>>335020751
you need to learn the difference between "what is actually optimal for your cpu/gpu" versus "what will make vrchat display your avatar as green(good performance) or red(poor performance)"

fun fact the two are not correlated

tldr forcing your pc to render more stuff will give your cpu/gpu a harder time. if you use a shape key to scale something, all of that thing's polygons are still on your screen and still have to be rendered every single frame.
if you toggle off the mesh (using the "is active" in unity) it basically doesn't get drawn at all, saving your cpu/gpu some work.

mesh toggle: good for cpu/gpu (actual performance), but bad for vrchat performance rating (vrchat rates having many separate meshes a problem, even though it literally isn't)

shape keys: bad for cpu/gpu (kills everyone's performance), but will make vrchat show your avatar as green(optimized), because vrchat is retarded and doesn't take shape keys into account in its performance rating