Optimize your 3D models: Atangeo Balancer 1.0 released
Atangeo Team recently released Balancer 1.0,
which allows quickly and easily simplify 3D models.
It also features fast and effective stripification algorithm,
to optimize meshes for rendering based on triangle strips.
Hope you will find Balancer useful.
From the press release:
Atangeo Balancer is a tool to optimize and simplify 3D models.
Its exceptional performance and a novel user interface allow finding
perfect balance between visual appearance and the number of polygons,
quickly and easily. Balancer utilizes a high quality polygon reduction
(aka mesh simplification or decimation) to preserve the visual
appearance of your model. The model features, normals, texture
coordinates, layer boundaries are all honored by Balancer. It can
optimize your models even further to dramatically speed up rendering
of your models. Balancer features a fast and efficient triangle
reordering that can be tuned for various rendering methods like
triangle strips and array/buffer based rendering.
Balancer Lite is a free version. It is fully functional but works with
small meshes only.
The limits for a single mesh are 15000 triangles and 10000 vertices.
Link: http://www.atangeo.com/
which allows quickly and easily simplify 3D models.
It also features fast and effective stripification algorithm,
to optimize meshes for rendering based on triangle strips.
Hope you will find Balancer useful.
From the press release:
Atangeo Balancer is a tool to optimize and simplify 3D models.
Its exceptional performance and a novel user interface allow finding
perfect balance between visual appearance and the number of polygons,
quickly and easily. Balancer utilizes a high quality polygon reduction
(aka mesh simplification or decimation) to preserve the visual
appearance of your model. The model features, normals, texture
coordinates, layer boundaries are all honored by Balancer. It can
optimize your models even further to dramatically speed up rendering
of your models. Balancer features a fast and efficient triangle
reordering that can be tuned for various rendering methods like
triangle strips and array/buffer based rendering.
Balancer Lite is a free version. It is fully functional but works with
small meshes only.
The limits for a single mesh are 15000 triangles and 10000 vertices.
Link: http://www.atangeo.com/
Replies
http://www.atangeo.com/guide/boundaries
It seems to be nice but I think you need more media on your site to communicate the product better. It took me some time to find some pictures - and even then they were rather spare. Maybe add some gallery with some before after shots and technical details on each.
edit: good job!
I suggest trying to make a more professional logo, because it gave me a bad first impression. Its too bright and is just a few primitives arranged together.
We will put some interesting and complex examples, screenshots
and (hopefully) videos soon.
One of the key features of Balancer is that it guarantees to
that there will be no gaps between groups/layers/submeshes,
by consistently simplifying all the boundaries between them.
See this here on the Daz3D forum:
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=2006305
@dejawolf: What do you mean by loops and rings?
Please take a look.
Both the dragon and the car goes from insanely many triangles to just many triangles. A valid question would be "Will it be able to optimize my level 1 LOD game character to level 2,3,4, etc?". With a game model we're talking a fairly low number of triangles to begin with going even lower. Does it handle that well?
Keep it up. I like your program so far. Tried it a bit at work.
been testing your program and must say that it works delightful
one problem for me, though. while the smoothing groups look just fine in your program, after i saved and imported it back into max its all in one smoothing group again.
been checking in the obj-import dialog the "smoothing groups" box, i gotta say !
what could i do there ?
Thanks for the feedback, Acumen.
It will be fixed soon within the next minor release.
When exporting, Balancer saves the smoothing data using the normal themselves.
Perhaps meanwhile this workaround may be helpful to reconstruct the smoothing groups data in 3ds max:
http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-fbx/fbx-plug-ins-import-export-discussions/importing-fbx-into-max-looses-smoothing-group-visual-updates/
but if you keep updating the program in such a steady pace, it's really a rather minor thing to worry about for me, atm.
From the Interface and example shots I can already tell that is has some clever ideas behind it. And offering a free version to get started with is also a good catch to get new people trying it out at least.
@atangeo: The screenshots and comparison shots are a very nice addition to the website. I think that brings already more people to actually try things out. I like the GUI and the icons - refreshing while still not eating up a bloat amount of screen-space.
Let the user tweak the background color and also let the user toggle lights on/off (in order to easier view silhouette). I have had times when I want to compare just the silhouette between different optimizations, and it's really hard with a bright white backgrund and a semi-grey lighted representation of my object.
Keep it up. Liking your program so far.
We hope to add them soon.
Meanwhile, you can try changing the object color by pressing the last
button in the toolbar, 'show with alternate colors'.
Also turning the edges on, 'show wireframe', can emphasize the silhouette.
Maybe check out typical game developments and their requirements in this area. I could imagine that exporting a sequence of different LOD levels or models would be nice - also some kind of checker or slider to faster compare changes.
Also perhaps have a look at the great tutorial of David King's LOD checker technique:
[ame]
Maybe you could add something like that into it? - it would be a nice way of seeing how the LOD models fit in.
In that regards also perhaps a nice graph or table of the different LOD levels so one can see what levels there are and with which polygon count they come.
keep it up - nice tool so far
Thank you for the advices and ideas, and for letting know about this great tutorial.
I hope we will be able to add such a functionality in the future version.
I appreciate a lot your really helpful post!
Except that, unless it's for personal use only, that's a little bit ILLEGAL.
Also, please note, I -WORK- for DAZ 3D.
Here is the list of main improvements:
- Full support for smoothing groups
- Intelligent vertex joining
- Enable/disable lighting for easier silhouette inspection
Thanks to everybody for contributing ideas and requests.
Download link: http://www.atangeo.com/download
I like that "Intelligent vertex joining" and the smoothing groups support. Of course it would help later on the website to show some screenshots of what it does (before/ after) in detail shots.
I was asked recently about a few people regarding LOD stuff and poly crunching and totally forgot your app, will definitely steer people next time into your direction just to get some feedback myself as well.
best luck with your business and keep it up
from 10k down to 2k in a few seconds, is pretty nice, the topology is not perfect, but better then most polycrunchers, a bit of work and its pretty usable i guess
The latest update of Balancer for Windows, v1.1.3, includes a cool feature to lock individual vertices to fine tune simplification results, and some nice enhancements like UV mapping foldover prevention and mouse navigation customization to match your favorite authoring application.
Atangeo Balancer technology is now also available as an SDK, which is 32bit and 64bit binary libraries for both Windows and Mac OS X.
Link: http://www.atangeo.com/download
The Windows version has been also updated
with some improvements to visualization and navigation.
Balancer comes now with both 32 bit and 64 bit binaries
on both Windows and Mac OS X.
Link: http://www.atangeo.com/
I still have to check this out but you've gotten my hopes up that this will make a slightly better messy mesh than previous optimization tools have.
I hope Balancer will give you at least 'less chaotic triangulated nightmare' and ability to easily pick the best resolution for your model.
By the ways, there is a nice comparison of Balancer against some big 3D apps at the Luxology forums:
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=40386
and now comes with selective density control.
Now you can control face densities for selective reduction rate of
different groups/meshes/sub-meshes. For example, you can set
density of 5 to the head group of your model, to increase the density
of the head vertices roughly 5 times.
Balancer also features locking of different groups/sub-meshes
and multiple selection.
See this user guide page here: http://www.atangeo.com/guide/density
Enjoy
ever seen the wireframes of the ingame uncharted 2 characters? they polycrunched the hell out of them, doesn't matter, they deform well enough and the normalmaps fix he rest.
@antageo: nice nipple protection, you can always spend some polies in the nipples
@stromberg90: do these keep the uvs intact? i'm not quite sure, never used meshlab or decimationmaster on uv'ed meshes