version after 2.92 or before(i think) doesnt copy the textures over when you bring the model to unity. I made sure to change path mode to copy and that the icon was lit up blue. also another thing if that doesnt work try using cats to both import and export your model. Ngl that saved me the trouble of having to assign every texture manually as well as not dealing with a purple colored humanoid blob. after you do that extract your materials and texture to their own folder in your assets folder. i.e. when you click materials extract textures put them in their own folder named textures or whatever you want right... then extract your materials just below extract textures and do the same but this time it's a material folder and boom it should work

[dry yew]

Is the CATS atlas tool just unusable when it comes to models that originate from vroid? Here's my experience:

Doesn't ask for a save file location, just assigns the ear texture to the whole avatar....

[heady smelt]

it's gonna be PC, not the quest version, I don't really wanna put in the effort when I highly doubt anyone who'd want the avatar is playing natively on quest anyway

looks like it'll be okay

[heady smelt]

It should be compatible considering I made my model in vroid got it over to vr chat no problem once I used the correct version of blender. Honestly I don't have an answer because I didn't encounter this when making my model. (In pfp so yeah I didn't encounter that with the ears)

[rose yarrow]

a

[ebon estuary]

are there any custom mobile shaders that could support cutout transparency? I have a model around 252 tris that I want to use as a fallback avatar but it uses cutout transparency

damn thats annoying

[gentle crown]

Thanks for the tips! I'll let you know if it worked once I have energy to finish

[gentle crown]

I just realized I have blender 2.93. Do i have to delete it and redownload 2.92 or can i try finding a fix?

[stray tangle]

2.93 is fine

[heady smelt]

I didn't use anything but 2.92 but even then I didn't have to delete my previous installation of blender it just added it in a separate folder in the blender install folder

I honestly don't know. As before I was using the latest version then switched to the recommended 2.92

[gentle crown]

alr

[gentle crown]

I'll find a YT vid on how to fix the issue

[stuck torrent]

i tried to use that baking thing in the CATS blender plugin but i get this error, what do i do?

[dire pike]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbX1lewQQWc Avatar Optimization Blender tutorial: Merging textures/materials/Meshes

@boreal glade @uncut plaza I made a tutorial on reducing meshes/material slots. Up next: Poly count

[gentle crown]

so, i sorta fixed my issue with the textures being pink. but now my avatar does not have any textures at all. anyone know what i need to do?

[uncut plaza]

@dire pike you are a legend

[uncut plaza]

Did you apply the right shaders that are used for the character?

[dire pike]

LMK if it helped at all, i can probably lower the music and add text to the video to make it more clear >.< I felt the music was too catchy and distracting

[uncut plaza]

ill prob watch it a million times anyways XD

[dire pike]

whatever works! ^^

[novel snow]

I know neither has an impact on performance in the documentations

But which is better for toggling things on the face: shape keys or bones?

I feel like the answer would be bones

[daring summit]

Bones

[dusty falcon]

okay so- I want to make an Avatar that can change clothes- but the way I'm setting it up the shirt will change with blendshapes and such, but I also want the COLOR/DESIGN of the shirt to change, so-

What would be more optimized?

a single material/texture on a seperate mesh that has an animation that just shifts the offset of the uvs to change design
(the seperate mesh is so that it doesn't also shift the UVs of the other materials)

OR

a single mesh where the animation just changes the material to another material for a single texture of each design?

[calm spade]

Don't use blendshapes for clothing, using bones and scale them instead. Blendshapes continuously active on high poly meshes are not performant at all to begin with
As for your second question, UV shifting is a lot better

[gentle crown]

most likely i didn't and idk how to apply the shaders

[wheat lava]

locate ur materials and apply a shader to them

[gentle crown]

how do i locate and what shader do i apply?

[wheat lava]

u could try default shader just to see if it shows up on the material, but most likely it is using poiyomi shader i would imagine so u would have to import that

ur materials are usually located in a folder under assets

[gentle crown]

alr

[wheat lava]

u can also click a few times on ur avi until u see materials on the right

[gentle crown]

I'll do that and lyk if it works

[wheat lava]

👍

[stone portal]

Anyone know a good tutorial out there that teaches you how to merge material slots and meshes

[wheat lava]

blender + CATS plugin can do that, should be tutorials on youtube for that aswell

[gentle crown]

Which one

[wheat lava]

click ur avatar twice, like on the clothing example the n in the right u should see the corresponding material u selected

it should be under packages i assume for u

it all depends on where ur avatar stuff is at in ur asset folder

u wanna find something like this

but where they all are pink, then change shader

[wheat lava]

are u quest ?

[gentle crown]

yeah

[wheat lava]

so u wanna use

matcap lit, toon lit, or standard lite

then they should show, if not then its probably because the textures arent set on the materials

[gentle crown]

do i apply that for all of the circles?

[wheat lava]

circles ?

materials u mean ? yes

[gentle crown]

yeah this

[wheat lava]

u want all ur materials to be quest compatable so they must be either standard lite, matcap lit, or toon lit preferrebly

[gentle crown]

alr

[wheat lava]

i personally prefer matcap lit

[gentle crown]

alr

[wheat lava]

standard lite to some things depends but ye

im a index / pc user so my quest variant isnt my biggest concern ofc

[gentle crown]

is that supposed to happen?

[wheat lava]

most likely the texture arent set

press that arrow

on the material

[gentle crown]

how do i set the texture?

[wheat lava]

then something similar to this should show

yeah '' none ( texture ) ''

u need to set texture in that

u press select, locate the correct texture to the correct material and it should show for u

[wheat lava]

most likely ur texture is named similar to this

so u could example type ''body'' in the search bar

[gentle crown]

alr

this is what came up

[wheat lava]

i cant tell wheter that is the correct texture or not, also i do not know the avatar nor the creator or how it is all setup etc or if anything is missing :p

so ..

what u can do now isi that, u selected that texture

now look at ur avatar body and see if it shows up

[gentle crown]

I made the avatar

[wheat lava]

did u made textures to it tho

or is this a vroid ?

neitherways i dont know where ur textures are or not or if u even have textures for ur materials / made textures for them, but atleast now u know how to 'fix' it

[gentle crown]

It was made in VRoid

[wheat lava]

so it should come with the textures, not sure where they gone

[gentle crown]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DRQWIdEeTo&list=PLqz7AVctqIE7fajuhW1kPCKiI-SL3uRrx&index=9

This was the tutorial i followed

now maybe i might've skipped a step but idk what i did wrong

The video was made in Late January 2022 so it's somewhat recent

[wheat lava]

might be the blender process that went wrong, most likely the combining materials / atlas

[gentle crown]

yeah

[wheat lava]

neitherways so what u could do is make a replicate of it, then export it from CATS dont do anything to it as long as it has the materials / textures shown

then import that fbx into ur project, and take the textures from that

to use

[gentle crown]

so wait. go back to the file in blender with the textures, and then export from CATS?

[wheat lava]

so basicly take ur Vroid file, open blender, import with cats, make sure i t shows up with texture / materials, then export it as fbx

[gentle crown]

so in unity do i make a new project?

[wheat lava]

u can use same project and just have a replicate of it under asset as long as u dont put it into ur hierechy

once u locate textures of that, u could right click to open in explorer, so it shows in a folder, copy paste the textures to ur desktop or some like that, then u can if u like but its not rly needed, delete the import again and then just drag in the textures from ur desktop to ur project

[gentle crown]

I found the textures

[wheat lava]

those are materials not textures

[gentle crown]

oh

[gentle crown]

can i import the avatar from my files or will the textures not go with it

This is what i have atm

[wheat lava]

i am not sure what u done now, it seems u started a new project even i said it wasnt needed

as said earlier

[gentle crown]

oh

I didn't wanna screw things up with the textures

[wheat lava]

vroid -> blender -> cats export ->

they wont screw up even if u have 10 of the same avi in the same project

[gentle crown]

yeah i did that

[wheat lava]

most importantly u just want the textures anyways which means u can delete those 10 avi's afterwards or keep 1 ofcourse

[gentle crown]

im at the point in unity where i need to import it

[wheat lava]

so u have ur .fbx that u exported from blender where u made sure it was showing with textures correctly

u drag that into ur asset folder

[gentle crown]

yeah

correct?

