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When optimization gets practical

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

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Blender

Remapping Materials in Blender after Simplygon Processing

Simplygon is using Blender glTF exporter/importer as an intermediate format when processing objects. The glTF importer creates new materials even if identical materials already exist in the scene, resulting in a duplication of materials when reduction processes brought back into Bleder. To overcome this limitation and ensure material continuity, we can employ a Python script that remaps materials from the processed objects to their original counterparts

Maya

Customize your Simplygon pipelines

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.

3ds Max

Customer Story: How Simplygon helped bringing Anno 1800 to PS5 and Xbox

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.

Unity

Calculating LOD transitions when using triangle ratio as reduction target

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.

Blender

Bake vertex colors into textures

In this blog we'll look at how to bake vertex colors into textures. Use case for this is certain phot scanned assets where color data is saved into vertex colors. We'll look at how to do this with both the remesher and aggregator pipeline. We'll also cover how to create a shading network for vertex colored materials as well as how to remove vertex colors from model post processing.

Best practices

Aggregation and remeshing - Evaluating the best method for proxy creation

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.

Best practices

Automating your asset pipeline

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.

Reduction

Introducing our high density reducer

In this post we will take a look at the new high density reducer we introduced in Simplygon 10.1. It's main intention is to be used with very high poly sculpted models and 3d scanned assets. We are going to compare the process quality and time to our ordinary reducer.

Reduction

What's new in Simplygon 10.1

In Simplygon 10.1 we have focused on improving the new features added in 10.0, as well as adding new exciting features. The headline of the release is definately shader casting which we hope will make it much easier for developers to bake materials and textures. We have also added a high density reducer to tackle very high poly scanned and sculpted meshes.

Unity

Reuse skeletons for Unity LODGroup

In this holiday themed blog post we'll showcase how to reuse skeletons for different LOD levels in Unity. As an extra spice we will also throw in Bone Reduction for our last LOD level.

Best practices

Troubleshooting gamma issues

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.

Maya

Protecting features using vertex locks and weights

Sometimes you want the ability to protect certain features in your assets. Simplygon provides you with the ability to use either vertex weights or locks to direct the optimization process to keep polygons where you want.