In this blog post, we will guide you through the art of safeguarding specific materials during mesh reduction. Imagine scenarios where preserving intricate details, such as character faces or dynamic materials like cloth, is crucial to maintaining the overall visual appeal of your 3D models.

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.

This is the first of a series of posts where we dig deeper into how to script with Simplygon. In this post we will explore four levels of scripting depth, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Characters constructed of modular pieces can suffer from a problem after they are optimized. If the seams connecting the different parts are not matching each other, you can end up with visual artefacts. This blog post will show how you can use the modular seams feature of Simplygon to prevent these issues.

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 introduction blog we'll look at how to optimize a skinned character with the quad reducer.

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 will cover how to generate meshes using NVIDIAs new micro-mesh technology with Simplygon. We will create a batch processor for kit-bashed 3d scanned content indented to save disc space and optimize render performance.

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 post we'll cover how to find the correct settings for a scripted pipeline by exporting a pipeline created using the user interface.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This post will demonstrate how to access the Simplygon Python scripting API through our Houdini plugin. We are going to create a custom geometry node running Simplygon's reduction processor and pass parameters from Houdini's UI to it.

In this blog post we are going to optimize a game character in 3ds Max. We are going to use two sets of vertex colors; one which the game utilized and one which control the reduction.

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.

A lot of unexpected Simplygon behavior is caused by broken assets. This blog post is about how to use our scene validator to validate your assets.

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.

In this post we will take the script created in previous blog post and turn it into a simple Blender Add-on with a basic user interface. That allows us to easily share it and makes it easy to use for non-programmers.

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

The following article covers the basic of how to automate your Simplygon driven content pipeline using python in UE4

Want to make those scanned assets more lightweight and ready to be used in your game or web application? This post will show how you can use Simplygon's remesher to produce heavily optimized versions of your scan data. It will also dig in on how to create a repeatable pipeline with which you can process large amounts of similar assets.

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.

This blog will give you a simple starting point into scripting with Simplygon's Python API in Blender.

This (Python) example demonstrates how to use the Visibility Culling feature to remove geometry that is not visible from a specific set of cameras. The cameras are automatically generated by Simplygon based on a user-specified visibility volume / geometry.

A crucial part of an automatic pipeline is the ability to distribute processes. With that you can complete large batches of assets much faster than if you're running them on a single machine. Distribution is a first class citizen of the Simplygon API, and in this post we will explore how to build a simple distribution over Simplygon Grid using Python.

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 cases where you know from which angles an asset will be viewed, you can use that information to optimize the assets accordingly. For example, side scene geometry in the level that's only going to be seen from the playing field. Rather the building assets custom for that case, you could just use what you got and optimize it through cameras scattered in the player area. You can instruct Simplygon to cull anything fully occluded, but the visibility information can also be guide the reducer and the material caster to keep more where the geometry is most visible.

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 Simplygon Python and C# APIs are wrappers around the core C++ library that contains all the algorithms and tools. This means that the ways of working with the API is inherited from the C++ library. Both in Python and C# there are some things that might seem odd at first, and this post will shed some light on these things.

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.

Many scripted Simplygon workflows starts with a pipeline that is exported from one of our integrations. In this post will give you a very straight forward step by step on how to create a scripted optimization with cascaded pipelines.

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.

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.