[wheat lava]

thats a blend

not a fbx

u wanna select fbx when u export

i mean it should be exporting as fbx

when u click on CATS export

[gentle crown]

wait

send the thing agaim

again*

[wheat lava]

it was not the right pic tho it was for import not export

but u wanna hit this button

[gentle crown]

ok'

i did

[wheat lava]

so it saved as .fbx then ?

[wheat lava]

just press continue

wait tho

can u show me the avi in blender

so i can make sure it has the textures

[wheat lava]

click one to the right

this one

[gentle crown]

i did

[wheat lava]

then show me

[wheat lava]

no i mean the avi lol

[gentle crown]

how do i show that

[wheat lava]

send me this again

but with that option

[gentle crown]

Im completely lost

[wheat lava]

send me a screenshot of ur avatar again

but with that option

look at the screenshot ^ u sent before

its on the wrong one

[wheat lava]

alright so this is how it is supposed to look right ?

[gentle crown]

yes

do i export it now?

[wheat lava]

yes export as .fbx

then drag .fbx into ur unity, then it should come along with the textures

[gentle crown]

its not working

[wheat lava]

are u clicking this

[gentle crown]

yeah\

[wheat lava]

seems odd when i click that, it allows me to export as fbx ehh ...

let me see again how it was with vroids

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18-cJ9_t9KU

found a video, never watched it but

title kinda says it all right

[gentle crown]

I'll watch it later. I'm gonna take a break from this

[wheat lava]

i understand, neitherways i hope it solves for ya (:

[tame bronze]

does anyone know how to fix Assets\VRCSDK\Dependencies\VRChat\Editor\EnvConfig.cs(445,28): error CS0117: 'PlayerSettings' does not contain a definition for 'SetVirtualRealitySDKs' ??? i dont know what to do and for the vrc skd pannel on the top it only says reload skd

[ruby isle]

Wrong Unity version. You need 2019.4.31f1

[tame bronze]

okay! thank you!!

[tame bronze]

aaaa i got the right version but it still says the error

[ruby isle]

You need to remake the project. You can't just switch versions with the same files

[exotic dawn]

So I am Trying to optimize a avatar I got online I has gone well so far but when I try to use the cats Atlas to combine materials this happens

[tropic valley]

what version of blender are you using?

pretty sure cats needs an older version of blender

ahh yes, I am an idiot

I have seen it plenty so I should have realized

[normal nova]

Finally figured out a better way to do animation-aware decimation :D should be in CATS dev version soonish

I already had a way to create the heatmap, but just giving that to the decimate modifier didn't work particularly well

[calm spade]

Any reason why it's not symmetrical ?

[slate crypt]

How to optimize avatar

Step 1

You don’t need 200,000 polygons

[ruby isle]

How else could you have a tiny model of a heart on a chain that nobody will pay attention to in VR

[normal nova]

I think that's actually an issue in the original weight painting of the model

results: incredibly promising so far

[thin steeple]

How to optimize avatars: You don't need 400 materials and 300 skinned meshes

[slate crypt]

That too

[thin steeple]

I really fucking hate the popular opinion of the community that, they must have everything on 1 single avatar

I personally do my best to be medium (poor at my worst)

I have an avatar called the Cirvulp (Gumroad) that has a bunch of clothing options. I separated them between 2 avatars and decimated when needed to be under 70k usually, decimating little things like the collar and stuff

[normal nova]

in the next CATS I've added a way to add clothing as props without needing another draw call

[thin steeple]

Because they're too lazy or just don't give a damn, then you have the people that have fallbacks telling you to show their avatar. I usually just full hide them if they do that :D

[normal nova]

Just additional bones for every bone it's currently weighted to. Ends up being added to skinning cost, which is waaay lower than an extra call

[thin steeple]

I love the decimate option that gives it a goal, fucking awesome

I select the mesh, and tell it too nuke till there's 70k -- it usually doesn't even damage the mesh's shape

[normal nova]

:3 That was around before me, but I added the shapekey preservation

[thin steeple]

That feature, is, god tier

[normal nova]

Issue with blender's decimation is that it's all suited to preserve shape, but doesn't care about animation. So the thing I'm working on now finds the most animated vertices and excludes them from decimation. So your arms don't get crunchy

it even, totally accidentally, ends up preserving loops a lot of the time

[thin steeple]

I need an SDK setting that I can check box, that, before uploading, it removes the controller from the animator xD I keep leaving it in there on accident

[buoyant holly]

cool

[buoyant holly]

some of that came about because until recently it was a pain in the butt to recalibrate the full body tracking Everytime swapped a Avatar so a lot of folks compensated by shoving every train in the Avatar but now it's saves calibration in between avatars so it should be easier to just swap Avatar is now in full body tracking

[thin steeple]

Suggesting that everyone is on IK 2.0 beta

[slate crypt]

It also no longer reloads the avatar upon calibrating. Useful if your avatar has intense effects on spawn

[thin steeple]

I did it again 😭

[thin steeple]

Just don't have annoying spawn effects Yeah

[slate crypt]

Like some out there

glares at TPP

TPP avatar joins the lobby
safe mode go brrr

[thin steeple]

I'm glad perf blocking very poor rated avatars removes 90% of the annoying avatars out there. And safety setting disabling audio sources on anyone that isn't my friend removes 90% of the annoying/toxic avatars out there

[slate crypt]

I will not allow the shit go boom

The shit don’t go boom anymore

half of the songs their avatars use aren’t even good

[thin steeple]

Minimum Displayed Performance: Poor
Maximum Avatar Download SIze= 65mb

Is my optimal life style

[slate crypt]

You see my avatar itself is very poor

And it’s public

Thus I leave safety settings as such so I can see those who use it

There should honestly be an option to allow users who are wearing the same avatar as you to bypass the shield

[ruby isle]

Lower that download size WAY lower

30mb is my limit, but 10mb is my personal 'you need to reconsider your choices' limit

[slate crypt]

I leave it at 200mb and very poor

I have a powerful pc

[ruby isle]

It's not about power

[slate crypt]

7 TPP avatars couldn’t stall my game

[ruby isle]

That will instantly fill your VRAM

You could have an RTX 3090 and an i9 cpu. It's still going to fill VRAM

[slate crypt]

that’s what vram is for, to store rendering data

[ruby isle]

Yeah, but there's a limit

You fill that limit, texture data goes to physical RAM

[slate crypt]

I haven’t hit it

[ruby isle]

Yes you have

Guaranteed

If you have less than 8gb, you have gone over

[slate crypt]

Well then the 32gb ram can handle that

[ruby isle]

The point is, there's no reason to even need to fill VRAM

[slate crypt]

I like seeing peoples avatars not grey blobs because no one uses standard surface shaders

[ruby isle]

You understand a full game like Apex Legends or whatever uses 6gb for their max resolutions. VRChat uses well over 8GB because people have no consideration

There is 0 reason IMO to be over 10mb for an avatar

No exceptions

[slate crypt]

Avatar size ≠ vram usage by said avatar

[ruby isle]

95% of the size is from texture

[slate crypt]

A 10mb avatar could use 8gb vram easily if you’re stupid enough

[ruby isle]

Yeah

[slate crypt]

Vram isnt about just textures

[ruby isle]

Which is why I have it set so low

A 200mb avatar could use 20gb

Then your PC is gone

[slate crypt]

Or it could use 100mb

[ruby isle]

Same with a 10mb

Could be 1mb

[slate crypt]

With bad enough shaders a 1mb avatar could use several gigs of vram

It solves nothing

[ruby isle]

Blocking 200mb avatars lowers the impact

[slate crypt]

That’s just the download size

Not directly indicative of the Vram usage

[ruby isle]

But it's much harder to fill VRAM with 10mb vs. 200mb

[slate crypt]

Hell audio files take more space than textures often

[ruby isle]

Unless you compress

[slate crypt]

If they use mp3

Wav isn’t as bad

[ruby isle]

Which you should

Wav is uncompressed

[slate crypt]

I got them backwards

Mp3 has issues for looping audio though

It adds dead space at the beginning and end

[thin steeple]

I know it's still high, but I download those avatars in like, 2 seconds so it doesn't bother me, but any higher is unacceptable to me. I have very few avatars i've uploaded that exceeds 30 because I crunch compress (Yes, I know that doesn't do anything to VRAM usage, but still)

[ruby isle]

It's not about how long it takes to download, it's about resources. A single avatar taking up 100s of MBs of VRAM is hogging resources from other people which is both damaging to other users and unfair

[slate crypt]

download size is not vram

stop making that connection

The avatar could literally be 10gb and use 5mb vram

Or very easily the other way around

[ruby isle]

It has a connection regardless

You can't write it off because it's not exactly representative

[slate crypt]

It has no connection

[ruby isle]

Please show me a 100mb texture compressed into 1mb

Then tell me that again

[slate crypt]

Avatar size isn’t only textures

Half of my avatars size comes from audio

[thin steeple]

is there a good video talking about this? I'm genuinely curious

[slate crypt]

because mp3s don’t fucking loop

[thin steeple]

mp3 is cringe. ogg and wav are 👌🏻

[ruby isle]

Until you can show me a 100mb texture compressed into 1mb, there is a connection. A 10mb avatar has a limit of how big a texture can be in order to get to 10mb. There will not be any 1gb textures in a 10mb avatar, but there may be in a 200mb one. Yes, it matters.

