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 look at how to use the quad reducer in Maya for character optimization. We'll look at both how to use it from the user interface but also from scripting.

We are proud to present our next major release. Simplygon 10.4 comes with improvements to the quad reducer, small parts remover and tessellated attributes. It also adds support for Unreal Engine 5.5, Maya 2025 and Blender 4.2.

In this post, we'll guide you through using Simplygon's scripting support in Maya to transfer data from Maya to Simplygon, run a process, and bring the results back into Maya. This tutorial will provide a solid foundation for applying tips and tricks from other blogs directly within Maya.

In Simplygon 10.3 we have focused on improving our integrations. Simplygon's Unreal Engine 5 plugin now comes with major updates for World Partition HLODs. Our Unity plugin has been overhauled to improve support. It also adds support for 3ds Max 2024, Maya 2024 and Blender 4.0.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this post we'll showcase how to reduce meshes containing both quads and triangles. We are going to use both the triangle reducer and new quad reducer along with vertex locks.

The Simplygon 10 release brings a couple of real hero features to the game. In this version we have added a quad reducer and processor that helps with protecting seams when optimizing modular content.

Simplygon has a pipeline specific tailored for vegetation optimization; Billboard Cloud for Vegetation. One of its features is an automatic trunk detector which can separate out the trunk from all leaves and run it in a separate reduction processor. However for this blog post we are going to do that manually to increase our control over the processing.

When creating physics meshes, it's typically a good idea to optimize the original heavily, to make calculations cheaper. You would also want to keep material information in the optimized object, in order to spawn appropriate effects, play correct sounds etc. Combining the vertex color caster and remeshing is a great starting point to achieve super-simple geometry that checks the boxes for good physics meshes.

Simplygon has a native plug-in within Maya that can handle exporting and importing assets. This is not only useful when you are working within the Maya UI, but can also come in handy if you want to batch process many assets and use the built-in functionality in Maya. In this post we will sho how you can set up a simple batch script that runs headless in Maya.

Using a visibility sphere can be a great way to save some polygons on assets that are not going to visible from all angles. In this article we will go through how you can use the SetCustomSphereCameraPath function in Simplygon to take away unnecessary polygons.

If you, like most others, are using kit bashing workflows when you are designing your levels volumetric culling can be really useful. This method will help you get rid of internal geometry, without affecting the exterior, nor require you to generate new materials. Apply it to assets that are built up from several small pieces and you will get rid of a lot of internal geometry, that's just hogging performance. In this post we will look deeper into this method.