Removing Unnecessary Blendshapes for VRChat Avatars

You can find the glasses used in this video here:
blizzball.gumr...
VRChat is finally cracking down on VRAM usage on avatars, yay!
I created the Universal Glasses on Gumroad as a way for people without blender expreience to have a customizable accessory that will fit all of their models. It uses blendshapes to do so, which uses more VRAM, though for a small mesh like this it is negligible.
I recorded this video to act as a tutorial for optimizing those glasses while still keeping the customizability of them. I did not originally plan to upload it, but the same idea can be applied to unused blendshapes on your avatar meshes themselves. This would have a much larger impact on total VRAM usage if more creators start to set their blendshape values in Blender, and it's not much harder than doing it in Unity!
DISCLAIMER: Always have a backup project when changing one of the fbx files in your unity project, especially if it has PhysBones or animations. Unity often likes to break these components or crumple meshes when you reimport an fbx file with even slight changes.
It is often easier to import a new fbx with a different name and recreate your scene!

[@Danxide]

I hope you meet someone who is good-looking, intelligent, and cultured

[@thatautogarage3644]

This is a very nice tutorial on optimizing of Shapekeys but at the same time I'm confused to why your showing people to add it in unity instead of having it static with the body and hiding the mesh (when you don't want to use) with the alpha or cutout slider. Regardless it's nice to see someone showing actual optimization tips that don't involve half ass unity packages.

[@BlizzardSnowMew]

There’s a little checkmark associated with every Unity Game Object to mark them as inactive. When you mark something as inactive it’s no longer rendering, versus if you just hide it or make it invisible it’s still rendering you just can’t see it. If you haven’t been making toggles by using the inactive toggle built into Unity, I recommend looking into it!
I made the glasses with the intention of having them fit any avatar, rather than having to buy or search for multiple pairs. The video is a supplementary just to show the people that want to how to make them as optimized as any static pair of glasses.
The same knowledge could be used on an avatar to remove bow shapes that change body shape, hair, etc. Removing blend shapes that affect whole avatars and not just small assets can make a decent difference in game!

[@BlizzardSnowMew]

And thanks! I just recently uploaded a hoodie for the Tiger Bee that I’m still releasing updates for. I’m going try and consistently upload to GumRoad now.
Even if you’re not interested in anything there, I started a channel that will be dedicated to setups for anything that’s more complicated than your typical clothing asset. Currently there are Quest and PC setup tutorial videos for that. The PC one covers parent constraints and manually merging animator controllers. The Quest one covers Physbone ignore transforms, quest material setup, merging animator controllers with the Avatars 3.0 Plugin, and the requirements for matching parameter lists when uploading the same avatar to both PC and Quest.
If you’re interested in avatar creation content, I’ll upload videos there in the future for any more complicated assets I make!
youtube.com/@BlizzballCreates