There's a reason game developers limit texture sizes when developing. Otherwise why not make every texture 8k?

[slate crypt]

If the texture isn’t being rendered it doesnt even count either

However, what there should be is a setting for max vram usage per avatar. If an avatar starts to use over the set value it gets blocked. That would be nice

[ruby isle]

Yes it absolutely does

No matter what, all texture assets are loaded into VRAM once the avatar loads

[slate crypt]

I rarely ever max out on vram with shield off

[ruby isle]

Wrong

[slate crypt]

I know how much is being used too

At all times

[ruby isle]

What is your usage

[slate crypt]

It’s called a performance hud

Usually around 60-70%

[ruby isle]

What GB

[slate crypt]

8

[ruby isle]

And what does it sit at

[slate crypt]

90-100fps

[ruby isle]

I mean VRAM

What GB is it out of 8

[slate crypt]

60-70% of 8gb

3070 FE

[ruby isle]

Do you ever go to worlds with more than 10 people

[slate crypt]

Call it cap, I’m giving you facts

Yes

All the time

Worlds with maybe 30 people start to cause issues

I rarely ever have my shield on

[ruby isle]

Right. 30 people should not cause issues

[slate crypt]

And it’s not just OVR Toolkit reading it wrong. Task manager confirms. And I have by RGB system set to show multiple stats as bar graphs on fans and such

Polygon count hurts me more than textures

[ruby isle]

Textures don't affect FPS much

They affect chance to crash mostly

[slate crypt]

With 30 people your polygons go up in several millions

THAT hurts vram

Any blender user would know that much

Anyone whos ever tried to export a ship from space engineers into blender likely maxed out their vram several times over

[ruby isle]

Unity doesn't work the same as blender

[slate crypt]

Polygon count still has more impact than textures

Why do you think games still need LODs

[ruby isle]

They have impact on FPS

[slate crypt]

That’s what vrchat needs on avatars

LODs

[ruby isle]

I recommend you read up on how Unity as a game engine works and the impacts on different assets

[slate crypt]

I know how it works

Need I prove it

[ruby isle]

You're currently proving otherwise

[slate crypt]

I could go on about this project alone for hours

[ruby isle]

And have you done any optimization passes on it

[slate crypt]

“Optimization passes”

What

[ruby isle]

Yeah that's what I mean

[slate crypt]

Term doesn’t ring a bell, but what it actually means might

[ruby isle]

I recommend you read up on asset optimization and impacts of them

[slate crypt]

Refuses to elaborate

I don’t know every term out there

[bleak vine]

how is my cat model with no toggles, phys bones, audio, particle systems, ANYTHING too big for quest??? its just the model i bought and a texture i edited, HOW

[ruby isle]

Okay let me rephrase it. Have you done any optimization at all on it?

[slate crypt]

Yes

Tons

[ruby isle]

Like?

[slate crypt]

Dynamic render texture resolution, oblique projection clipping, render texture pooling, etc. had to rember what oblique proj matrix was called

[thorny garden]

What does the SDK say?

[slate crypt]

Occlusion volumes for render textures and their respective cameras

Not using RGBA32SNORM for depth textures

Shall I continue?

[ruby isle]

Anything involving profiling? Frametimes?

[slate crypt]

Profiling how

Again don’t know every term under the sun

[bleak vine]

26.39 MB

[ruby isle]

Profiling is an integral part of Unity

[slate crypt]

Cool

Still doesn’t help me recall what the fuck it means

[thorny garden]

Not really what I meant, is there anything else that's listed as "poor"?

[slate crypt]

I’m not a dictionary

[ruby isle]

It's a thing in Unity to see frametimes

[buoyant holly]

https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.4/Documentation/Manual/Profiler.html

[bleak vine]

22818 polgons, thats literally it :/

[ruby isle]

It's integral like I said so you should know it by name

[bleak vine]

way less than i put on other quest avi's

[thorny garden]

jesus

[bleak vine]

what?

[thorny garden]

surely a model like that doesn't need that many polys

[buoyant holly]

you should see if you should be able to shave off 2818 polgons so that you don't show up as very poor

[thorny garden]

preferably get it down to 15000

[bleak vine]

20k isnt anything tho lol, not 26MB worth atleast

[thorny garden]

Still, not optimized

The filesize is likely a texture thing

[ruby isle]

Compress textures

[thorny garden]

^

[bleak vine]

how do i compress?

[thorny garden]

The textures are probably wayy higher res than they need to be

easiest way would just be to open the texture in an image editor

[ruby isle]

Click each texture in Unity and enable "Crunch Compression"

[thorny garden]

and shrink it

[slate crypt]

Mesh batching and instancing as well

[ruby isle]

Those are checkboxes

[buoyant holly]

that's not going to help much on avatars

[slate crypt]

Wasn’t that simple

Network lagged

Sent that like 10 mins ago

Instancing one singular camera to render multiple different portals rather than each portal having a dedicated camera

Game runs at like 90fps with up to 3 recursive renders

Developed half of it on a 2015 macbook pro, shit ran

[ruby isle]

There's a different from desktop to VR games too

[slate crypt]

I don’t disagree

[bleak vine]

tysm it worked!

[slate crypt]

@ruby isle https://youtu.be/eqo3-Rurwfk

It was my senior project

[thin steeple]

What size is the texture, and have you crunch compressed the texture at all?

Select all of the textures you use on the model, drop them to 2048 and enable crunch compression.

If you're still having size issues, drop it to 1024

[woeful lark]

Hey! The SDK is indicating that I should only have Skinned Mesh Renderer for optimal performance. Currently, I have the character and a couple of pieces of clothing that I want to be able to toggle. I was going to do that by toggling the Gameobject for those pieces. But, that won't be possible after combining everything into one mesh to fix that complaint. What are my options in that case?

The only solutions that I've found while researching are to hide the clothing using blend shapes or material transparency. Wondering if there's anything else that I'm missing.

[buoyant holly]

you could also use bones to do the scaling

[bleak vine]

that was the fix 🙂

[patent tusk]

give it to me straight doc, how much will this actually optimize the avatar when I have 3 sets like this and will have more (I added some extra transitions between phases to make sure you can't get stuck, but the top part is the basic animator)

[ruby isle]

This is incredibly unoptimized for an animator

[stoic cloak]

I have a question about an avatar?

[patent tusk]

it's a comparison of the old and the new animators. the new one uses the action animator as a basis, while the old uses the any state method without transitions etc. so you're saying both methods are unoptimized, huh

[ruby isle]

Having a ton of transitioning from Any State is unoptimized as the animator has to check for a ton of parameter conditions every single frame

[patent tusk]

yes, and that's... a comparison of the old any state animator

and the new animator on top that will replace it

[ruby isle]

Oh I didn't know which one was which

The top one is better than the bottom for sure

[lone tiger]

You can have multiple transitions coming out of Entry state.

So you can have something like this working just fine for toggles with no visible interruptions between transitions.

[patent tusk]

sure, but knowing Unity, that might recreate the issue where it keeps knocking on every door every frame

I don't trust unity to not be dumb

this is why I decided to gate it. this system also leaves no visible transitions when you drop transition times to nothing

at first it did when quitting, but then I just added an "exit time" and made it very small (zero left it at 1 second), removed any audible transition times

I added the double gates just to make it easier for myself to visualize it

having 28 anim states in each part of the system is a bit much

[novel snow]

Question: does the color of a material make any impact on performance?

