VRC Avatar Tutorials - Optimizing your Toggles!

hey guys this is retired Panda I hope you're having a great day uh I just wanted to go quickly go over toggles and how they work today hopefully it'll be a quick video quick 10 minutes but understanding your blend trees is pretty awesome and the way this works uh is pretty great in terms of optimization there going to save you a lot of CPU memory space um this is this was actually sent to me by hum freaky and the guys over at Refuge so this is slightly Dev this is just slightly notes and I'm not taking any credit for this but it's a great way to do U your toggles just cuz it'll save you a lot of performance if you've seen your average uh Avatar it's going to look like this there's a lot of layers on your avatar so understanding this blend tree is very important how they work uh the cool part about this blend is everything all your toggles will fit into one single animation layer and it's going to save you a lot of CPU memory so you want to make sure that you're following this method the other methods may seem easier or maybe seem easier to be do plugins but in terms of optimization this is the way to go so if you're taking a look at this image this image pretty much explains it all so the first blend tree acts as your animator controller and then the second layer is going to be your layers so it's going to be the individual animation layers you have for your typical onoff state for your toggles just like this you see the on off and then the piercing is the animation layer but basically this first layer acts as your FX controller this acts as your animation layer and this is your individual states okay and then the transitions will go in between the only real disadvantage to this is that your transitions don't really work so you'd have to figure out a way to animate your dissolves uh this really works with integers floats and booleans it's really cool so you can really set it up to however you want you can fit a lot of stuff so this not only works for toggles it'll work with for Hue shifters or anything that has a decimal placement so the first thing that we're going to go over is the animation controller and I have a little setup right here for one of her outfits this is from a client that sent me their Avatar uh but I have the main blend tree right here okay and this looks like a lot don't worry about any of this all you have to worry about is the weight so the weight in your blend trees acts the same way as your animation layers so your weight is set to one at all times just like any other animation layer make sure that when you're setting this up you click the plus button and then hit make sure that the weight on that layer is one or else it's not going to read okay next thing you're going to do is make a parameter it's going to be a float so if you just press hit hit the plus button click float and then make sure that weight is always set to one remember there's no need for it to be any other number so just make sure that weight is one and then when you're setting this up if you go to your expressions and then your parameters right here you see that I have all these Boolean set up and the way that VR chat is going to work is they're going to be set up as booleans here but in your parameters make sure to set them set them all up as floats as you can see I've done that for the enemity outfit toggles the all set up as floats and when they're all set up as floats the chat does this funny thing because they can't read if you remember from the previous video that VR Che can't actually read the Boolean as a true or false statement it always reads it as a zero or one and it'll push it that way so the data on this on these floats is actually read as a zero or one because the communication comes from your your par your expression parameters your expression parameters is telling you it's either a zero or a one and the enem skirt or the sleeve they're like oh it's going to be a zero or one and there's no decimal placement in between even though this value can be 0 2 it's always going to be a zero or one if you have it set up as a Boolean in your VR chat parameters okay and then we're going to go back to the layers we're going to go inter your blend tree okay so the organization Behind These blend trees is pretty so the main one the main blend tree is very simple you just want to make sure that you have the blend type set to direct and then when you do this you you're going to hit the plus button and add a new blend tree okay now this can either be your individual toggle or if you need some uh individual you know if you need organization this is a great way to do it then you can just set it up to direct if you're going to set it up as a folder right folder so if you name this folder three it can be named anything and if you change you want to make sure the blend type is direct and then another thing that you want to keep an eye out for and the main issue you're going to run into is you don't have your parameters for your blend Tre set correctly so right here whenever you make a new parameter it's going to automatically set to the first parameter that's available which is gesture left weight but you want to make sure that that's set to waight okay and then you're going to go to folder three and you're going to add a motion field if this is going to be your toggle your individual toggle just like I have set here for the anemon earrings you want to make sure that the blend type is on 1D and you're adding motion fields in which it'll let you add your animations into your blend tree if you're looking to use this as a folder you don't want to do that and you want to set it as direct you want to add a blend tree make sure that the parameters if you have another blend tree connected to your your blend tree that's above or parented above make sure it's always set set to weight okay so now it says weight one right and then this is your individual toggle so let's say we have a shirt okay and this is going to be your shirt toggle you want to add your motion fields and then you can add whatever animations are available to you for that shirt right and then make sure that on this your parameter is not set to weight in here but it's set to whatever you need so the last blend tree that you have the parameter is always going to be whatever toggle that you want the parameter to be so it's going to be either top skirt shoe belt shoe whatever you need it to be and the folders above or the blanes that are above it need to be setting your independent motion to weight and it's always going to be set to direct okay and you can easily set up a float parameter the same way because these are all really floats so you can have any value in between zero or one and have a decimal placement which allows you to use the Hue shifters which is pretty awesome so that means you that you can have your Hue shifters you can have your toggles all in one animation layer and that's pretty awesome and the only part that really sucks about setting the blend trees up this way is that you can't really test it in unity with your typical gesture manager emulator or anything like that you have to go into VR chat to test so the issue when I set this up actually is that I wasn't paying attention and I just added a bunch of blend trees and it was set to gesture left weight and if it's set to gesture left weight your toggles are not going to work so if I upload this right now and I believe it's already uploaded okay now that the Avatar is loaded you're going to see that she has her clothes on but in unity it's off so you can pretty much know that it's working because I have my parameters set to have this specific outfit on as default but just to double check if we open our hold R and open our radio wheel and then we go to to our clothing closet and then go to the anemone outfit you can see that if I toggle the skirt it's going to toggle the skirt and she also has an unders skirt which is why it's not toggling the unders skirt but she also has the top toggle the sleeve toggle the lace gloves and uh whatever else she has for this specific outfit um I don't have them all set up properly but if you look at the shoes see they're done and the toggles do work so that's the good news and then if you need any other togg added onto your um your avatar all you have to do is just add a blend tree and then for that blend tree you're going to add a motion and then here you're going to set a parameter for whatever you need so let's do the sleeve and then if we do sleeve going to say sleeve off and then sleeve on and you got to remember this is all within one layer so it's actually way easier to access because the way you need works is every time you edit something it's going to reset you to the top of your animation layers there a real pain in the ass so if you have this all set to one layer it'll actually be way easier for you to work in the long run this is a little bit more of a complicated process to set up this is a better way to do it it's just going to be easier to work once you're used to it of course you can just pop your plugin your typical plugin in and it'll set it up just like this with there an on and off State and then it's going to have an exit and understanding how these work is cool and all but in the long run having 30 animation layers isn't really ideal and it really sucks to have such a slow Avatar and people just don't enable your avatar because it's running so slow and I can see already that this is not going to work and the reason why is because this line is white so this is the common area you're going to run into if this Line's white your weight is most likely going to be stuck on Gest your left weight which you just switch Gest your weight and then this toggle will be enabled and that's all I wanted to talk about today just to make a quick video uh thank you guys for watching if you have any questions let me know uh or feel free to reach out thank you so much I hope you have a great rest your day I'll see you on the next video byebye

Channel: Retired Panda

Views: 94

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Id: 9mZyG3kGcj4

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023