InstaLOD’s versatile suite of tools allows you to tailor your optimization strategy based on your project’s specific needs.

InstaLOD offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to optimize 3D assets for various use cases and 3D applications. Two of these tools are the polygon optimizer and the remesher. Understanding when to use polygon optimization versus remeshing can make a significant difference in the efficiency and quality of your optimization workflow.

When to Use Polygon Optimization: Precision and Detail Preservation

InstaLOD’s polygon optimizer is best suited for scenarios where it’s important to maintain specific aspects of the original mesh. There are many cases where it’s important to selectively optimize elements of a model or scene so that they can integrate seamlessly with the rest of your pipeline. InstaLOD’s Optimize mesh operation can reduce polygons while maintaining many of these important elements.

This includes:

• Preserving Submeshes: When your project requires that submeshes remain separate, the polygon optimizer reduces polygons for each individual submesh, allowing for greater control over individual elements within the scene. This is helpful when separate objects need to animate independently from one another.
• UV Layout and Material Assignment Preservation: If your workflow requires that the original UV layout and the materials in the scene be preserved, the polygon optimizer allows for significant polygon reduction while maintaining these crucial aspects. This is particularly helpful in real-time applications with workflows that require specific material assignments.

InstaLOD’s polygon optimizer provides a flexible and efficient way to optimize 3D models for any destination, thereby saving an enormous amount of time and cost compared to rebuilding them by hand. Now, you can fine-tune how assets are optimized in a way that best fits your already existing pipelines.

When to Remesh: Quality and Comprehensive Optimization

InstaLOD’s Remesh mesh operation is ideal for thoroughly optimizing an asset while preserving its overall quality and performance. Remeshing creates an entirely new mesh, giving InstaLOD the opportunity to optimize many aspects of an asset in one step.

Key features of the remesher include:

• Improved Topology: By generating a new mesh from scratch, remeshing creates a mesh with only the polygons needed to construct the model. This includes combining meshes together if they are next to each other. Having fewer separate meshes can significantly improve the asset’s performance.
• Material Combination and Draw Call Reduction: Remeshing intelligently combines materials to reduce the number of textures per asset, significantly lowering draw calls and enhancing performance in complex scenes. Textures make up most of an asset’s file size, so reducing the amount of textures keeps the file size of each asset down to a minimum.
• Efficient UV Creation and Mesh Map Baking: The remesher generates optimized UV layouts and bakes essential mesh maps in a single step, ensuring that assets are ready for high-quality texturing workflows. Remeshing automatically transfers highly detailed model information into the texture maps of the generated mesh, resulting in incredible visual fidelity with a fraction of the number of polygons.

InstaLOD’s remeshing technology creates highly optimized assets with the click of a button by combining all of the steps involved in preparing models for any real-time scenario. InstaLOD’s remesher makes it possible to spend more time on the creative part of asset creation.

Combining Both Approaches for Maximum Flexibility

InstaLOD’s versatile suite of tools allows you to tailor your optimization strategy based on your project’s specific needs. The polygon optimizer is the tool of choice for fast, straightforward reductions while maintaining key mesh features. Remeshing offers a powerful, all-in-one solution for more comprehensive optimization that complements both performance and visual quality. But why not use both? InstaLOD makes it possible to combine both approaches to build flexible and adaptive mesh processing pipelines.

InstaLOD’s polygon optimization and remeshing technology are already changing the game at studios like Wargaming.net with their massively popular title World of Tanks. Before InstaLOD, an artist took 3 days to optimize a single asset. Now, they can do the same in only half a day!

The award-winning company Lightshape is using InstaLOD’s remesher to quickly optimize extremely complex geometry when preparing models for visualization in AR and VR. What used to take an artist 40 days now only takes them 4.

InstaLOD’s wide suite of tools ensures that you can achieve the best balance of performance, quality, and efficiency in your 3D asset creation process.

Instant AR-Ready Models

Take a peak at how InstaLOD’s technology makes optimizing models for augmented reality a simple and straightforward process. Viewing models in augmented reality invites an elevated sense of scale and context that isn’t possible through a stationary screen. Augmented reality enhances workflows in a wide variety of areas, such as manufacturing, making it possible to accurately visualize a product in the real world before construction.

Explore the remeshed communicator model in AR now brought to you by Abstract Polyverse. Click the AR button to instantly view the asset with augmented reality on your iPhone or iPad.