ASSIST: Skin textures performance (Patreon)

Posting this in connection to a discussion on textures & performance, I figured it might be useful to other people too.

There are lots of cool vam skins but since performance in VAM is negatively impacted by so many things, using 4k or 8k skins that are like 100mb in total size might not be practical for most.

One trick I've been doing to help with that is to optimize the textures I like & use often and turn down the quality a bit to like 80 on the Diffuse images (the actual skin) & turn it down considerably on normal, gloss & specular which are usually overkill, to like 50 or lower using GIMP (free alternative to photoshop). You can just open the images with that and then export them as jpg and you can select the quality level. Also if they're .png and don't have transparency (only the decals do, like tattoos,makeups etc), converting them to jpg helps a lot with the size to.

Here's an example of the 4k skin6 by Riddler, the original is 112mb, the optimized version is 11mb. Side by side comparison in the post images, I'll let you guys figure out which is which.

Local skin textures go in \Custom\Atom\Person\Textures.

Feel free to use the skin if you want, just credit Riddler for the original https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/skin-6.16516/