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When optimization gets practical

Customer stories, technical guides, and deep dives into 3D content optimization pipelines.

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Open world

Customer story: Scaling Forza Horizon 6 with Simplygon

Forza Horizon 6 welcomes players to Japan: a location of striking contrasts, where rural landscapes, mountain roads, wooded regions, industrial districts, and the iconic streets of Tokyo City come together in one spectacular driving experience. Simplygon became an important enabling technology in achieving that goal, supporting Playground Gamesʼ technical art and content teams across three key areas: Hierarchical Level of Detail, Projection Level of Detail, and Impostor Baking.

Best practices

How to optimize vegetation with Simplygon

In this blog, we will look at five different tools for automated vegetation asset optimization. We will go in order from those suitable for closer distances to those to be used when the vegetation is further away.

Batching

Handling alpha clipping with compute casters

In this blog we will have a look at how to create billboard impostors for assets using shaders with alpha clipping. The solution is to introduce a little code snippet using sg_DiscardValue and sg_PreviousValue in every sampler function.

Impostor

How to find correct settings for Billboard Cloud: Outer shell

Billboard clouds can be a lifesaver for assets where neither reduction or remeshing works. In this blog we will cover how to find good optimization settings for a Billboard Cloud: Outer Shell impostor.

Blender

How to create a cross billboard impostor

In this blog post, we’ll demonstrate how to use impostor from single view, along with some scene graph manipulation—specifically copying and rotating—to create a cross billboard. A cross billboard consists of two axis-aligned impostors, using the same texture in this example.

Unity

Optimizing vegetation assets with reduction and billboard pipeline

In this blog we will look at how to optimize vegetation assets with a combination of reduction and billboard cloud pipelines. We will also cover some texture import settings in Unity.

Unreal Engine

Optimize Unreal Engine levels with visibility culled Stand-Ins

This blog will cover how to use Stand-Ins in Unreal Engine to replace distant meshes with simple proxy meshes. We will use visibility culling to cull away any geometry not visible from the player's perspective.

Unreal Engine

How to build HLOD clusters for World Partition levels with Simplygon

In this post we'll showcase how to build HLODs for world partition levels in Unreal Engine 5 using Simplygon's new HLOD builder.

Open world

Introduction to terrain culling

In this blog we'll showcase how to cull away triangles that are below terrain. This is useful for aggregation and remeshing. We'll also showcase some common pitfalls.

Remeshing

Using your own shaders for material baking with Compute Casting

Today we will look at how to create proxies for object with custom shaders. We are going to use compute casters in combination with scene descriptions serialized to xml files to create a batch processor indented to process HLOD meshes. We'll also cover clipping planes.

Customer story

Customer story: LOD Authoring in Forza Horizon 5

In this post we will show how Forza Horizon 5, the latest award-winning open world racing game from Playground Games, is using Simplygon to run smoothly.

Open world

Customer Story: How Simplygon enables large scale optimization in Flight Simulator

The Flight Simulator game is in many aspects very complex from a rendering and data perspective in comparison with other games. The vast view distances, the detailed landmarks and the whole world as playable area makes the asset optimization strategy a very important part of the game production.