Avatar Size Limits
Uploading a custom avatar is a great way to express yourself in VRChat. However, unoptimized avatars require more bandwidth, RAM, and VRAM, which decreases VRChat's performance.
This page explains VRChat's maximum download size and uncompressed size for avatars, and how to decrease your avatar's size.
Download size and uncompressed size
Here's how VRChat calculates your avatar's file size:
- When you build and upload an avatar, the VRChat SDK packages it into a Unity asset bundle and compresses it. The download size is the file size of your avatar's compressed asset bundle.
- When VRChat downloads an avatar, VRChat decompresses the asset bundle. The uncompressed size is the uncompressed bundle size.
When calculating your avatar's size, VRChat does not decompress individual assets! For example: If you set "Compression" to "High Quality" in a texture's import settings, it increases your avatar's download size and uncompressed size.
Avatar size limits
The maximum size limit depends on the platform you're playing on:
| Platform | Download Size | Uncompressed Size |
|---|---|---|
| Android | 10 MB | 40 MB |
| PC | 200 MB | 500 MB |
| PC (before Aug 16th)1 | 500 MB | 1.2 GB |
How to know if you are below these limits
Within the SDK it will inform you when making a build if your avatar is breaking either limit and prevent upload, post build it will remind you what the download / uncompressed size was along with the limit. When using Build & Test size limits are not enforced.
The android uncompressed size was not enforced in the SDK until 3.5.2, ensure you are at least on this version otherwise if you upload it will just fail server-side security checks! The reduced PC limits are enforced starting 3.7.0, so similarly if uploading to PC ensure you are at least on this version.
Within the client you can see both stats within the avatar details, either within the quick menu or main menu.
How to decrease your avatar's size
You can reduce the size of your avatar by optimizing your assets:
- Textures
- Reduce the max size in the texture import settings.
- Use fewer texture files by deleting/merging textures or materials.
- Resize your texture to a power of two (i.e. 512, 1024, 2048) or enable "Non-Power of 2" in the texture import settings to improve Unity's texture compression.
- Audio clips
- Shorten long clips.
- Reduce the quality of clips or enable "Force to Mono" in the Audio Clip import settings.
- Animation clips
- Reduce the number of keyframes.
- Blend shapes
- Remove unused blend shapes.
- Reduce the number of vertices affected by blend shapes, especially if your model has a high number of blend shapes.
You can find more optimization tips on the Avatar Optimizing Tips page.
Footnotes
-
Avatars uploaded prior to August 16th, 2024, are subject to older limits. A short grace period is present for new uploads past this date. On November 1st, older avatars will be forced to comply with the newer reduced limits. ↩