I have a material that's just a solid color and figured I could just set that color to the material color to save on file size and not have an unnecessary image file cached.

[ruby isle]

It's more performant than textures. The color itself has no impact vs other colors

[novel snow]

So for flat colored materials just go with coloring the material itself?

[ruby isle]

Yeah it'll save you a texture and it's a tiny tiny bit more performant

[gaunt wadi]

Even with low polygons its still a pc avatar

Is this because of poiyomi and the 10 materials I never atlas?

Actually it is poiyomi

But I heard i only need one material for quest

Im really bad at doing atlas so I'm very dependent on a program doing it automatically and even then there's some errors

[rustic ether]

Anyone able to help me optimize this?

[gaunt wadi]

214 collsions???

You do not need that many collsions

Collisions*

There is a limits option in the phy bones and it kinda works like collisions

[rustic ether]

Well yeah but I need help reducing em

Idk how

[languid quartz]

Why do you have 65 transforms with like 214 collision checks... Did you set some bones to collide with things they don't have to? For example a skirt doesn't have to collide with a head collider, but you may have set it up to do that.

[rustic ether]

to do any of that

It's a male avatar... and... it's a package I purchased.

so like..

Not my problem

they did it, i gotta deal with what they did

[gaunt wadi]

Check your collisions

[rustic ether]

;-;

oh

pff

the only thing I need help on iss

nvm i lied

pretend I never said anything

[gaunt wadi]

?

Wut

[rustic ether]

idk how

to do ANYTHING

;-;

I need uh.. a smidge of backup

totally just a smidge

i got iHop bein delivered

[marble rain]

So i recently found out my Avatar actually takes up 340 mb of Vram.. which is super bad but its considered a good rated avatar regardless of it. which makes me wonder why the download size of my avatar is only 12.6 mb. what exactly does that include?

[slate crypt]

Vram ≠ download size

Download size includes mesh data, textures, shaders, materials, sounds, animations, objects, etc

Vram is literally just the amount of data which the gpu needs to store about the avatar to be able to render it. This includes compiled shaders, mesh data and materials currently visible, as well as lights and particles

[marble rain]

i know.

i am surprised Vrchat does not take Vram into account for that.

[slate crypt]

It can’t really know how much vram an avatar will use until it tries to render it

[marble rain]

well it can. based on texture size.. etc.

[slate crypt]

Shaders complicate it

A lot

[ruby isle]

There isn't a way to calculate VRAM usage before it's downloaded, however it could after it downloads the avatar

[slate crypt]

You also can’t determine how much vram a shader will be using

Especially if it changes

[ruby isle]

Shaders don't really use up much VRAM at all by themself

[slate crypt]

Weak shaders then

They definitely can

Shaders which utilize lots of virtual textures can eat vram

[marble rain]

again there is. take each texture you use. and good shaders do not create extra vram need

[ruby isle]

You can't get the texture sizes before you download the avatar package

[marble rain]

look in your unity project

[ruby isle]

In my unity project, where it's already loaded?

I'm talking about in-game

[marble rain]

meta data. can tell it

[ruby isle]

You can't get any stats about the avatar until you download the avatar package

Turn your download size down in-game and check the stats of a blocked avatar. All it shows is overall download size

[marble rain]

easy solution make every avatar from a unity project include a int for the total vram

[ruby isle]

VRChat doesn't have metadata

It measures the package size from the server

[marble rain]

everything has metadata lol. thats how things are stored.

[ruby isle]

Send me an example of a vrchat avatar metadata file then

[marble rain]

no you can just look in your files.

[ruby isle]

Where

[marble rain]

for avatars.

[ruby isle]

Path?

[dull trench]

Any suggestions for how to get a good Atlas from CATS. It seems to break something no matter what I do. Currently it is breaking the hair. The hair is white instead of it's texture color. Pre-Atlas my avatar is perfect in all three shaded display modes in Blender.

I will add that I am using a stand alone version of 2.93 to be sureit's not a compatibility issue.

I have a UV on clothing that I have to merge with the body UV before I can join the meshes without issue. I tested joining various pairings of two meshes and joining them did not cause any other issues.

[ruby isle]

Make sure all your textures are unpacked from blender. CATS can't access textures packed into the blend file

[dull trench]

Oh, does the packing prevent access by other apps? I do have packing enabled, but I created the model from local textures which is why I'm seeking the clarification.

[ruby isle]

I believe so

I'm pretty sure CATS needs the local files to read/write to the atlas

[dull trench]

Sweet, I look forward to testing this. This would actually make sense and bring some sanity back to my blender experience. With proper atlases there really is no need for packing anyway.

[dull trench]

Apparently unpacking isn't as straight forward as it would appear to be, but when it fixed the hair I went ahead and made new materials for the face and heels with auto packing off and....success!

[bleak vine]

anyone available to help real quick?

i atlas my materials in blender down to 1 and it makes the nose and whiskers on my cat black in CATS 😦

[lone tiger]

If you are checking via Thry's VRAM calculator, then I noticed it can sometimes include textures which aren't even used by avatar in any way. I don't know why it happens.

Also newest avatar from Godfall uses 800MB of VRAM (400 when counting only active), so you are not the worst.🥴

[eternal bay]

um, sorry - I'm new here and I just desperately need help. I'm trying to make a fallback avatar, but for whatever reason even when I reduce the material slots, vrchat seems to show that there's 2 slots being used. Any advice...? (Ignore the bounding box/size issue. Problem persists even when those are fixed)

(Problem also persists when shaders are changed)

[void hornet]

Do you have your Avatar Descriptor on a mesh or on the parent object?
It needs to be on the parent...
Otherwise idk how you have the material component showing right under the descriptor like that, I thought that only happened with meshes

This should say ENA instead of Body
It's also possible you just have the wrong thing selected when you click upload

(or whatever the name of your parent object is)

[eternal bay]

Alright - so I'm stupid. It's now on the parent. But the materials are still showing 2 :(

[void hornet]

What does your Avatar hierarchy look like? Just the parent, armature, and a single mesh, or multiple meshes?

[eternal bay]

Parent, armature, and uno mesh.

[void hornet]

Are you intending to use the camera and light in your Avatar? 🤔
If not, I think that might be where your mystery material is coming from

[eternal bay]

No, but I deleted those to no avail :(

(Thanks so much for helping btw <3)

[void hornet]

And your one mesh only has the one material slot shown on the skinned mesh renderer right? I'm assuming that's the case or Pumkin tools would probably count it as two as well...
So maybe something in the avatar is making it have a second instance somehow? 🤔

[eternal bay]

Yep, which is doubly weird since pumkin shows it as 1. I'm so confused ;-;

the prefab originally has two though

idk if that means anything.

[void hornet]

Were they unique materials?
How did you get it down to one mat? Texture atlas, or removing mesh?

[eternal bay]

Yes? I just... Removed the material. eheh

is that not a valid way of getting it down to 1?

It's a material that I didn't really need.

[void hornet]

Idk tbh, but technically the mesh itself is probably still looking for 2 mats, even if you restricted it to being only able to access the one...
Maybe
This is getting into weird fringe cases I'm not completely sure of lol 😂
You might need to remove the reference to the second material from the mesh completely if it's still got faces expecting it

[eternal bay]

removing it directly in blender worked, so

i'll take it ^^

thanks stranger!!

[void hornet]

Glad I could help!

[eternal bay]

<3!!!

[onyx harness]

I’ll have you know it’s 700 xD
But yeah that’s a known issue and is being addressed for her update. Literally just selecting all the 2D textures, and unchecking the Pc overwrite for the compression settings will recompress them using the right format and drops it to ~550. Still not great but better for minimal effort.

[lone tiger]

8k textures go brrrr

Crunch compression makes load in lag with these huge textures even worse

[onyx harness]

There shouldn’t be anything that’s still 8k but there is a few 4k lel

My plan is to drop everything 1 or 2 steps and if people want higher quality they will need to turn it up themselves. That way the responsibility falls on them for hogging the vram.

Though i can safely say a majority won’t change it

Should bring the model down to something more reasonable for what it has

[lone tiger]

Still though, one Godfall avatar is equal to 5-10 average avatars, which is absolutely horrible...

[onyx harness]

I mean, in more than just vram, yes.
In a perfect world I’d love people to literally delete the shit that they don’t want to use either in unity or better yet, in blender. Though, a lot of people who do use the models are also downloading these programs for the first time, so expecting that will only bring disappointment.

