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lisa · 7th April 2008, 05:39 PM

What format? Some of the exporters are more efficient than others.

Here's the general steps I use to optimize a model before I export it for real-time. Depending on the model, it can sometimes cut it down considerably. Some of these things may or may not reduce the size on disk, but will make the model render more efficiently in other ways:

- Turn on surface normals ('N' on the keyboard) or switch all faces to 1-sided polys and make sure my surface normals are all facing the right direction. Use Surface > Flip Normal to fix any that are facing the wrong way. On surfaces with more than three sides, it may also be neccessary to click Surface > Change Vertex Order to get the normals pointing as they should.

- Make sure that all meshes that are using the same texture and material are welded together, the fewer independent meshes the better. I usually use "unified textures", which means that I cram everything onto one map, so for a lot of models I only have one mesh when I'm done. The only exception is if the mesh needs to be broken apart for animation purposes.

- Switch to vertex mode and select everything.

- Click Vertex > Snap Together by Distance with the distance set to a ridiculously small value, such as .001. This makes sure any adjacent vertices that should be welded together will get optimized correctly.

- Switch back to object mode and choose Object > Optimize Vertices

- Then select Object > Optimize Surfaces to get rid of any degenerate faces

- Switch to surface mode and delete any unneeded interior faces. Also check for invalid polys or bad triangulations; you can select these quickly with Edit > Select Surfaces > [type]

- Possibly snap by distance and optimize again depending on how much junk I deleted from the inside of the model

- Check all my pivot points ("object centres") and make sure they are correct. Set the pivot on whatever my root object is to 0,0,0 and make sure the object is resting on the ground. Some (but not all) games take pivots into account when creating bounding boxes, so stray pivots can make the bounding box needlessly large and interfere with screen clipping.

7th April 2008, 05:39 PM	#2
lisa Senior Member Professional user Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Phoenix, AZ Posts: 917	Re: The X-Files What format? Some of the exporters are more efficient than others. Here's the general steps I use to optimize a model before I export it for real-time. Depending on the model, it can sometimes cut it down considerably. Some of these things may or may not reduce the size on disk, but will make the model render more efficiently in other ways: - Turn on surface normals ('N' on the keyboard) or switch all faces to 1-sided polys and make sure my surface normals are all facing the right direction. Use Surface > Flip Normal to fix any that are facing the wrong way. On surfaces with more than three sides, it may also be neccessary to click Surface > Change Vertex Order to get the normals pointing as they should. - Make sure that all meshes that are using the same texture and material are welded together, the fewer independent meshes the better. I usually use "unified textures", which means that I cram everything onto one map, so for a lot of models I only have one mesh when I'm done. The only exception is if the mesh needs to be broken apart for animation purposes. - Switch to vertex mode and select everything. - Click Vertex > Snap Together by Distance with the distance set to a ridiculously small value, such as .001. This makes sure any adjacent vertices that should be welded together will get optimized correctly. - Switch back to object mode and choose Object > Optimize Vertices - Then select Object > Optimize Surfaces to get rid of any degenerate faces - Switch to surface mode and delete any unneeded interior faces. Also check for invalid polys or bad triangulations; you can select these quickly with Edit > Select Surfaces > [type] - Possibly snap by distance and optimize again depending on how much junk I deleted from the inside of the model - Check all my pivot points ("object centres") and make sure they are correct. Set the pivot on whatever my root object is to 0,0,0 and make sure the object is resting on the ground. Some (but not all) games take pivots into account when creating bounding boxes, so stray pivots can make the bounding box needlessly large and interfere with screen clipping.