Poly Few | Mesh Simplifier and Automatic LOD Generator

I recently upgraded and noticed the 'Combine Meshes' toggle under Automatic LOD has disappeared. I "undeprecated" your code so I could bind the LOD skinned meshes to the original skinned mesh rig as it was before. Thank God it's still supported... please leave it in there.

The main problem for me with using BatchFew to combine the skinned meshes actually has to do with blendshapes. For some reason the blendshape animation clip [facial blends] will not play on your combined mesh blendshapes unless I add a helper script [basically a hack] that gets the blendshape weight each frame from the original skinned mesh and then sets blendshape weight of the combined mesh. I think it has something to do with the blendshape name being changed or number of blendshapes increased, im not sure yet. That is the core problem.

When BatchFew combines meshes the new single skinned mesh is bound to a new rig. My blendshape helper script has to get & set blendshape weights from the original skinned meshes to the new single skinned mesh. However I have to play 2 animators to accomplish this hack versus the single animator when meshes are combined within AutoLOD.

Bottom line - please continue to support the 'Combine Meshes' in Automatic LODs. The toggle was fine and I don't have a good work around with blendshape issue using BatchFew then Automatic LOD. Thanks!

 

Hi, It seems quite strange that you can't play blendshapes. Is it a specific blendshape animation that isn't working or is it that none work at all?. I would be grateful to you if you could email me the model causing this issue and guide me through the steps in order to reproduce the issue. This way I'll be able to solve the problem from the root instead of mitigating it.

Thank you

 

Sure, I’ll send a package first thing tomorrow. Thanks

Update: sent to kbawar555@gmail.com

 

Thanks, looking forward to it

 

Hi there

Could I ask how I can properly and cleanly uninstall Polyfew?

O

 

Hi, You can simply delete the PolyFew folder from your project. If you want to remove the association with the package manager as well. You can follow these steps:

► Delete Poly Few from your projects completely. Do this by deleting the complete Poly Few folders.
► If you're using a Windows machine go to
C:\Users\[YOU_USER_NAME]\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Asset Store- 5.x\Brain Fail Productions\Editor ExtensionsUtilities.
If you're using a Mac machine then go to
~/Library/Unity/Asset Store-5.x/Brain Fail Productions/Editor ExtensionsUtilities
► Delete the file named "Poly Few Mesh Simplifier and Auto LOD Generator"

 

Hey!
Is there a way to change one specific material properties in runtime after having combined this material with other materials? I saw that it's possible to do it in the editor using batchfew. I am wondering if there is a way to replace a single material with another one in runtime?
(What we want to do is allow the user to change the skin tone and hair color of its character but all the character's materials are combined)

 

Hello.I have two questions:
1. Are you planning to support URP shaders to use Combine Material?
2. Are you planning to support Combine Material and create kind of atlas with one texture which can use any Custom or Standart shader (not Poly Few shader)?

 

Hi, yes you can change the material properties at runtime, the only gotcha is that when you exit play mode the changes will still be there and won't be reverted until you restart unity editor. Below is a script that shows you exactly how to do this. Attach it to a Game object whose material properties you want to change. This should be a game object for which in the editor you can change the material properties through the Batch Few inspector window. Read the initial comments in the start method to get a basic idea of how the code works.

Code (CSharp):