But yeah, compared to the average avatar they’re considerably performance heavy. We’re still trying to improve the avatars from quality, functionality and optimisation perspectives. There were a few mistakes in the latest release, we will correct and learn from them.

[tawdry drift]

godfall 😰

i bought yurei and nuked the crap out of her

still rated as very poor but its a lot lighter than it was when i first bought it

[tulip rose]

Hey guys, im working on a osc project and I was wondering if anyone could help me with understanding rendering to an array of objects. I am looking for a way to show and hide objects, but I assume that having 200 mesh renderer's is not good for performance. Does anyone know a more preferment way to render a display.

I was thinking that maybe I should use blend shapes, but unsure how this would scale if I wanted to have different colors rendered to each plane

[ruby isle]

You could use a shader with vertex displacement

[tulip rose]

I was thinking about that, but problem is that that would remove any chance of quest compatible with an avatar

[ruby isle]

Then I believe the only way to stay quest compatible (and not incredibly poor) is using shape keys

[stray tangle]

either that or bone scaling

but that would also count towards your perf rating

[tulip rose]

Yeah, it is definitely an interesting problem, to say the least. I'll have to have a play around with it. lol.

[onyx harness]

If she was still very poor than you didn’t really nuke her :P
She’s got a version coming pretty soon and after what we learnt with Valk’s 700MiB release, the goal is to have her be pretty decent optimisation wise at minimum.

What contributes to a mesh’s vram?
I’ve seen some meshes have no vert colours, minimal vertex groups and maybe a dozen blendshapes be +15MiB on Thry’s Evaluator. What should I be looking out for to try and reduce this?

[tawdry drift]

if an avatar's mesh is over 70k poly its still very poor regardless of its other stats but i got rid of mesh/mat toggles i don't use, lowered some texture sizes. felt a bit nuked in the end xd

still a good avatar though

[unreal plover]

is roughly

Runtime Memory (bytes) = (roughly) 
  4 * vertices * [a float is 4 bytes]
    ( 3 [position]
    + 3 [normal]
    + 4 [tangent]
    + 2 * uvMapCount
    + 3 * blendShapeCount
    + 3 * blendShapeCount [legacy blendshape normals unchecked]
    + 4 * vertexColorCount
    + 8 * boneCount [4 bone weight w/ index]
    )
+ 4 * 3 * triangleCount [indices, divide by 2 if vertex count < 64k]

(please stop using empty blendshapes to categorize your blendshapes)

[onyx harness]

I can promise i won’t start doing that

[unreal plover]

😢

[onyx harness]

So, quickly looking at it, those meshes i had in mind would be mainly vert and bone count with maybe those few blends too.
Sounds like a lot of work… okay, I’ll look into it more. See if I can pull them down with that formula in mind.

[teal timber]

I recently started making avatars and I'm getting progressively better in vroid/blender/unity. It amases me how many ppl are using avatars with 300-500k polygons.

Also does anyone have any good tips or reads on optimizing hair in vroid? I've noticed it makes big chunk of the overall polygons

[cerulean glen]

This is were I started:

And this is were I'm now:

took me like 10 min to do, even though it's still not really good, but wayy better then it was before ^^

I would whish for more people to optimise their VRAM usage

[buoyant holly]

I suppose it would be helpful if the SDK listed vram so that they would be even aware it's there

[cerulean glen]

Yeah ture, in general it would be cool if VRAM usage could be used for performance ranking or being able to set a limit for it

[ruby isle]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/449386885299830794/975857322981195846/unknown.png

More flexing here

[buoyant holly]

very nice

what tools are we using to check vram so I can go check my avatar

[ruby isle]

Thry's Avatar VRAM tool

[radiant shadow]

Always use that tool to see if some texture i dont really use is in it, not the first time i forget to remove something.

output log has it too,but bit more tedious

[cerulean glen]

but how?

[ruby isle]

Lowering sizes. Any textures that don't need to be huge I tone down

My atlas is the only 2k texture

Everything else is less than 1k

Also not having transparency in images helps

[radiant shadow]

nearly none of my avs are over 50mb vram use (ish anyway) 🔨 (older av)

[ruby isle]

The glory of atlases

[buoyant holly]

and yeah mask textures don't need to be particularly high res

[radiant shadow]

point (no filter) so it doesnt bleed into stuff , tiny size

[buoyant holly]

also if people are using Poiyomi Toon Shader the RGB detail normal mask feature is definitely a good one to utilize so that you don't have to use like big textures to have nice detail

https://twitter.com/VIANVOLAEUS/status/1517951135528665088?s=20&t=AT-pxsT9g790tfTZn8Xg7w

𝗩𝗜𝗔𝗡𝗩𝗢𝗟𝗔𝗘𝗨𝗦 (@VIANVOLAEUS)

Single material, 3.3k △, using RGBA masked 256px normals in @poiyomi's shader. 🧵👇

Likes

269

▶ Play video

Twitter · Apr 23, 2022, 7:38 PM

https://twitter.com/VIANVOLAEUS/status/1517951142730346497?s=20&t=AT-pxsT9g790tfTZn8Xg7w

𝗩𝗜𝗔𝗡𝗩𝗢𝗟𝗔𝗘𝗨𝗦 (@VIANVOLAEUS)

RGBA masking requires an RGBA texture - this defines where the shader acts on the mesh. Left, map. Right, shader setup. The region in red can be changed in shader to display as yellow, etc.

Twitter · Apr 23, 2022, 7:38 PM

https://twitter.com/VIANVOLAEUS/status/1517951160740687873?s=20&t=AT-pxsT9g790tfTZn8Xg7w

𝗩𝗜𝗔𝗡𝗩𝗢𝗟𝗔𝗘𝗨𝗦 (@VIANVOLAEUS)

Back to shader: Can use seamless tiled normal maps per RGB area - tiny (128/256px) normal maps, but tiled around 50-100 times in the shader, giving you a higher effective TD.

You can combine these with an base nrm map for creases and baked normal details etc: (Blend with Base)

▶ Play video

Twitter · Apr 23, 2022, 7:38 PM

[fossil grotto]

how do i reduce the file size for my avatars??

i compressed all of her textures

[stray tangle]

the best thing you can do is to reduce the resolution

compression does nothing for VRAM usage

since all textures get decompressed

[fossil grotto]

ah

it was working for a bit then i got down to the point where it didn’t go down anymore

[stray tangle]

turn down the resolution of each texture individually (don't set them all to the same res!) until the quality loss is too much

and also, don't go pixel peeping

stay at a certain distance from the model

[buoyant holly]

like what would be a comfortable conversation distance

[fossil grotto]

okay thank you so much

[buoyant holly]

and in future if you're making avatars detail normal Maps can be quite helpful for making it still look nice when you stick your nose in it

[radiant shadow]

crunch will lower upload size if you are trying to hit that quest <10mb , doesnt do anything for vram

[buoyant holly]

and also helpful so you're not waiting forever to download the avatar

[fossil grotto]

thanks!!

[buoyant holly]

https://github.com/Thryrallo/VRCAvatarTools the link to the vram tool

[radiant shadow]

vram checker thing is sorta handy to see if your fbx is bloated (amount of blendshapes is a dead giveaway too tho, 140+?) , tested an av earlier where i cut off the head on its own mesh since thats all the blendshapes were, it dropped 2mb~ on vram use, since it doesnt need to bother with the ones thats not affected (57k poly av)

[ruby isle]

I would split my face if it didn't kick me to Medium perf rank. My avatar is only 20k polys so it's not a huge deal anyways

[stray tangle]

separate the meshes of the ones you don't want included, and unparent them from your armature (hold shift and drag them outside)

[terse gale]

So I ran the VRAM tool and want to know if what I'm seeing is right. I have a mesh with 120k Verts, 85k Tris, 6 submeshes, 4 UV maps, 220 bones (limited influence to 4 bones per vertex) and no shape keys. But the tool is saying the mesh specifically is using 40MB of VRAM. Using the rough hand calculation I should be at no more than 10MB I think. Any idea what might be causing that?

[terse gale]

0 blendshapes on this mesh. The mesh is everything but the head joined together

And to be clear I checked to make sure none were hanging around, same with vertex colors.

