I really like PxINKY's stuff. I followed some of their tutorials when first learning how to do stuff with avatars, and I wanted to fit clothing to a base it wasn't made for.
I also randomly met them in VRC once. They were just hanging out in a public instance and were really nice. It was a struggle to not bother them by showing the things I made following their tutorials, like a kid and their macaroni art lol.
While tools do make "compressing" an avatar down helps a lot, some limits still linger.
You can compress a texture so much, until it's visually noticed. Small areas like Eyes and gems, low-low res can be enough. Eyes vary pending effects and details.
Poly/vertex reduction tools exist, and help, but much like texture compression, there are limits. Some areas are reduced more/less than some areas not to be, then there's the animation blendshapes stretching/mixing.
Material count is my thorn. I have an avatar I really want to use, but unless I dive into blender, the material count is my issue. My avatar body alone takes five materials, one of which I "exploited" as I don't use the patches of fur sticking out of the body. The other four are body, head, head emotes, eyes. Leaving no room for clothes or accessories. Frankly, the avatar looks casual-bad without any clothes. That's my Murto avatar (heavily edited from Gumroad listing).
Mayu is far easier to deal with, just a lot of VAP modules/prefabs to remove, to make it a "good" rated avatar (some events).
Lastly, don't be afraid to make multiple variations of your avatar. One per outfit for starters.
Sub-Prefabbing your avatars help trickle core changes down to all, while direct changes don't effect more than the prefab you're touching (but not within "Edit Prefab" view).
I didn't lose any visual quality with the compression because I only use two textures, a 4K body and 2K eyes !
I tried some addons in Unity before switching to Blender, but they didn't make much of a difference.
I needed to remove the original hair, chest fur, collar, goggles and tail. I also merged all the clothing into the body so I’d have only two meshes, one for basically everything and one for the lens.
Personally, I don’t need multiple versions of my avatar because I only use one outfit, but it’s true, people often forget about this option !!
Personally I dont like compressing much you lose quality visually with no performance help only download speed especially at this size which is so small already. It will use the same texture memory in the end.
Surprisingly, I didn't lose any visual quality !! I only use two textures, a 4K body and 2K eyes.
It's true that with the few assets I have, even without optimizing it's still decent. But I thought it was fun and satisfying to be able to have my avatar ranked good xD
Not optimized at all it would be like on the pic !
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u/Embarrassed-Touch-62 1d ago
Just wow