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First, we have the albedo map. The albedo map is uninteresting, but very important. It's where the colours of your material come from! What you'd put here is the same kind of texture that other engines would call a colour or diffuse map. To go into extra detai...

Next, we have the normal map. The normal map defines details on the surface of the material seperate to those of the mesh.  If you're reading this guide, you might not know what a normal is. Let me explain it for you! You see, meshes are made up of vertices, ...

Specular maps are a tricky subject. Many write ups explaining specular maps focus on how a specific game or engine handles them, and the specific compromises and simplifications inherent to them. One thing is clear, though, specular maps focus on shiny stuff. ...

Occlusion Maps Next up are occlusion maps. These maps contain ambient shadows - the cracks and crevices that are normally too small for light to reach unless it's shone directly into them. For single models like props and characters, you can bake these using...

Detail Mask Next up is the detail mask, which controls how the detail map in the next section is applied. Where the detail mask is black, the detail map won't be applied. This lets you have a detail map that affects some parts of your mesh, but not others. I...

How do these textures look? Well, I've included a sample right here.  Here is a section of cloth from a material with albedo, normal, specular, smoothness, and occlusion maps, using Materialise to render it shaded on the left.   You can see that the cloth...

When using the Standard shader, it expects the metallic and smoothness map to be elements of the same texture. You can also combine the occlusion map and detail mask into the same texture. Having all these elements be part of the same texture saves memory, so ...

For world creators, Materialise is great. What is it? It's a tool that, given a simple tiling texture, can create all these maps with some clicking and tweaking! All this came from one image. Isn't that amazing? You can download Materialize from the Boundin...

The Standard shader is really misunderstood in VRchat. I've heard many people curse and blame Standard for all kinds of visual issues, but it's just a complicated tool that's easy to use wrong. You can get great results from it. It's efficient and easy to tune...

Occlusion in a Unity scene is data that divides the world into chunks containing smaller and smaller chunks of space. In each of these sections, the data for what is and isn't visible from each section is recorded. Unity takes this data and uses it to hide thi...

Occlusion culling treats static objects (like the map) and dynamic objects (like players and pickups) separately. Static objects can hide and be hidden. (You don't always want static objects to do both.) They'll be baked into the data and can't be changed at ...

By default, Unity will put the entire scene into one big chunk of space, called a View Volumes. If you place an Occlusion Area into the scene, Unity will only calculate occlusion data for the inside of that space, which can make the occlusion data much smalle...

The Devouring is a large map in VRC that uses occlusion culling to squeeze the most performance out of Unity. Here is some advice from its developers. Don't forget, occlusion is calculated using Opaque mesh renderers as occluders. Transparent materials will...

Occlusion Portals Occlusion Portals are occluders that can be turned off and on and affect occlusion. If you have a large object in your scene that can open/close, like a door or toggle-able object, you can place an occlusion portal alongside it and open/clos...

A reflection probe captures an image of the world around it and stores it into a "cubemap" - a six-sided texture that can fill every side of a cube. Each side of the texture is square, and of the same resolution. This means a "512" resolution probe is six 512...

Reflection probes capture an image of their surroundings into a texture. This means a few things A higher resolution probe is much sharper, but much much bigger, due to containing six textures. The texture is static. It can't change. It won't be updated if t...

Supersampled Probes When baking a probe at a low resolution, the result can look a bit low-res. This is because the probe is rendered at that low resolution before it's saved. If you bake the probe at a higher resolution, and then set the Max Size lower on th...