[hollow sedge]

This avatar I purchased is missing a bunch of scripts, anyone have an idea as for why it is? Is it just because of the way the creator made it?

[stray tangle]

it was most likely set up with Dynamic bone, which is a 20$ asset you don't need anymore due to it being replaced by Physbones

[hollow sedge]

Ooh thank you so much!

[thin steeple]

Does someone have an article or anything telling you, why high poly count models are bad in unity/vrchat? Have one of those poly knockers arguing with me that "polys don't matter"

They have roughly 300k+ polys from clothing and stuff

[ruby isle]

The more polygons your avatar has, the more your GPU has to render. Obviously having more results in more work for the GPU. On top of this, since most avatars use Blendshapes, blendshapes incur a large performance hit the higher your polycount is, as it has to calculate all of the vertex positions every frame. More polys = more vertex movements = worse performance.

The blendshape part only applies to meshes with blendshapes, but the rendering is always a thing

[thin steeple]

Is there an article or anything about this?

[quartz geode]

Is having a high material count bad for preformance? I was ripping a model form a psp game and for some reason it has 27 materials depsite a low poly count and texture resolution

[thin steeple]

Yes, every material is a draw call

From the docs: "Draw Calls"-- essentially, time spent by your processor telling your graphics card to draw something on the screen
Every draw call (If all materials are enabled at the same time) can heavily bottle neck performance

[upper yacht]

A lot of different things can be in a game for reasons.

[fathom flicker]

heyo gang im trying to make my first avatar so im not the best at this, whenever i try to atlas materials my avatar turns into some eldritch horror, what's the best way to avoid this?

[balmy scaffold]

gotta edit the UV

[stray tangle]

check that the UV maps on all of your meshes have the same name

default name is UVMap

[woven pawn]

Never tried making and optimizing an avatar before, but i guess i have to do so now

commissioned a vroid and i want it in vrchat

too bad those models have like a million bajillion trillion tri's.

[tawdry drift]

i dont think vroid does?theres a lot of unused mesh you can cut out i think

unless theres a ton of toggles and whatnot

[woven pawn]

oh, nice

shouldn't be too hard then

[tawdry drift]

@quick patrol it looks strange but it reduces the draw calls on your model. i have outfit toggles but all of the outfits are all on this texture here

if i had one texture for each of the toggles, thats double the drawcalls with the mesh

[quick patrol]

Im not even using toggles lol

I could get a pic but om at work

[tawdry drift]

yeh its okay

but no toggles is better performance lol

if you don't have any toggles, you can merge all of your model together

so instead of uh.. 1 body mesh, 1 head mesh, 1 hair, 1 shirt, 1 shorts, (each of those is a drawcall) but if you merged them together it turns into 1 drawcall in total

[quick patrol]

So merging them with ctrl j?

Then how do I assign different textures to different parts?

[tawdry drift]

if you're atlasing, you move their UV's to match

if you're not, you can add a second material to the model itself

also yes ctrl j is merging oops

[quick patrol]

Know any good tutorials for atlasing so i can reference it when im home?

[tawdry drift]

i guess the one in pinned would be a good start

you could try the CATS atlas if you have 8 or less materials

[quick patrol]

I have 4 or 5 i tbink

[ruby isle]

It's 2-3 drawcalls to be exact, but yeah it's always good to keep that as low as possible

[tawdry drift]

yeah i couldnt remember exactly how many it was per

but the point was reducing em so oh well xd

[jovial tartan]

Does anyone know why if i enable "Keep Quads" on my model it almost doubles my material slots?

[upper yacht]

Because you don't have a fully quad mesh

And there's pretty much no reason to use keep quad for a VRC avatar.

[upper yacht]

But, as far as to actually answer the question...

When you use Keep Quads on a non-quad mesh it "doubles" all materials as it under the hood creates two separate sub-meshes for a sub-mesh that contains both quads and tris as it's meant for special shader functionality or in very specific cases... besides those quads WILL become tris before being rendered to the screen.

[jovial tartan]

Ah okay, I read that also reduces polygons, thats why i was looking into it 🙂

[upper yacht]

Reduces polygons. Doesn't optimize, since it's the same amount of tris.

It's more like a de-optimization unless you need a full quad mesh.

[mild pendant]

Does anyone know how I could decimate a model, and not delete any shape keys? Also I was originally using cats plugin to down size the avatar, it made the avatar look un-playable

[mild pendant]

as much as this could help, I went through the whole list and none of them popped up in my side bar

Okay, never mind, it was actually there x)

thank you

[lament garden]

Please consider pinning this, people keep sharing it 💜

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-LzjODZ0RbBooAOK5uszoIuvb8yfy4vYxwXsaDdZZg/edit

[calm spade]

There's a pinned video made by tupper which goes over all these steps already

[lament garden]

Fair!

it looks like tupper's video is using 2.79?

[calm spade]

[lament garden]

Some of these steps don't make sense for the updated version of blender

It doesn't address the awkward settings that need to be addressed in +2.8 🤷‍♀️

Like how blender needs to be told what image to bake the atlas

[lament garden]

can anyone find an updated link for this?
https://vrcat.club/threads/material-combiner-blender-addon-2-1-1-2.2255/

Shotaryia's patreon just links back to vrcat

[calm spade]

Do you know if any of the steps in 2.8 aren't compatible with 3.0+ ?

[lament garden]

i've just run through the guide myself just today

the only changes i've found were UI changes

Which i've just updated. Buttons in 2.8 were changed to checkboxes in +3.0.

[lament garden]

This post in #vrchat-general-1 also backs this up
#vrchat-general-1 message

[mild pendant]

Does anyone know of a shader that's optimized for quest? I was originally using poiyomitoonshader and saw in a video it wasn't quest compatible

[buoyant holly]

you can only use the provided vrchat mobile shaders for avatars

[loud ore]

So at the moment my avatar has a "Very Poor" rating, and I want to optimize it. The console tells me that there's way too many skinned mesh renders and that I should combine them. However, I don't know how to do that and can't seem to find a guide. Anyone know what I need to do or have tips for optimization that might help?

[stray tangle]

joining meshes is as simple as selecting two (or more) in blender and doing ctrl + J

material slots are a little more annoying to get rid of, since you will either need to atlas the textures into a grid and move the UV's to match, or repack the UV's and bake the old textures to the new one

[loud ore]

The thing is, I have already completely set up the avatar in Unity, so if I changed the model itself in Blender would I have to redo everything again?

[stray tangle]

no, as long as you never unpack your avatar in Unity, you can just override the FBX and it will update

make sure to always export your FBX with the "Apply scalings" option set to FBX All, and "Add leaf bones" unchecked

[loud ore]

Well, the avatar has to be unpacked to edit it, so I've already done that.

[stray tangle]

no? you never need to unpack the model in unity

adding props and empty objects does not require unpacking

if a change you want to do requires you to unpack it, that should be done in Blender

anyways, what you can do now is drag your FBX into your hierarchy again, and use Pumkin's avatar tools to copy components from your old model to salvage it

so you don't need to completely restart

in an ideal workflow, you should just be able to pop open your avatar's blender project, make a change, export, and Unity auto updates your model in the scene

minimal effort required

[loud ore]

At the time it seemed like it wouldn't let me move the eyes or mouth without unpacking the model first, but I think it was probably something else that allowed me to do that. Well, guess I'll try copying the components over. I was hoping not to have to touch Blender at all since it's confusing as all hell, but I guess I could probably figure it out.

[stray tangle]

keep in mind Unity is a sort of asset-placing program. it is not a substitute for a 3d modeling program

[loud ore]

Yeah, I never tried 3D modeling in it

Just used it to port an existing model to VR Chat

I've never been able to figure out Blender no matter how many tutorials I watch, but I suppose since I'm just optimizing an existing avatar it shouldn't be too bad. Don't have to do any of the actual modeling.

[stray tangle]

learning blender is best done when you have a specific goal

something you need to do

[loud ore]

So which meshes should I keep separate and which should I combine?

I'm guessing I should keep anything with physbones or animations seperate

[buoyant holly]

https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/avatar-optimizing-tips#reduce-the-amount-of-meshes-on-your-avatar

[onyx harness]

Try to keep the face separate to reduce the verts the visemes are calculating on, else it's up to you

[past arrow]

Hey good night! im optimizing my avatar and i only need to figure this out "lower arm is not first child of upper arm fix" can any dev help me out? Thanks alot!

