Poly Few | Mesh Simplifier and Automatic LOD Generator

The performance of any 3d application is highly dependent on the total number of polygons that the GPU has to process per frame in a 3d scene. If you have a complex scene containing high polygon 3d models with a lot meshes that use a lot of different materials, the overall performance of your game will suffer. Poly few is a complete optimization solution for unity that aims to solve this problem by allowing you to optimize high quality complex 3d scenes. With integrated features like mesh simplification, automatic LOD generation, mesh merging and material combining, you can greatly improve the performance of your game with a few click without the need of writing even a single line of code. Such optimization techniques are especially useful when developing for resource constrained platforms like mobile phones or other low end devices. This can also help eliminate your expenses for artists.

Try out the demo

Read the API Docs

FAQ

Supported features:

▓ Mesh simplification, Automatic LOD generation, Mesh combining and Material combining in one package.

▓ Supports mesh simplification on the fly with a powerful runtime API.

▓ No coding knowledge is required. Use the full features of the tool in editor mode without writing even a single line of code.

▓ Supports simplifying both skinned and static meshes as well as meshes with 16 bit and 32 bit index formats.

▓ Supports simplifying complex nested object hierarchies as well as objects with sub-meshes and multiple materials.

▓ Combine both Static and Skinned meshes.

▓ Combine Materials using Texture Arrays. Only supports the Standard Shader (Specular and Non Specular setup)

▓ Texture Array based Material combiner. Doesn't suffer with the common problems of texture atlases like texture bleeding, resolution limitation and no tiled texture support.

▓ Allows mass generation of LODs for multiple selected objects at once.

▓ Preserves texture mappings.

▓ Preserves animations on meshes. Even supports blend shapes.

▓ Options to preserve UV Seams, UV Foldovers and Border Edges.

▓ Allows preserving certain areas of the model up to specified levels, while simplifying rest of the model normally.

▓ Supports animated meshes.

▓ Packs everything in a convenient inspector window that pops up right under the components hierarchy.

▓ Visualize the changes before actually applying them.

▓ Undo / Redo the applied changes per object.

▓ All the source code is included without encapsulation using dll files or any other means.

▓ Includes editor tooltips for every control to ease understanding and usage of the tool.

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Check out the video:

Screenshots:













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This looks great!! I put it on my list for later. Thank you!

 

nice!
- does this support 32bit index meshes?
- batch processing multiple meshes (or whole folder)?
- runtime version?

 

- Yes, PolyFew supports both 16-bit mesh index buffers as well as 32 bit buffers (32-bit mesh indexing format).
- I am not sure if I quite get this but if you meant simplifying nested object hierarchies (Objects with a lot of child meshes) as a whole, then yes it does support that. The reduce deep option is meant for that.
- Currently PolyFew cannot be used at runtime. Why would you need it anyways?. If a runtime version be made then what operations would you require be ported:

a) Just mesh simplification with complete options.
b) Mesh simplification and LOD generation.

EDIT: Runtime API has been added in version 1.3 (Read the API docs linked at the start of the article) with support for various runtime operations including but not limited to:

►Simplify 3d models.
►Simplify mesh arrays.
►Importing OBJ files on the fly(Both locally and from a server with textures and materials).
►Exporting OBJ files on the fly to local file system with textures and materials support.
►Optimal heuristic based simplification.​

 

Thank you for checking it out. If you have any queries feel free to write them here or email me @kbawar555@gmail.com

 

1) If i have folder with 100 meshes, so i could do optimize all of them, either selecting that folder (or those files) in Project window, or drop them all into scene (separate gameobjects, not one hierarchy) and optimize all selected?

2) For example at runtime the application allows OBJ import at runtime, then could optimize that mesh, from script as in PolyFew.Optimize(targetTransform);

 

Well that's not supported. The process of mesh simplification is such that there are no common settings that work best for every single mesh, for example if I have 100 different meshes and I choose to reduce all of them by 70% and also select to preserve UV Seams, UV borders etc, then it might happen to be the case that out of 100 meshes only 30 got the settings suited to them and are optimized nicely without distortion and major changes in the look, this effort wasted processing on the 70 other meshes that look awful now. You can't find a global optimum for every single mesh. Even if you find some good settings to work for them all, it might not be the best for every single mesh, so for example you could've optimized some meshes more.

