Blend Shapes and Skinning Preservation

Simplygon’s optimization technology is the cornerstone of many AAA games’ character optimization pipelines. Many of our tools are specifically designed to put extra care into preserving skinning data to ensure your characters look their best after optimization.

• The Triangle Reducer takes skinning data into account when optimizing skinned assets. This means deformation zones will keep more of the original geometry to ensure animations look good. During triangle reduction blend shapes are preserved in 3ds Max (where they are known as Morph targets), Maya and Unreal Engine.
• Skinning data is kept intact during Object Aggregation which enables you to optimize draw calls on skinned meshes automatically.
• The Remesher and Occlussion Mesh Processor have a setting for transferring skinning data to the optimized proxy mesh.

Simplygon’s preservation of skinning data and blend shapes allows you to create a fully automated character optimization pipeline. It eliminates the need to do costly manual work after optimization, such as reskinning or rerigging the assets.

Simplygon’s optimization technology has been used for over 16 years in the video game industry and it is considered the standard of automated character optimization. It is used in some of the largest AAA game productions daily and we are constantly improving it in tight collaborations with customers all over the world.

If you are interested in evaluating how our technology can automatically optimize your game’s characters, please contact us for an evaluation.