In this introduction blog we'll look at how to optimize a low poly skinned character with the Simplygon plugin for 3ds Max.

For this customer story we'll share the talk we did at GDC 2023 together with Fatshark. We'll cover the basics of 3d optimization and then how those concepts where applied in the making of Warhammer 40k: Darktide.

In this blog we'll look at different issues with material baking in Unreal Engine and their solutions. As example we will optimize draw calls by create a stand-in replacement of a group of objects. We are going to look at how to reuse UV-space, separate out troublesome material nodes and how to debug texture baking.

In this post we'll cover how to find the correct settings for a scripted pipeline by exporting a pipeline created using the user interface.

This blog will cover how to customize your Simplygon pipelines in 3ds Max, Maya, Unity and Blender. Customizing pipelines allows you to share presets for different kinds of assets with your team. Defining pipelines for different asset categories can be seen as a step to fully automating your asset pipeline.

Anno 1800 is a city-building game from Ubisoft Mainz that was released in 2019 for PC. It features a massive world with huge islands, dense forests and hundreds of unique and beautiful buildings that form anything from small villages to gigantic cities. There’s a wide range of assets, small fishing huts, noble four-storey-tall residences, breathtaking skyscrapers, factories, monuments and more. Thanks to its great initial success and continuing support of the live-game with DLCs and cosmetic DLCs, the decision was made that the title should launch on console, too. This was a huge undertaking but with Simplygon's help it turned into a great success.

This blog covers how to use GetResultDeviation to calculate when to LOD transition. In normal case we strongly recommend to use screen size or max deviation as reduction target, but if you have a specific need which request reduction ratio or exact triangle count this blog will describe how to calculate when to switch to that LOD. We are going to use this to populate a Unity LODComponent. We are also going cover how to reuse materials from LOD0 automatically.

After reading this blog post, you will have a framework to evaluate the best method to create proxies for your game. The post will compare the remeshing and aggregation methods for generating proxies for your asset collection, and delve deeper into how to decide which method is best for your game.

This blog post describes how to optimize content using Simplygon's SDK for various platforms with automation. It includes a guide on creating an LOD chain in Maya and scripting it for multiple assets, and highlights the benefits of using screen size optimization. The post also gives suggestions for further challenges to tackle in the pipeline.

If you have processed assets in Simplygon and the output had another color shade, then this post is for you. In this post we'll go through how to detect and solve gamma issues.

In this post we are going to bake textures into vertex colors. This is useful for LODs which are really far away, where we just want some color. In order to do this, we need to disable sRBG on all texture nodes in the scene. So we'll cover how to traverse shader network as well.

A lot of unexpected Simplygon behavior is caused by broken assets. This blog post is about how to use our scene validator to validate your assets.

In this post we will create a proxy for an interior design asset using the 3ds Max Simplygon plugin. We will both use the basic remeshing with material baking template but also the advanced remeshing template to unlock some advanced optimization settings.

In this example we will discuss how to utilize the remeshing processor for generating a grid of HLOD terrain chunks from a large terrain input geometry. In doing so, we'll go over some basic geometry manipulation, remeshing fundamentals, and advanced usage of some remeshing processor functionality.

Running reduction with multiple Reduction targets and Stop conditions can be a flexible way to run the same reduction settings on a batch of assets targeting a certain quality while simultaneously enforcing a strict performance goal.

Balancing performance with visual quality by making sure the triangle budget of the LODs end up in the right place.

If your asset pipeline holds different material setups for different assets, it can be useful to know how to make Simplygon cast materials correctly without having to know the exact setup for each asset. In this post we will guide you through a way of detecting and applying the correct material casters based on the input materials of the loaded scene. This guide is for the glTF file format, and different options is likely to be required for other file formats.

The billboard cloud aims to replace the objects in a scene with a view independent set of billboards. The Billboard mode: Outer shell makes the planes fit to the outer shell of objects, as opposed to Billboard mode: Foliage.

The billboard cloud aims to replace the objects in a scene with a view independent set of billboards. For vegetation assets the "Billboard mode" should be set to "Foliage" . This mode allows the billboards to represent the foliage volume with intersecting planes. The leaves should map to the billboards in a manner that keeps the perception of volume and silhouette close to the original tree.

The Simplygon Python and C# APIs are wrappers around the core C++ library that contains all the algorithms and tools. This means that the ways of working with the API is inherited from the C++ library. Both in Python and C# there are some things that might seem odd at first, and this post will shed some light on these things.

In the Simplygon SDK you can find a range of options in the area of geometry culling. You can cull geometry volumetrically, use custom cameras, distribute cameras along a spherical surface, use occluders and clipping geometry. All these options can be combined in different manners to achieve the results that you are looking for. In a series of posts we'll go through the different options you have at your disposal. We'll explain how you use them and in what cases the different options comes into play.