Runtime operations are not supported as of now.

Thank you for all the suggestions, I'll definitely plan them for a near future release.

EDIT: Runtime API has been added in version 1.3 (Read the API docs linked at the start of the article) with support for various runtime operations including but not limited to:

►Simplify 3d models.
►Simplify mesh arrays.
►Importing OBJ files on the fly(Both locally and from a server with textures and materials).
►Exporting OBJ files on the fly to local file system with textures and materials support.
►Optimal heuristic based simplification.​

 

Does this also generate low poly faceted meshes?

 

Hi Ina!. Unfortunately that won't be possible with Poly Few at least not accurately. When it simplifies a model it doesn't care about whether simplification would result in a low poly stylized version of the model or not

 

Hi, Is there a way to simplify a mesh and then bake the result? (As opposed to maintaining the original mesh in the file). My scene file becomes huge when I reduce all of the meshes in my project.

 

Hi, Unfortunately that won't be possible. I know that it sucks to keep extra meshes but there is no other way. The original mesh(es) come with the imported model file (obj, fbx, c4d, cad etc). Because Unity doesn't allow you to modify the imported model files, we can't modify the properties(vertices, triangles, UVs etc) of mesh(es) represented in the model file as well.

 

There should be no reason to store simplified meshes in the scene. You can save the simplified mesh as asset in the project:

Code (CSharp):

1. AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(simplifiedMesh, "Assets/SimplifiedMesh.asset");

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AssetDatabase.CreateAsset.html

This will not overwrite the .fbx file, but it stores the mesh in the project as an asset file. If you create a prefab of the .fbx file, you can then replace the mesh reference with the simplified mesh asset.

 

The OP was actually referring to not saving the modified mesh at all and somehow get it to bake in the model file itself. Poly Few doesn't save the modified meshes just for a single scene. It actually saves it in the project as you mentioned using

Code (CSharp):

1.  AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(simplifiedMesh, "Assets/SimplifiedMesh.asset");

Then these simplified meshes can be reused in any scene by just changing the mesh references in the prefabs (Mesh filters or Skinned Mesh Renderers)

 

Are you planning on adding Asset Database V2? I converted to V1 for now, but it would be good to not be on a deprecated ADB going forward.

 

I have plans on adding ADB V2 support in the next update, however the ADB V2 is still not stable and there lacks a good amount of documentation for it. I can confirm that there is nothing that Poly Few does with ADB V1 that ADB V2 can do in a better way, but moving forward it is of utmost importance to me to add support for ADB V2 or any other changes that Unity makes in their core engine APIs

 

Cool, thanks. I got it working in 2019.3 with ADB v1.

One more question, I think this tool can also "Combine Mesh", but I dont see how to do that explicitly.

I'd like to take a bunch of sub-items, make them 1 item, then apply LOD to that. Is there instructions to do that? I thought watching the video it said you could, but rewatching I cant see how, and dont see them in the doc sheet.

Also, is there a way to save the values? Each time I edit another item, I have to go set all the same Reduction Options and the additional layer. Doing this over and over again takes a long time, especially waiting for all the LOD gen in between.

Also, as a feature request, it would be good to be able to process a bunch of Prefabs in the Project dirs too. I basically want to make all my prefabs have LODs on them, but I have to go and drag them into a scene, set up each one, then update the prefab. Having some automation workflow would be great. Looking at the C# API its not immediately apparent how I would do that.

I see SimplifyObjectDeep, which takes the parameters, but not where to add the levels for LOD. So Im thinking thats not LOD. Not sure which methods do the LOD.

 

Unfortunately for now you can't combine meshes explicitly. But you can achieve your use case easily i-e combine meshes and generate LODs. Follow these simple steps:
1> Create an empty GameObject just to act as a root of the objects whose meshes you want to combine.
2> Now parent the newly created empty GameObject to the objects you want to combine. For example if you want to combine the meshes of object a, b and c then make all of these three objects children of the created empty GameObject.
3> Now click the empty GameObject and generate LOD's for that object, mark the combine meshes option against each LOD level and change other settings as required.
4> Finally press the generate LODS button. Now the meshes of the objects will be combined into one as well as have LODs setup (or more depending on if the meshes had blendshapes). You can verify this by checking out the hierarchy of the Empty parent GameObject you created.