1. using BrainFailProductions.PolyFew;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. using static BrainFailProductions.PolyFew.MaterialCombiner.CombiningInformation;
5.  
6. public class ChangePropsRuntime : MonoBehaviour
7. {
8.     // Start is called before the first frame update
9.     void Start()
10.     {
11.  
12.      
13.         GameObject changeFor = gameObject;
14.         // Get properties objects of all materials that were previously
15.         //associated with this GameObject
16.         var materialsProperties = GetMaterialsProperties(changeFor);
17.  
18.         if (materialsProperties != null)
19.         {
20.             // For demonstration purposes I'm changing the properties for the first
21.             // Material. This means suppose that there were originally 3 materials associated
22.             // with this game object A B and C. Then I'll change the properties of material A
23.             var singleMatProperties = materialsProperties[0];
24.  
25.             if (singleMatProperties != null)
26.             {
27.                 singleMatProperties.albedoTint = Color.black;
28.                 ChangeMaterialProperties(singleMatProperties, changeFor);
29.             }
30.         }
31.  
32.     }
33.  
34.  
35.     public List<MaterialProperties> GetMaterialsProperties(GameObject forObject)
36.     {
37.         if (forObject == null) { return null; }
38.  
39.         var matLinks = forObject.GetComponent<ObjectMaterialLinks>();
40.  
41.         if(matLinks == null) { return null; }
42.  
43.         var attrImg = matLinks.linkedAttrImg;
44.  
45.         List<MaterialProperties> originalProperties = new List<MaterialProperties>();
46.      
47.         for (int a = 0; a < matLinks.linkedMaterialEntities.Count; a++)
48.         {
49.             var enitity = matLinks.linkedMaterialEntities[a];
50.  
51.             if(enitity == null) { continue; }
52.  
53.             for (int b = 0; b < enitity.combinedMats.Count; b++)
54.             {
55.                 var combinedMat = enitity.combinedMats[b];
56.                 string name = combinedMat.materialProperties.materialName;
57.                 originalProperties.Add(combinedMat.materialProperties);
58.            
59.             }
60.         }
61.  
62.         return originalProperties;
63.     }
64.  
65.  
66.  
67.     public void ChangeMaterialProperties(MaterialProperties changeTo, GameObject forObject)
68.     {
69.         if(forObject == null) { return; }
70.         if(changeTo == null) { return; }
71.  
72.         var attrImage = forObject.GetComponent<ObjectMaterialLinks>().linkedAttrImg;
73.  
74.         if(attrImage == null) { return; }
75.  
76.         int texArrIndex = changeTo.texArrIndex;
77.         int matIndex = changeTo.matIndex;
78.  
79.         changeTo.BurnAttrToImg(ref attrImage, matIndex, texArrIndex);
80.     }
81. }
82.  

Please be mindful that you can't at the moment do this on builds. This code will only execute in the editor play mode. In the next update, I'll think about including this in the runtime API


EDIT: Version v7.20 adds two methods that allow you to do this even on builds see the following functions:

GetMaterialProperties
ChangeMaterialProperties

 

Hi,

1> I have no plans for URP using Texture Arrays
2> Not sure but, I might shift to texture atlas based material combiber in the future with support for a wide range of materials

 

Thanks a lot for the help! That's already really useful and sure it would be awesome to use it in a build as well! Looking forward for the next update, thanks!

 

New
Hi guys!

Im looking for a mesh siimplification to eliminate mesh superposition. I have a runtime generated mesh with some penetration between objects. When unify objects i need to eliminate inside vertex. Your asset do that?

 

Hi,

Unfortunately, this is not possible with PolyFew as it is not meant to remove vertices selectively

 

+1 for this, UI is super hard to read.

Edit: I did find the button to change the skin (colors). Thanks for adding this. This is big improvement but some of the buttons detail is invisible in dark mode still - Poly Few Host inspector, upper right 4 buttons.

 

Thanks for reporting the problem. The inconsistency will be removed in a future release

 

Hey there,

I would like to know what is the procedure to follow if I want to to add a new material to a merged material created with batch few?
For example, if I take your food table example from your tutorial. Let's say I combined all the materials. And after some time I want to add a new food element to the table and combine its material with the others. How should I do this?

 

Hi,

Unfortunately, this is not possible. You can't combine anything with the BatchFewStandardShader merged material.
You'll have to recombine everything.

 

Hi,
I updated poly few to Latest version 7.40 but still can't solve missing scripts
a lot of prefab have been broken tried by folder clean missing scripts and by windows also but still no luck .

 

Hi,

I have to test this further to fix this problem. Do you mind contacting me @kbawar555@gmail.com? in order to cooperate with me and help me fix this issue.

I would be grateful

 

Hey, when I combine some meshes, I get a warning telling me that my object has overlapping UVs. It appears in the Mesh renderer in the baked lightmap section. This seems to be causing some strange shadow issues.
If you have any idea on how to solve this, that would be very welcome!

 

Hi, this is not a problem with PolyFew or the mesh combiner or anything. This is actually an issue with the Unity UV unwrapping system. It is not perfect and battle-tested. In fact, this is what unity says and not exactly my words.
Just read the post here https://forum.unity.com/threads/overlapping-generated-lightmap-uvs.522747/#post-3591474
Even for some simple models, this problem can occur. Honestly speaking the only actual solution to this is to manually generate lightmap uvs in a dedicated 3d modeling package.

In some cases, it can be fixed by changing lightmap generation settings particularly the resolution and padding.

