When working with 3D assets, optimizing materials can significantly improve performance, especially in game development and real-time rendering. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to merge materials in Maya using Simplygon. We’ll cover both the manual process through the UI and a more automated approach, helping you set up an efficient optimization pipeline. Whether you're looking to speed up your workflow or prepare assets for large-scale production, this guide will help you get started.

In this blog we will have a first look at the new Simplygon Subsystem import and export API for Unreal Engine and how to use it using Python. We will use it to aggregate and remove internal geometry of a collection of Static Mesh Actors.

In this blog we'll showcase how to keep original materials during material merging. This enables you to keep materials that require special shaders separated during optimization.

In this blog we'll showcase how to use a mapping image with multiple output materials. This enables you to perform material merging on an asset with both opaque and transparent materials.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this spooky blog post we will optimize away spider web decals from a scene. While it might seem unfitting given the release date of this post it is a well-known fact that most of the spider webs being displayed are not real and just for decoration.

In Simplygon, you have two different options when it comes to transferring materials from source to optimized geometry. You can either cast the materials pixel for pixel, or merge the materials using the existing UVs. This makes for some interesting choices that we will explore in this post.

In this post we will show you how to create a simple python script that generates a hollow shell. This can help you to optimize kitbashed content that typically is riddled with internal geometry which causes all kinds of performance hits. The resulting hollow shell will have all its internal geometry removed, while the object collection looks exactly the same from the outside. Perfect as a final step to clean up your creation and make it game ready.