About saving settings for GameObject (Like reduction options, strength etc). There is currently no way to do this. But why would you want to save the settings anyways?. The way the tool was designed is that it assumes you would select an object, tweak some reduction options and either reduce the object or generate LODS for it and then you would move on to other objects individually and doing the same thing. Anyways i'll keep this is mind and will queue this to a future release.

Plese do let me know if you face any problems while following the steps above, i'll be more than happy to help you out, and btw some good news is that iI'll be releasing a new update within this week that will add compatibility of Asset Database V2 and might as well add the feature you need (Remembering the reduction settings for individual objects)

 

On #3 I dont see a "Combien Meshes" option.

Where would it be? Screenshot attached.

This will make a single mesh? I want to make it 1 draw call, which is why I want to combine them.

Another future nice option would be texture atlasing as part of the combine.

About saving the items, I have 1000s of items I need LODs for. Im not going to individually tweak them all, especially in the beginning. A standard setup is way better than not having any LODs. Im happy I can adjust them as needed, but I have a project with like 50,000 assets in it. I cant do that by hand, I need a way to mass run them. Then I can tweak by hand if needed.

Thanks for the quick replies!

BTW, do you have a way to use the C# to create LODs? I can make the auto-do-all-my-assets-how-I-want as long as I know which method to call, but I dont see the one for LOD, only simplify and combine.

 

It seems like you have an older version of the product, please update it. Go to the asset store and download the newer version.

And yes the combine meshes will combine all StaticMeshRenderers (MeshFilters) into one mesh and then it will take all meshes using SkinnedMeshRenderers(Without blend shapes) and combine them into one. Meshes with blend shapes are not combined at all, this is a limitation. However, blendshapes are not commonly used, so you might not encounter such a case.

Also you can generate LODs for multiple objects but that would require some coding skills. The reason why this wasn't included as an out of the box feature was that because it's almost possible that common reduction settings do not work out for every different kind of model thus ruining everything. LOD generation should be carried out individually for your objects

 

Yeah, I definitely need to do them all with the same parameters. For better or worse, I just need less tris in scene, and there are too many objects.

Every object takes like 18 interactions (selecting options, adding option), and then waiting a few minutes, and like I said I have like 50,000 of them. I cant do all that by hand, or tweak them individually to start. But I need them to have LOD for perf.

Im fine with doing the coding, what are the basic steps to add LOD?

 

Can you please give me some time, I'll write an editor script for you to serve your purpose. You'll just need to attach that script to an empty gameobject and specify the common LOD generation settings in the script through the inspector and then make sure that only the objects that you want the LODs for are present in the scene. You will then just need to check a toggle or press a button on the script and it will iterate over all your objects and generate LODs for them with the same settings. I'll send you the script by today and if you don't mind me saying can you please get in touch through email?, I don't want to clutter the thread with a lot of posts.

Thank you

 

My Asset importer says I am on the latest version. Is there an incompatibility/feature-flag with the "Combine Meshes" option and 2019.3? Because Im not seeing the option, but there isnt an update to download.

Sending an email for the script stuff.

EDIT: I got all my questions answered. Everything works great, and Bawar implemented Asset Database V2 and added a new feature to mass-select and operate. Really happy with the support!

 

I've pushed out a new update that adds the following new options:

► Support for Asset Database V2 and the newer Asset PipeLine V2
► Support for multi selecting objects and generating LODs for multiple selected objects at once.

 

PolyFew Host component is showing up automatically for all GO selected. Anyway to turn this off ?

 

PolyFew Host component is required by PolyFew to render its interface, without it you won't be able to see PolyFew, hence it's an essential part of it. This component only gets added when you select a feasible GameObject or multiple GameObjects and then gets deleted from the same object(s) automatically when it loses focus. So don't worry about it because at the end of the day there won't be any PolyFewHosts on any GameObjects in your scene whatsoever.

