I think deciding not to use shadow shaders at all for your main setup is a very smart way to keep things running smoothly. Your idea to only activate '影領域' locally for pictures makes total sense!

Based on your insights, I think I will try to balance them out: using 'ふんわり影シェーダー' for indoor settings or toon-style modifications, and switching to 'リアル影' for outdoor scenes or avatars with more revealing outfits. On top of that, I'm planning to upload my main photography avatar as a 'test avatar' to keep everything as optimized as possible.

Thank you again for your incredible kindness and for sharing your knowledge with me. Hope you have a wonderful time in VRChat!

You can check out this note. At first, I bought funwari shader because I thought it would be lighter than PCSS, but after reading it, I decided to stop using any shadow shaders.
(I using 影領域 for only taking picture tho since it’s not a shader and I active it on local)

@reisaku said:

It's heavier than PCSS btw.

Thank you so much for taking the time to update this to v1.31, especially since you don't use it anymore. I'm incredibly grateful!

If you don't mind me asking, I was quite interested in your mention of it being heavier than PCSS. Out of pure curiosity, could you tell me a bit more about that or where I could look up the details? I'd love to know for my future reference.

It's heavier than PCSS btw.