 

Hi, I have a few questions, hoping someone can help me out.

This plugin seems really powerful. I am not sure that I am using it correctly. There are a bunch of features that seem aimed at convenience, but I am hoping to add this manually to my objects. Initially, I followed the instructions in the ReadMe pdf and ran into problems. I turned off the automatic UI and am now using Brainfall Projects -> Poly Few -> Attach Poly Few to Object. I personally didn't see much use for this appearing at the bottom of all of my game objects.

1) I have been able to add LODs. I am using this at the child level on objects that have Mesh Filters. I have got that working, but when I play the game the objects are disappearing randomly. Do I need to recalculate Occlusion Culling? I thought that might be the cause, or?

2) With Batch View, the colors of my textures are changing. I use uncompressed and use the same texture size as my original textures, but they come out with color-shifting / artifacts. I checked to make sure all of my maps (diffuse, normal, and emissive) were set to the proper size.

3) At the top of the plugin are Poly Few options. Is this to reduce the poly count of the object beyond what Automatic LOD does?

4) Is there some way to better understand what performance gains BatchView will bring? I have probably two dozen objects in my game, each with one material but thousands of instances of them.

5) This plugin should work at the parent level, correct? For example, I have a bunch of objects that make up a temple and have them grouped. Can I add a Poly Few Object component to the parent Group and the Automatic LOD will apply to the child objects?

6) Are there any considerations regarding skeletal meshes to consider?

I have watched the videos. The API is too much detail for what I need and the Pdf is great for an overview. I was wondering if there might be some other documentation that explains the features and benefits.

Thank you.

 

Hi,

To keep this organized I'll answer your questions in the order they were asked.

1) As I don't know your setup I can't think of a reason why your objects are disappearing.But, when you generate LODs Polyfew creates some new gameobjects and hierarchies also on the GameObject you initially pressedthe Generate LOD button on you get an LODGroup component attached. On that component you can adjust shifting distancing between LOD levels. Read about it here https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-LODGroup.html.
Also, you have to set the static flags again on these newly created objects. For example if you need to make occlusion culling work. You'll have to set again the occlusion static flags on the new GameObjects.

2) You do get changes in colors when you combine materials and it can vary from the kind of textures and material setups that you have. After combining materials you can click on individual GameObjects and adjust their material properties. This can help you account for the changes in colors after combining materials.

3) These options are there for mesh simplification. For example if you don't want to generate LODs and just simplify mesh(es) for a GameObject you can use those options. I advise you to watch the intro video again as it demonstates all of this.

4) Well this is up to you on how you test your game. People normally use the stats window to see what performance benefits they get after combining meshes or materials or both. Just maje copies of your scene and objects and do testing there just so that you don't mess up anything in the worst case. Please take some time to watch the additional videos on mesh and material combining with BatchFew to understand these things.

5) Yes the "Regard Children" and the "Reduce Deep" options let you do this. Again I advise you to watch the intro video which shows the meaning of all the options. Also, there are tooltips to help you as well in understanding the various options.

6) You won't get any issues at all. You might get a few problems with animations in very rare cases after you combine meshes but these problems are easily solvable by re assigning avatars etc.

Feel free to contact me with specific issues @kbawar555@gmail.com.

 

Hi, I'm very interested in this, but we use Jason Booth's Better Lit shader throughout our game -- we're staying on built-in pipeline, but BL is basically a super-powered replacement for Unity's standard shader. I fully appreciate why PolyFew doesn't support the SRPs, but do you think it would work with Better Lit (or if not, any chance of adding support)?

thanks
Dave

 

Hi Dave,

Unfortunately, PolyFew's material combiner only works with the unity standard shader materials. This means that it can't combine any other material based on some other shader. I have no plans of adding support for other shaders at the moment. The reason has to do with the complexities involved in re-writing shaders. You can though use any other feature of PolyFew on any rendering pipeline or shaders/materials or a custom setup. It's just the material combine that won't combine materials other than the Unity Standard Shader Materials.

 

Hello,

When using Polyfew on Around 100 objects in my scene, it just doesn't work. The mesh combination works fine, but when I bake the lights I have some UV overlap that just make the mesh not usable at all.
I know you told me UV overlap are not an issue of Polyfew, but it makes my Polyfew useless as I can't use it, whenever I use it, I have light baking issues.
Am I the only one who have this issue? I have it almost every time I use polyfew.. Am I doing something wrong?
Here it the picture of how my scene looks after a light bake so that you understand I cannot use the mesh at all.