Anyways if you still want to temporarily disable PolyFewHost component and PolyFew's interface you can do it by going into the gizmos menu from the scene view and disabling the transform gizmo (See the image below). Please note that you'll have to enable the Transform gizmo if you want to be able to see and use PolyFew again.




EDIT: From v3.6 onwards If you want to change the default behavior of
automatic popping of PolyFew's UI in the inspector for every selected GameObject. You can modify this from the menus toolbar by going to "Window > Brainfail Product > Poly Few > Disable Auto UI Attaching".

 

Hi, this tool looks super useful for solo devs! So combining materials is the only unsupported feature now for URP or did I miss something in the description?

 

You're right, Combining Materials is the only unsupported feature for URP and HDRP right now. You can just use this feature to combine materials using Standard Shaders.

 

Hello and thank you for this great tool!

I bought it this week and like the results very much. Works like a charm.

I have one question though. Is it possible to replace the original mesh with reduced one on asset folder? I have ready made levels with huge amount of meshes and I'd like to be able to just write over the original mesh in asset foldet, so I could go through all project meshes fast.

 

Hi, It should replace the original mesh assets if they were previously created, otherwise it prompts to save the mesh assets before applying the reduce operation. This doesn't mean that the original mesh(es) that come with the imported model file (obj, fbx, c4d, cad etc) are modified(Unity doesn't allow you to modify the imported model files themselves) only the mesh assets that are saved are modified or overwritten if they were previously saved/present. However, I have noted that in newer versions of Unity with AssetDatabase V2, PolyFew prompts you to save the meshes again and again after the reduce operation and doesn't overwrite the previously saved meshes (Which it should). After performing some deep testing it turned out to be a bug in AssetDatabase V2 that was causing this issue. Fortunately I was able to overcome this and solve the issue. I have also pushed the update, hopefully Unity will approve the update soon. Please keep an eye and be sure to update to V2.9 to resolve this.

Thank you for the patience.

 

Is there a way to set the default location to store the LOD meshes? For example, we are putting ours into Assets/Meshes/LOD, but since it only persists the location that you last used during your session, we often have issues with someone else on the team forgetting to set the location when making or updating LODs, and it messes everything up.

 

The save path that you choose will always be used to save LOD assets and persists unless the path becomes invalid or doesn't exist, in which case it uses a default path which is the root of the assets directory ("Assets/"). Achieving what you want would require me to change this functionality and ask for the save path every time you press the "Generate LODs" button, which most of the people don't desire. Since this behaviour doesn't suit your needs and is causing you trouble, I'll make a customized script that will always ask you to choose a path to save the LOD assets upon the generation of LODs. Please email me @kbawar555@gmail.com and I'll send you the script and guide you on how to install it in your project to achieve what you want.

 

Sorry, I must not have been clear. I definitely don't want it to ask for the path every time you save. The problem is that I set the path on my machine, and it works fine every time I create LODs. But if someone else on a different machine doesn't set the path on their own machine, it ends up going to the default root folder. I was wondering if there was a way to set a default that would get saved into version control so that anyone working on the project would always save the LODs to the same place.

 

Sorry for the late response. You can do this, but not from any control present in the UI. You'll have to modify the source code a little bit. Here's how

1> Open the PolyFew folder from the assets folder of your project then go to Scripts>NonEditor-Scripts
2> Look for "UtilityServices.cs" and open it
3> In the top 50 lines of the script search for a variable named "LOD_ASSETS_DEFAULT_SAVE_PATH". This variable's value is what you need to modify in order to change the default save path. See the attached image

 

No worries! And thanks, that does the trick.

 

Another thing that I noticed is I'm seeing the following error spammed in the console:

UnityException: GetProcessorCount is not allowed to be called from a MonoBehaviour constructor (or instance field initializer), call it in Awake or Start instead. Called from MonoBehaviour 'PolyfewRuntime'.
See "Script Serialization" page in the Unity Manual for further details.

This points to line 26 in PolyfewRuntime.cs.

 

Hi, sorry for the inconvenience caused. You can safely remove or comment that line of code. It was actually used in older versions of PolyFew and I forgot to remove it in the newer versions. I'll also push an update to resolve this.

