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Materials

Why are there so many material slots listed for this one piece of clothing?

Materials dictate how a specific part of your avatar is rendered. This includes things like texture, color, and lighting effects.

Material slots hold one material each. Depending on how your avatar is set up, you will have a varying amount of slots, allowing you to render each part of your model differently. It's important to keep the amount of material slots on an avatar low for good performance.

Shaders​

For any avatar, choosing an optimized shader is going to serve as an excellent foundation for your materials. Popular shaders like Liltoon, Mochie's Shaders, and Poiyomi Toon work excellently.

  • For Quest, you are limited to what's available in VRChat > Mobile. There's good reason for this!

  • If you are using Poiyomi, remember that it is a robust shader. For the capabilities it has, utilizing optimization features is a must! In-built features like shader locking come in super handy, disabling any features you may not use. Any features that you don't use, please be sure to uncheck and disable them. If an animated proprty is enabled but not used, it will add unnecessary load. Right-click these properties and uncheck the animated property.

    • When using Poiyomi's Shaders, it auto-locks upon upload. No need to hit the Lock button every time!

Culling​

Why can I see through one side of a wall?!

Avatar (and world) materials may appear one-sided due to a shader feature called back-face culling.

Usually when rendering an object, it is opaque. To alleviate half of the processing time rendering the other side of an object you'd normally not see, shaders can cull (remove) the backside of a mesh.

Quest shaders like Standard Lite and Toon Lit have this property to ensure optimized performance on mobile platforms. For PC shaders like Poiyomi Toon, this setting can be turned off.

Material Swaps​

If you'd like multiple textures for your model, you can always implement Material Swaps! You don't have to worry about being locked into one material look if the material they're using can't be animated. This will not add extra slots, but it will increase your VRAM usage, even if they are not directly visible. Use this wisely!

Methods​

Polytool​

Polytool is a paid Unity addon by Markoragon to simplify the process of optimizing materials. It can be used to merge and atlas textures and materials.

  • Atlassing refers to combining multiple textures onto one material, instead of having them split up among many materials.

Tuxedo​

Tuxedo is a tool that can assist with optimizing your materials from within Blender. It's completely free, but requires Blender experience. It can redo the UV maps to be combined, and bake the textures from the old UV to the new UV.

Manual Atlassing​

If you prefer to have more direct control over what polygons are removed, you can do this manually in Blender.

  • This can be done within the UV Editor, but it takes time and some precision. The texture itself will need to be done outside Blender in an image editor.