[proper grail]

Blender exports bones in an alphabetical order list, vrc ik wants the humanoid bones so they are listed first

[past arrow]

Can i send you a private msg or maybe a screenshot of whats going on?

this is what i got so far, im not a dev so was a struggle to got it almost done

[proper grail]

oh youre pretty close, it just wants left shoulder, left arm, and left elbow to be listed at the top of their groups

right now its like left shoulder, left arm, armbelt

[past arrow]

omg Thank you! I think thats solved but still saying the avatar is unsupported why is that?

this is what's going on right now

[proper grail]

build target standaloneOSX? On mine its set for building for windows, gonna need somebody with osx to help here

[past arrow]

Ok thanks alot, idk if i have to install some android or what, maybe someone here can save me

[ruby isle]

Go to the File menu and click Build Settings. Screenshot that

[loud ore]

I've managed to bring my avatar down to Medium optimization by combining some of the meshes, which is nice. However, what are the exact requirements for making an avatar Quest compatible? I see a few of the suggestions the APK is giving me, but I assume I wouldn't have to meet all of those.

[stray tangle]

all of the performance requirements are stricter, and there are also some components you outright cannot use

such as constraints, audio sources, and FinalIK

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

if you want to make a quest Fallback, (the avatar people will see when the PC avatar you're wearing has no quest counterpart), you will need to hit a perf rank of Good or Excellent on quest

which can be a royal pain in the ass

[loud ore]

I don't want a fallback; just an avatar that can be seen on Quest. Surely I don't have to meet the "max of 2 meshes" suggestion, right? That seems like it would be impossible to achieve for any avatar greater than a fallback.

[mild pendant]

I believe you can do 3-4, but that could make your avatar poor or very poor

[stray tangle]

if your avatar is Very poor on quest, it will be automatically hidden for everyone

regardless of safety settings

people will need to manually show your avatar

I think that most quest users are used to already doing that, but it's still something you should consider

it's also not even a guarantee that Very poor avatars on quest will exist forever

[loud ore]

It says my avatar is very poor on Quest, but the export option is locked

[stray tangle]

make sure all other avatars in the scene are hidden

[loud ore]

I wouldn't mind if it's very poor so long as people can enable it

[stray tangle]

what are your performance stats?

[mild pendant]

very poor avatars can be removed at any time unforntunately

[stray tangle]

if you said it's medium on PC, it's probably not that bad

[mild pendant]

by the way sacred, if you do not mind for a moment, do you know to bind materials together?

[stray tangle]

"bind"? not sure what you mean

are you trying to reduce material slots?

[mild pendant]

yes

i currently have 6

im trying to wiggle it down to 3, without the cats plugin since it messes with my shape keys

[stray tangle]

you need to either move the UV's for each material to be in a grid, and use an image editor to tile the textures together in the same manner, or re-pack the UV's and use baking to bake the original textures down to a new one that matches the new UV layout

CATS does not fuck with your shape keys

CATS is a large toolbox of very useful functions related to avatar creation and model editing in general

[mild pendant]

well i bought a model online and the model has armor, but the model sticks out in certain areas the creator was able to fix with shape keys

[stray tangle]

the Bake feature in CATS is exceptionally useful to quickly reduce the material count of an object, but at the cost of making it harder to edit in the future

[mild pendant]

when i use CATS it resets it all back and i loose my shape keys

[stray tangle]

"when I use CATS" is extremely broad

you could be doing any number of things

if you mean "Fix model", don't use it

it's not magic

[mild pendant]

hmmm okay here let double check the setting really quick cause i dont remember the name

[loud ore]

How do I find the performance stats?

[stray tangle]

in the VRChat SDK's Builder panel

[loud ore]

Do you just mean the list of notices?

[stray tangle]

screenshot the whole builder panel

[mild pendant]

okay, I double checked and I was using optimization

[loud ore]

Had to stitch a few screenshots together, but here it is

[stray tangle]

okay, yea bit too high for quest

the first warning is extremely important

all physbone components will be removed from the avatar

[loud ore]

Okay, so should I remove all physbones, or only some?

[stray tangle]

you just need to respect the limits

[loud ore]

I can remove one or two physbones pretty easily, so it would fall below the max

[stray tangle]

you can be equal to the limit and be fine

[loud ore]

Alright, met the limit

[stray tangle]

I would also highly recommend using Thry's Avatar Evaluator

to check the amount of VRAM your avatar will use

[loud ore]

Alright, will do.

[stray tangle]

VRChat will literally crash on quest if the RAM fills up

[loud ore]

Also, apparently physbones don't even work on Quest, so should I just remove them entirely for the Quest version?

Would clear up usage without making a difference.

[stray tangle]

Physbones do work on quest

the older Dynamic bone component was not supported on quest because of how utterly SHIT it was for performance lol

[loud ore]

Oh yeah, I just read it wrong

Physbones do work, cool

It seems like 50,000 polygons is a lot for the Quest; more than they recommend for most worlds. So maybe I should try bringing that down. Any suggestions on how to do so? Think I've heard about a process called decimating or something, but not quite sure how reliable that is.

The polygons may very well be what's preventing me from porting

Oh, actually, it seems like I may just have to make an android-specific project. I'll try that.

[mild pendant]

the polygons are something you would fix in blender

you can fix the issue by using a modifier named decimate

the only thing is, it will lower the overall quality of how nice it looks

[loud ore]

If there's no other option, I guess I'll just have to deal with the lowered quality

Don't know what else could be preventing me from porting to Quest than the polygons

[mild pendant]

well it could be multiple things like the polygons, physbones, materials, etc

[loud ore]

Is there a way to tell what specifically is preventing me? There's some notices, but it doesn't say which ones prevent me from publishing it.

[mild pendant]

usually the builder will tell you what is preventing it from being quest compatible

if its only the polygons a warning message should pop up and tell you its over the reccomended polygon countage

[loud ore]

Yeah, it's telling me at the bottom that people should still be able to toggle my avatar on Quest, but the "Build and Publish for Android" button is greyed out

Yeah, they're all hidden.

[mild pendant]

It may just be your polygons then

[loud ore]

Oh, I just had to delete the other models, and now it's working!

Hooray!

[mild pendant]

claps

[loud ore]

My avatar functions great on Quest as far as physics go, but it appears completely white and textureless. Is this a common issue? If so, what is the fix?

Might be a shader issue, but I used the VRC-provided diffuse shader, so I don't see why it wouldn't work

[normal nova]

You may have emission enabled with no emission texture specified?

[loud ore]

Where could I see if emission is enabled?

[loud ore]

Seems like Toon Lit works, so I guess I'm going with that

[oblique patio]

I think retopology -> data transfer weights -> retexture -> redo blendshapes and everything else is what they want us to do to reduce poly count withhout reducing quality too bad?

[upper yacht]

That's one way, yes.

[stray tangle]

dissolving edge loops is by far the best way to quickly reduce poly count

preserves topology, weights, and blendshapes

UV's will also be fine as long as you don't dissolve seams

[misty matrix]

i got it working but the tutorial i am following hasnt explained this ;-;

[stray tangle]

follow the 3 videos on the VRChat learning channel

watch them all in order

[mystic crescent]

VRC Traders doesn't have a good place to ask... So I'm gonna ask here how much do you guys think someone would charge to simply optimize a model if the polygon count is already fine, but it just needs combining + texture atlas?

For some reason every time I've tried to do it... Looks fine in Unity but breaks in game.

[lament garden]

you're trying to texture atlas?

If you know your way around blender a bit, you can try atlasing manually using this guide.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-LzjODZ0RbBooAOK5uszoIuvb8yfy4vYxwXsaDdZZg/edit

don't have to pay someone if you can learn it yourself for free c:

It also links you through to how to combine skinned meshes

[mystic crescent]

Yeah and fuse meshes together, I may need to reduce meshes for Quest but that'll be for later. Just wanna get my avatar from "poor" to "good" or higher rn.

[lament garden]

That guide is a step by step on what you need to do on what you're describing

First by joining your skinned meshes, then finish by running your texture atlas bake.

@mystic crescent

[mystic crescent]

Ah okay thanks!

[lament garden]

💜

[oblique patio]

@misty matrix if it's a new avatar, you have to set up the vrc avatar descriptor. I had that behaviour on an existing model when there was a missing "animator" or if the animator isn't linked to your model

[misty matrix]

Oh thank you!