EDIT: You can now just update to the newer version to automatically get this resolved.

 

Is it really necessary to have a top-level menu for Brainfail Product/Poly Few? I work on a laptop and there is limited space up there. Every other plugin puts something like that under the Window menu.

 

Never thought that it would be inconvenient for someone. Anyways, I'll change it to "Window/Brainfail Product/Poly Few" in the next update. You can contact me @kbawar555@gmail.com if you need to change this early.

EDIT: Please update to v4.1 which moves the menu settings to "Window/Brainfail Product/Poly Few"

 

No worries, thanks for the quick fix!

 

@Brain-_-Fail Hello, beside I want to mention, Poly-Few is the best and easiest to use poly reducer I've tried so far, I ran in a major problem.Tolerance Spheres isn't working for me on Skinned Mesh. It's quite important for me to, to reduce poly reduction on character faces.
As soon as I create a new sphere, "Reduction Strength" looses it's function. I can move the slider, but nothing happens. I thought, maybe just the preview fails, so I tried to "Reduce" anyway, I give a save path, and then Error "Failed to save mesh: ..." .
Another issue: When I use the undo button complete strange things happen. The POLY_REDUCED mesh is still in Skinned Mesh Renderer, but materials (UVs?) are messed up.
Additionial Info: It's / they are Skinned Meshes with BlendShapes. On normal Mesh tolerance spheres work fine.

Edit: Next strange thing just happened: From one second to the other PolyFew stopped Auto UI Ataching. Entering the Menu, disabling and enabling Auto UI Attaching helps, until I leave the object and go to next, it's away again. Restaring Unity didn't help.

 

Hi, Can you please send me over the 3d model that is causing you this issue ?. I need to be able to reproduce the problem in order to solve it. You can send it to me @kbawar555@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Edit: If you can send me over the unity package with the model and the scene it would be even better. Please also mention your unity version.

 

I'll see what I can do regarding the model. Be prepared, they are big, lots of Blendshapes. Regarding scene, I don't think I can send, it's crazy big. I once tried this with another scene, and the receiver complained, how I can send such big scene, took hours to uncompress. And hours for me to prepair.

But new finding, when I add PolyFewHost to an object manually it's there, when I leave the object and come back, the component is gone again. Yesterday I worked whole day with PolyFew and everything was fine.

Edit: It's Unity 2019.4.1f1

Edit2: Suddenly it works again, the Auto UI Attaching. Hmm. Can it has do do something with having 2 Unity sessions open? Regarding Tolerance Sphere, I got it work on an other model, still researching and will report.

 

PolyFewHost will be removed automatically from an object when it looses focus, so if you manually add it to an object, It will be there until the object doesn't loose focus, so this is expected.

To answer the other query, yes it would definitely effect PolyFew if you're using in two different Unity sessions at the same time. This has basically to do with EditorPrefs (A way to store consistent data in Unity Editor). EditorPrefs store settings that you can access in any version of UnityEditor. So If you have disabled AutoUIAttaching in one instance of the Unity Editor, it will automatically be disabled in every other version of Unity. Even if you delete and reimport PolyFew it would still be true.

I'll wait for your skinned mesh model with blendshapes, so that I can test the most important problem that you're facing.

 

I'm currently preparing. The problem I'm facing, the character that doesn't work (and some others), is one I created over time and has lots of components on it, and was also portet from one game to an other as prefab. If I pull this, lets say the raw importet FBX character, from the Assets into the scene, this one works.

Edit: I'll write you an Email, it seems a very specialized issue, and has to do with the above mentioned.

 

new happy owner here! can't wait to get into it once i get the time!

 

Hello friend, does this LOD generation system preserve lightmap UV layout? This is important for LOD lightmap sharing between LODs. Is this the case?

 

Hey does this asset have the option (generate lightmap UV's) for newly generated combined meshes & LODS?

 

Sorry for the late response I've been on a lengthy trip to the north of my country. Yes it does preserve LightMap UVs.

 

No, it doesn't have such an option at the moment. But I can add this feature if you want.

 

Hey there,

Does this plugin support HLOD? Can I select multiple assets (sharing the same material/shader) and make a HLOD out of them?