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 create a system for automatic character prefab automation. We will cover baking textures during reduction for URP and rebinding LODs to the original skeleton.

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 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 detail how our new Simplygon 10.3 release can be used to optimize Unity games.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

As a Midsummer gift to all game developers we are proud to release Simplygon 10.2! In this release we have worked on core improvements to our remesher, support for Unity's Universal Render Pipeline and High Definition Render Pipeline and lastly support for Unreal Engine 5.2.

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 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.

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.

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.

With Simplygon 10.0 we introduced tessellated attributes. In this post we'll showcase how to use them to speed up high resolution remeshings where we only care about surface details.

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.

Physics meshes are used in almost every 3d game. It is also very common that we want to know the different materials of the physics object for spawning certain impact effects. In this post will showcase how to optimize a physics mesh and keep material data in Unity as a texture.

There are many objects which have different types of materials; both transparent and opaque. Remeshing these with Simplygon requires extra care if one wants to preserve the transparency. In this example are going to optimize a house with glass windows, a quite common asset in many games.

This example show how you can use shading networks to recreate a normal map that had it's blue channel removed.

In this example we'll show how you can use the mapping image directly to do a custom material casting.

In this example we'll show how you can use material casting with a shading network to optimize a custom shader.

This post will give you a simple starting point for a remeshing script. We'll show how to turn an untextured glb asset, with material colors, into a textured proxy.

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.

If your asset pipeline holds different material setups for different assets, it can be useful to know how to make Simplygon cast materials correctly without having to know the exact setup for each asset. In this post we will guide you through a way of detecting and applying the correct material casters based on the input materials of the loaded scene. This guide is for the glTF file format, and different options is likely to be required for other file formats.

This blog post will show you how to write a simple remeshing python script in 3ds Max 2021, using the new Physical Material system.

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.

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.