 

Hi,

I believe you did generate lightmap uvs before generating lightmaps. But, just in case you didn't do it here before combining meshes



It's unlikely that this is a problem with PolyFew. Did you try changing lightmap settings?. Resolution maybe?.
The fact is that PolyFew has got nothing to do with generating the secondary uv set it's simply generated by unity itself and not PolyFew.

The hard truth is that lightmap baking is a complex process that requires a lot of preparation. But the way unity puts it seems like you just have to press the "Generate Lighting" button a bit of wait and you should get the perfect lightmap but that's not true. You have to apply a lot of effort. Even with all that elbow grease, sometimes you get unacceptable results, then you read through the internet and get in touch with a unity representative to finally find out there are clear limitations with the lightmap baker. The approach nowadays is to keep minimal lightmap and resort to light probes. Not only is it much faster but it will get fewer things to adjust in general.

Anyways, you can email me the model @kbawar555@gmail.com and the necessary steps required in order to reproduce the problem. I'll try to inspect it on my own and see where we get to.

 

Hello could you add support for multiple platforms? for batch few
https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...t-texture2darray-when-build-target-is-changed

 

So, I haven't written any importer for texture 2d array that comes with batch few. Instead, I've made this integrated into batchfew if you want to change the properties of existing texture arrays.
Also, I believe you've got the concept of texture arrays wrong. The bug filed on the issue tracker that you have referenced is not a bug at all but the way that texture arrays work. Also, the solution posted by the unity guy cannot even work. Texture arrays are "self-contained" as in they don't depend on anything. When you create a texture array you create textures (hard copy) of exactly the same attributes(Resolution, compression, etc..) that you put inside it. Texture array doesn't reference any textures it contains the textures copies. You can delete all the source textures and you will still have your texture array working fine. This means any change to the source textures doesn't affect a texture array at all. The only way to change the properties of textures inside a texture array is to regenerate the texture array itself with all the textures inside of it. Batchfew does provide support for this. Look at the bottom of the inspector where it says "Drop here existing texture arrays to change their properties". See the image below.



Read about texture arrays here: Array Texture - OpenGL Wiki (khronos.org)

Feel free to ask me any questions if this was confusing.

 

Hi,
How could I convert the .mesh file generated by Polyfew to .fbx ?
I want the .mesh files for meshcombiner utility.

 

Hi,

The format PolyFew uses is not it's proprietary format. It's what unity uses for everything. When you import a 3d model into unity, it converts the model internally into it's own format that can be understood by the engine. That's the same format PolyFew uses. You can look for other 3rd party tools on the asset store that convert this format to fbx model file.
PolyFew only provides inbuilt support to convert a GameObject to obj format and that is very limited and you need to use the runtime API for that. Look at the demo scene which demonstrates this.

FBX Exporter | FBX Exporter | 2.0.3-preview.3 (unity3d.com)
fbx export - Asset Store (unity.com)

 

what should i do in this situation?

character with skinnedmeshrenderer with runtime reduction

suddenly he changes one of his items

new item has no LODs. what now? is there way to call just the reduction process for that individual item instead of reducing whole character again?

 

Hi,

You need to write some code to use the PolyFew runtime API for this. Check out the SImplifyObjectDeep method for example. You can also take a look at the demo scene in PolyFew and see how the code is written to allow for runtime simplification.

 

Hello!

Asset has been great so far, but when I do a development build, I keep getting a ton of warnings that

"The referenced script (BrainFailProductions.PolyFew.PolyFewHost) on this Behaviour is missing!
(Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Runtime/Scripting/ManagedReference/SerializableManagedRef.cpp Line: 199)"


Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Thank you!

 

Hi,

Sorry for the late response. Please make sure that you're on the latest version of PolyFew(v7.6.1). Build your project using that.

After upgrading please make sure you follow these steps: (Look at the image below)

►Right click on an empty area in the project panel
►Go to Brainfail Projects > PolyFew and click "Cleanup missing scripts from prefabs"

This might take a while depending on the complexity of the project. Wait for the process to finish
and save your open scenes.

You don't have to follow these steps over and over again. The newer version doesn't make this issue happen.
You have to follow these steps because you might have built with an older version. These are also there as a contingency plan if something fails.



B
est,
Bawar

 

Hi! Thank you for the great asset. I found Poly Few extremely helpful when you want to add LOD without changing the original fbx of the prefab.