[lime basin]

In blender my it says my avatar is 13,440 polys but in unity its saying higher idk why and i cant fix it

[high kiln]

press a in blender to select everything and then check tris count

[lime basin]

Still the same and nothing is hidden

[faint raptor]

https://youtu.be/pEBqcbhc8Eg

[stray tangle]

@lime basin did you add anything in Unity?

any props etc

[lime basin]

No

[stray tangle]

do you have a subdivision modifier on any of your meshes?

or any modifiers

(besides Armature)

[lime basin]

I used a decimation tool and it acts like i didnt use it

When i put it inside of unity the model looks the same as before i put a decimation tool on it

[daring summit]

Did you apply the decimation modifier?

[lime basin]

Yes under the wrench on the side

[tired fog]

https://gyazo.com/bf18f412f13b9dc529180b994d4e6e8d

any suggestions on how to improve these?

[tawdry drift]

it tells you how to improve them

[tired fog]

im not sure how to combine skinned mesh or transform phybone count means

[mild pendant]

You can do that through blender with the CATS plug-in

The physbone components just mean they would prefer only up to 4 physbones

[lament garden]

skinned mesh renderers (meshes with armatures are skinned) -> reduce these by joining together meshes that do not need to be separate, do this in blender

phys bone components -> try to reduce the amount of physbone components. Look for parts of your avatar that do not really need phys bones or reduce the amount of bone chains to use less phys bone components

phys bone transformation count -> Your phys bones components affect too many bones in your armature

[tired fog]

Awesome thanks a ton 👌

[hardy hound]

soo im trying to make the avatar quest compatible... i removed all the phys bones but it still gives me this? what this do?

what are they and how do i remove them?

[high kiln]

you look for components in that case they might be on bones

[hardy hound]

i see no components on any of the bones

[high kiln]

if u have multiple versions of avatar in scene disable all but no the one u try to upload

[hardy hound]

i only have one version of it in the scene

[high kiln]

u look at every bone and object in hierarchy?

[hardy hound]

yep

not a single component

[high kiln]

weird try maybe re-openning project

[hardy hound]

agh

aight fuck it imma keep it pc only then

ill just remake the model lowerpoly n shit

[high kiln]

u might be missing them somewhere

[radiant shadow]

click [select] it should highlight them and where they are

[hardy hound]

just selected the top layer... the entire thing

[rose ermine]

What the fuck did this last update to my favorite avatars eyes?!?!?!

Does anyone know why this happening or when it will be fixed? Is it somthing the creator has to do? It shouldn’t be seeing how it was completely fine a day ago before the update.

I’m about to lose my shit if this doesn’t get fixed. I’m so pissed right now.

[tawdry venture]

That looks like something the creator would have to fix.

That's a new one though, not seen cross-eyed avatars being caused by the latest update.

[ancient crystal]

:(

now i need to figure out where to remove 15 bones

[ruby isle]

Tongue, Tail, Ears

[ancient crystal]

i did it :)

[buoyant holly]

cool

[glossy pendant]

can someone help me with this issue I have been trying to make one of my avatars quest compatible

[buoyant holly]

basically you need to lower the polygon count and combining your materials together

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

[vast depot]

700,000 polygons?!
HOW!

[ruby isle]

Probably clones

[keen quiver]

Hi guys

is there a way to to combine textures into one within unity?

because i have a model i want to use but its already in unity package file format

and theres like 24 maps

[buoyant holly]

somewhere in the assets folder for the project would be a fbx for the avatar so you can combine stuff in blender

[worn yew]

whats the best way to handle toggles? blendshapes, separate skinned meshes? in terms of optimization

[buoyant holly]

bones are a decent option and apparently blendshapes are quite expensive as toggles

[ruby isle]

What Rainwolf said. Bones are the most optimized way to do toggles. Skinned Mesh renderers are second best. Blendshapes being the worst

[worn yew]

how are bone toggles set up? i forget

[ruby isle]

Assign a separate bone to the object you're toggling and in Unity scale the bone down to 0.0001 to toggle it off, scale to 1 to toggle on

[worn yew]

wouldnt the renderer still have the draw it?

[ruby isle]

Yes it would, but rendering is the least of VRChat's performance issues these days. CPU is the one you need to avoid, which Blendshapes take a huge hit to

[worn yew]

makes sense i suppose. when people do toggles like for shirts and have a blendshape on the body to shrink it to prevent clipping, is this really inefficient?

[ruby isle]

Yes it is one of the many reasons VRChat runs so poorly. Another thing to keep in mind: the more polygons you have the worse blendshapes will affect performance. So those 200k poly avatars with 45 toggles are for sure killing your fps

[worn yew]

any better way to prevent that sort of clipping?

using an alpha comes to mind but that seems expensive as well

[ruby isle]

Clipping?

Oh toggling clothes?

[worn yew]

yeah

[ruby isle]

Put it on a separate avatar. There's no reason a single avatar needs 5 different outfits

[buoyant holly]

especially now that full-body tracking calibration sticks around even when you switch avatars now

[worn yew]

i dont mean entirely separate outfits but like with a shirt toggle if the body remains underneath i imagine certain deformations will still cause clipping even if your weight painting is good

[ruby isle]

Blendshapes can still be used if you have a small amount of polys (<32k). Otherwise I think using a cutout shader and using alpha to cut that part of the mesh out might be the best idea I can think of

[worn yew]

ah ok

unless im mistaken and its possible to weightpaint it so that theres no clipping at all

[buoyant holly]

but probably the best would be see if you can weightpaint it properly

like it probably goes better if the topology of the clothing lines up with the body underneath

[worn yew]

yeah im not sure how possible that would be would clothes made in marvelous

[buoyant holly]

you would probably want to do retopology anyway on Marvelous Designer clothing

[worn yew]

yeah ik but even then the verts wouldnt line up perfectly and i feel like it would probably end up clipping

[lament garden]

That's interesting. So even if you were rendering all poly in your clothing at once, it's better to have it just shrink it down (through bones) so you can fit everything on few materials as possible?

Assuming it's not five separate outfits

[buoyant holly]

yes because extra triangles goes to the graphics card but more materials goes to the CPU

[ruby isle]

Well they both go to the GPU, but Unity can do multithreading for Draw Calls so it's not a huge issue anymore. It still makes a difference though

[buoyant holly]

the CPU still has to process the materials

[lament garden]

Most videos that teach you how to do this are always using separate skinned meshes lol. Well this is good to know.

[worn yew]

the cpu is the bottleneck with drawcalls is it not

[ruby isle]

It does but it does a better job at multithreading them than before

[buoyant holly]

yes

[lament garden]

A few extra non-dyanmic bones shouldn't hurt I guess

[buoyant holly]

yup

certainly less expensive than the materials

[worn yew]

ie i think all the work that has to be done after draw calls gets delayed until the buffer is flushed

but multithreading helps i guess? idk i forget

[ruby isle]

It definitely helps. I'm not saying draw calls don't cause lag anymore I'm just saying they're a lot better than they used to be a year ago

[worn yew]

i didnt realize blendshapes were so inefficient though

[buoyant holly]

of course it can be better but still be quite the relevant issue

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

[lament garden]

Most ppl don't I think

[buoyant holly]

the vrchat documentation relating to blend shapes

[worn yew]

how bad are things like twist bones?

[buoyant holly]

that's because the performance ranking system currently doesn't consider blendshapes

[lament garden]

A lot of avatar creators leave body sculpts in their blendshapes and ppl just turn them all to 100.

[lament garden]

Right

[buoyant holly]

like it would be more optimized if you apply the body modification blendshapes to the base shape in the modeling software if you're using it as a private Avatar

[lament garden]

Applying stuff to basis is nice

[buoyant holly]

like people also currently don't consider vRAM usage do to the lack of Avatar performance stat

[lament garden]

I wonder if it's possible to detect active blendshapes on upload and count them that way. Still doesn't stop ppl from changing them post upload though.

[worn yew]

always wondered why vram wasnt a consideration

[ruby isle]

Ehh most people just don't care about optimization at all

[worn yew]

makes the game laggy misery though

[ruby isle]

They just want the highest quality with the most features

[buoyant holly]

my main vrchat Avatar is good rank

and not poor or very poor on the quest

[ruby isle]

The only avatar I use is Good on both platforms