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.

In this blog, we'll explore how to control LOD switch distances in Unreal Engine when using Simplygon's LOD Recipes. We'll look at both automatically calculated switch distances and how to override these with manual switch distances when needed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 related to impostors.

In this post we'll showcase how to merge the texture of a remeshed proxy into the original texture. This allows you to use the remesher without requirement of introducing a new material and texture set.

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 post we'll showcase how to automate LOD creation for Unity prefabs. This allows us to optimize our game with (almost) the click of a button.

In this blog post we will look at two shading tricks that will increase visual quality of vegetation impostors; fading of orthogonal planes and noising of normals.

In this post we will look at how to cast textures for custom shaders in Unity using compute casters. This is very useful if you have non-standard shaders that use custom texture channels.

In this blog we'll showcase how the surface mapper enables reusing the same model as LOD levels for multiple models with different topology. It also showcase how you can bake materials to an self supplied proxy model.

In this blog we'll create a Unity tool similar to our Unreal Engine plugin's Stand-In feature. It can be of great use to optimize objects in backgrounds of video games.

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.

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

In this blog we'll detail how our new Simplygon 10.3 release can be used to optimize Unity games.

Generate tight fitting impostor geometries around the opaque areas based on the input opacity map.

In this blog post we will take a look at how material casting for Unity HDRP render pipeline allows us to create extremely lightweight impostors. We are also going to cover how to hide LOD pops with cross fading.

In this blog we'll have a look at the flipbook impostor and how to use it in Unreal Engine. We are going to cover what the up and down sides of it are as well as some tips and tricks how to change parameters and materials on generated LODs in Unreal Engine.

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.