Avatar Optimization
Optimizing your avatar or world or 3D asset is a massively important part of the avatar creation process. In general, increasing the render efficiency of your avatar means that it has less impact on your, and other people's framerates.
VRChat has performance ratings, but these are only rough guides to actual optimisation. They're not that bad when you actually understand optimization, but this article will focus on one thing: Getting the time it takes for your avatar to render down. It's possible to make an 'Excellent' avatar that is godawful, or a Very Poor avatar that's extremely performant.
The Process
Actually working on optimizing your avatar will be a balancing act between how many shits you give, what kind of environment you expect to use the avatar in, and how many features you want.
It's recommended to focus your efforts on making appropriate avatars, rather than min-maxing optimisation every time. For example, an avatar you're going to use in a crowded instance you will definitely want to optimise as much as you can, else you'll be performance blocked and no-one will see your cute avatar. For instances where it's just a few people... or just two people.... then you can basically not optimise at all and be fine. Plus, some optimisaiton is harder than others. For most avatars doing the quick wins can get you a lot of extra frames for little effort.
Optimisation covers both blender and unity since the final asset is built in both. Some things are kind of blended between editors.
Focus areas:
- Number of distinct mesh objects
- Vertex Count (number of polygons)
- Texture Size
- Material Quantity
- Shader settings
- Use of Blendshapes on high poly-count meshes
- Number of bones
- Physbones (previously dynamic bones) count
- Number of animator controller layers
- Other crap added (particles, Lights, etc)
The main render/resources to be focused on are:
- VRAM / RAM usage
- GPU Frametime / Framerate (How long the avatar actually takes your GPU to render)
- CPU Frametime (How long the CPU takes to go through all the avatar's logic and drawcalls and shit)
- Download size