VRChat’s First Official Optimization Guide

Picture of Tupper taken by Ck TheS0rr0w.

Recently, VRChat Inc. published an optimization tips considered to be the first guide officially made by VRChat. The tips were most likely mentioned specially for content creators working on public avatars and avatar worlds.

On November 15th, Tupper updated the “Public World Request” channel on the VRChat Discord server, which is now filled with tips and explanations about optimization every content creator should be aware of before publishing their world. There’s a lot of things covered in the message, but the most common optimization rules and issues were highlighted in their “Avatar Optimizing Tips”, which may be extremely important, since every creator of a public world with avatar pedestals will have to get their work approved by the moderators based on these rules.

According to VRChat, “Dynamic Bone Colliders multiply the complexity of the calculation needed roughly by a factor of two.” They said, “That means if you have a skirt with 48 affected transforms and a collider on each hand, it is a similar performance cost to having 144 affected Dynamic transforms. As such, VRChat strongly recommends against the use of Dynamic Bone Colliders. If you do use them, limit the number to one or two at most.”

If your avatars aren’t optimized well enough for VRChat, eventually, it may lead to a punishment. As Tupper informed us, the list of penalties in general is pretty much the same, “If a world is marked with "Performance Issue" 3 times in a row, there will be a 1 week delay before it will be checked again; Terms of Service violations will incur a 1 week penalty until next review; if a world violating the Terms of Service is submitted repeatedly by the same user, the user may suffer moderation action.” On top of that, they asked creators to avoid expensive shaders and use a few others instead, including shaders by Cubed, Xiexe, and NoeNoe.

There are still a few more issues mentioned in the doc, but to put it shortly, don’t use any light sources, reduce the number of meshes and materials, make your avatar as boneless as possible, and you should be good to go.