Older preview #1 videos:
YouTube video here.
Vimeo video here.
Features
Written as native plugin for ultimate speed (requires Unity Pro)
Runs inside editor
Single or multiple file conversion (batch)
Adjustments to the quality of reduction can be previewed live
Ability to generate multiple LODs from a single higher resolution mesh to support the new LODGroup in 3.5 right from the conversion window
Ability to adjust settings from the root of a mesh that propagates to all meshes
Root adjustments can be absolute or relative, with relative adjustments preserving any manual adjustments that were previously made
Out-of-the-box settings ensure no holes appear in meshes even at low quality
Introductory price of only $100, price will go up later on
For those that are curious, the plugin is based on Balancer and if you want to see how it will work on your meshes, you can try out the demo or lite version in their site.
At this point it doesn’t reduce textures since the normal import setting on textures generates mipmaps and it will do the right thing already in most cases. If you have a specific use-case where this doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll see if it’s something we should add.
One thing I think that could be useful is to have the LOD stages generated from the tags or layers that the objects belong to.
For instance if I tag 20 objects with high poly, 40 with medium poly, and 30 with low poly, than it would generate highly reduced versions for the 20 objects, slightly reduced versions for the 40 objects and no reduction for the 30 objects.
Basically I’m thinking about ways to optimize large scenes with many objects automatically, just before compiling for iOS.
The conversion window shown in the demo will have some additional things added, namely it will allow you to choose how many LODs to generate, and at what targeted qualities. The plugin will also include a “mesh browser” that basically allows you to configure these same things and apply the settings to a set of files.
But at this point, the LODs must be generated during edit time, not build time. And you’ll have to link them to an LODGroup attached to a GameObject as per how it works now in 3.5. Currently the LODGroup doesn’t expose a public API, so I can’t set these for you automatically.
WOW ! Great !
I always had to use another software to reduce the polygons… And I couldn’t know if it is OK in Unity !
With your plugin, it will be more efficient immediately !
Congratulations !
This looks great! I have a system in Unity that creates meshes, most of the time 65.000+ triangles so I have to export and optimize in a modeling app first. Will your tool be able to take care of this or will it require a mesh input?
The plugin is designed to work with any object that has a MeshFilter or SkinnedMeshRenderer attached to it. But you can also manually put the controller on an object of your choice, link it’s Mesh field with a mesh somewhere, and it will be able to reduce that too (I think :-).
But if you generate prefabs (model prefab, user prefab, model instance prefab or user instance prefab) then these will work fully with all the plugin features and windows.
As mentioned above, if you’re unsure it would work, you could supply me with a sample and I can try it out and let you know if it worked or not.
You mentioned it works with mesh or skinnedmesh - In the skinned case, do animations survive, or is it a case of experimentation to see the end result?
Thanks for your post. Yes, the animations survive (or it’s a bug
Bone weights, colors, uv, uv2 and tangents are all supported in the reduced mesh. That said, the remapping may not always do what you think. This plugin never moves vertices, it only removes vertices and collapses faces. So for a given vertice, it’s color, uvs, bone weights, etc. are fixed. There might be use cases where somebody would want to average some of the data, but I haven’t found such a clear case yet.
