A VNyan Plugin that automatically combines hair meshes on standard VRM-structured models to greatly improve performance

Table of contents

1. Compatibility Notice
2. Installation
3. Merging Hair Meshes
4. Usage
   1. Inbound Triggers
      1. Activate Plugin
      2. Deactivate Plugin

Compatibility Notice - READ BEFORE BUYING

In order for this plugin to function, it needs to be used on a model with the standard VRM object structure and hair meshes that were not already merged when the model was exported. It won't be able to work on models where the hair objects are located in a differently-named part of the model hierarchy, and (obviously) can't merge hair meshes that are already merged.

Installation

1. Grab the ZIP file for the latest release of the plugin from this store
2. In VNyan, make sure you've enabled "Allow 3rd party plugins" from the Settings menu.
3. Extract the contents of the ZIP file directly into your VNyan installation folder_. This will add the plugin files to your VNyan Items\Assemblies folders.
4. Launch VNyan, confirm that a button for the plugin now exists in your Plugins window!

Merging Hair Meshes

Many VRoid-provided hairstyles have more than one hundred individual hair sections! If a VRM model is exported without merging the hair into one mesh, this could triple the number of draw calls required to render your model every frame.
This can greatly reduce your framerate, especially if you're also streaming a CPU-intensive game.

When the plugin is active and a model is loaded in VNyan, it will look inside the model's structure for a GameObject called Hairs that contains a series of other GameObjects.
If it finds this, the individual meshes will be merged together into a single mesh, with one submesh for each different material found. The result is that the model's hair will look and function exactly the same, but with a greatly reduced number of draw calls and therefore improved performance.

This can be useful if you'd like to keep your model's hair separated so that you can customize different sections of it with different materials in Unity, while still minimizing the performance impact at show time!

Usage

When the plugin is activated, it works automatically on the currently-loaded model, and will also automatically apply to any other model that is loaded! There's also an option to automatically actvate the plugin when VNyan starts

Inbound Triggers

While entirely optional, this plugin listens to a couple triggers in case you need to activate or deativate in from the Node Graph for some reason. These simple triggers don't use any value sockets and are simply called by name.

Activate Plugin

Trigger Name: _xjho_enable

Activates the Hair Optimizer plugin if it isn't already activated. Functionally the same as clicking the "Activate" button in the plugin window.

Deactivate Plugin

Trigger Name: _xjho_disable

Deactivates the Hair Optimizer plugin if it is currently active. Functionally the same as clicking the "Deactivate" button in the plugin window.