One question though, it is possible to undo the LOD generation after the PolyFewHost script is gone? For example if I found that the generated mesh has some problem later on, or simply decide to create LOD with another way.

Since the newly created child object has "don't delete manually" on it's name, I guess I shouldn't delete it, although deleting it and the LOD component do fix the problem and make back to the original status.

 

Hi,

You can revert the changes by manually deleting stuff and re-enabling renderers etc. The "DO NOT DELETE MANUALLY" is just there for people who don't know what they are doing. It doesn't cause a disaster if you delete it manually it's just that the "Delete LODs" button won't work after that. So, what you did is perfectly fine. Also, even if PolyFew script is gone, the next time it re-attaches the "Delete LODs" button will still work provided that you didn't restart unity.

 

Thanks for your reply! I came across another problem with BatchFew with emission and transparent object.
Emission is not working. The emission property in standard shader uses HDR color, but the emission property in BatchFew is using normal color, I guess it's the problem?
The render mode of the combined transparent material is set to transparent, but it is not in the scene.

 

Sorry for the confusion here. Unfortunately, it is a limitation with the texture arrays based material combiner. The alpha channel for colors is reserved for keeping the metadata about the materials combined and the texture index in the array. This allows you to adjust individual material properties even after combining the materials. For this reason, transparency doesn't work. So you only have opaque materials. This is also stated in the "Requirements and Limitations" section on the asset's page in the asset store.

 

Ah, I see. Just to make sure, so material combine may not work for material that has emission/HDR color property too?

 

I'm having issues with Polyfew not working. I tried it in several projects and then created a new project and in all cases, nothing happens when I click on a gameobject. I've verified gizmos are enabled and there are no console errors or messages. I'm using 2020.3.3f1 with the built in pipeline.

 

Please try going to Window > Brainfail Products > PolyFew and click "Enable Auto UI Attaching".
Please let me know if it still doesn't work after that. Here's my email as well kbawar555@gmail.com in case you
feel more comfortable talking on the email.

 

Thanks, that was the problem. I had looked in the docs but never saw that so I apologize if that was in there and I just missed it.

 

Is it possible to easily change the colors on the ui? Some of the text is quite invisible, at least with dark ui. Would be nice to have text which is either just white or a light grey.

 

You can click on the small paint brush icon to the right of the PolyFew title in the inspector window to toggle between light UI and Dark UI mode. See the image below.

 

Hello Is there any chance to have optiom of simplier LOD hierarchy There is like too much unnecessary objects very often created, especially if You animate objects it is unwanted in unity to have a lot of parents etc as it decrease effiecency Thanks for creating that asset. P.S Also would be great to have something like "Create Lod as child of objects" for a situation when Your model have a lot of meshes for example doors, etc, and in game You disable that doors, in actual workflow You have to manually reparent objects in other case when disabling doors, You disable only first lod (also would be usefull for characters)

 

It's already minimal to its best. It doesn't create many objects. The only unnecessary objects it creates are 1 + (The number of LOD levels you have) which I'm certain don't cause more than a few milliseconds of overhead while animating. All the other objects that you see are essential in the working of LODs in principle which requires active renderers in your scene to act as LOD levels. So these objects that you see below:



I didn't quite understand your second suggestion with the doors example. I'll appreciate it if you could elaborate, please. Maybe with some rough sketches/images of your idea?

 

hi Brainfail,
i just bought ur plugin, im on unity 2022.1.2, but i cannot find the "Enable Auto UI Attaching" button

also when i was combining materials, the asset always appeared black, even though they are all using standard built in materials

is there a way not let the plugin combine my emissive material?

 

Hello,

I just purchased PolyFew and I have 10 errors that showed up after import. A screenshot is attached.

I'm running Unity 2021.3.0f1

Please advise me on how to resolve these errors.

 

Hello,

Thank you for getting in touch. Apologies for the confusion causes. Auto UI Attaching was removed in the newer version s of PolyFew. This is mentioned on the asset page.



In newer versions you simply have to add PolyFew component on your gameobject to use it. This is shown in the image below



For your second question you can adjust individual material properties after combining materials. For this you simply have to add PolyFew component on the GameObject for which you want to change properties (in this case the object that appears black) and collapse the Batchfew panel from PolyFew window and you'll see a bunch of material properties you can adjust. See the animation below.



Let me know if you need further assistance