The quickest optimization tips I wish I would've known in Blender

okay here are my two favorite tips and they're also kind of the quickest tips for optimizing a full scene like this so taking down the Burtt the vertices count and and also merging materials so and I didn't say these in any of the jor-el's I just sort of found out about them so tip number one is destructive so save a copy before you do anything and depending on your workflow you might want to do it this is the beginning or at the end or sort of mix it up but basically you're probably familiar with the decimate modifier which if you're not you should go figure that out right now but if you so I'm here in the editor if I push a to select all tab to go into edit mode a to make sure all my vertices are selected and then going to mesh and then get go down here to clean up you have a bunch of different options here the main ones that I use a lot and I wish I would have known from day one is merged by distance decimate geometry so you could do like the decimate modifier you can do that with specific with specific geometry so for instance this entire and scene or you could do it with just say a wheel on one of these vehicles you could just do it instead of having to do it for the entire vehicle you could just select the wheel that you want to do it but but yeah before we do that I'm going to go up here window toggle system console so I don't get us will be able to see more information and then if we look here we have this scene right now has 515,000 verts so if we do this mesh cleanup merge by distance just by pushing that well I've already had it selected for something else but I know if you saw that but where's my console that's in my console window console so just by doing that merge by distance I removed two hundred and seventy two thousand vertices so I literally took the entire scene and brought it in half half the half the vertices which is pretty insane and this in this particular scene I actually can probably get away with that the default is something like Oh point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one or something even still even the default would remove 43,000 vertices and then you can play with this merge by distance two to see you know Oh point zero one or in my case Oh point one is fine this particular scene in it and like I said it can remove just tons and tons of vertices but again like what's really great about this is you don't have to do it for your entire scene so you could do so push seven to get in this view let's say that our all of our action happens on this side of the airport we could select just this side do alt Z to get into x-ray mode and then do this and then you can also push f3 and then search merge by distance and then you can do it to to those now I've already done it so it's not gonna remove much but I'll just do point two for the sake of for the sake of this tutorial so so that's awesome and then the other thing is so you can push a again to select all and then you could go up to mesh cleanup let's go ahead and delete loose let's see if there's anything there there's no loose ones but depending on where you're getting this and what's happened to it you might you might have a bunch of loose vertices just hanging out and that's one way you can easily delete all of them and then the other one too and again you could also just if you if you have some of these assets that you don't want to be affected you could just hide them say these three aircraft were important going to edit mode excuse me select all edit and now those three won't be affected but I can select everything else what's going on here all edit and then go into mesh and then I can do cleanup and decimate geometry and I'm gonna go in here so you can see the results because it's kind of it can be you can do some damage here for sure then do alt Z to get out of x-ray mode just look at this so if I go point five will should see a pretty big difference so you can see it brought that down really really low so you know again this might not be the result the desired result you can just do point seven five see what that does and you know that might work for me and and then if we look here I won't tell us how many but we could look over here so we say so right now so let's go back up to one so this is with nothing hat so this is with no decimation it's two hundred and thirty eight thousand vertices so if I do 0.75 now art 186 so you could see how you could very quickly decimate an entire scene or parts of a scene really really quickly before I was adding a decimate modifier for every single object and it was just tedious just tedious and then if I had a big object so let's say these were all joined and I wanted to decimate say this this plane here let's say these wheels were attached to this aircraft what I would do is I would separate the wheels as a separate mesh make them their own object and then add the decimate modifier and then decimate him but now I could just edit and then select those obviously I would do a better job and then do mesh decimate so that's awesome the other quick tip that I wish I would have known from day one that's amazing is merge merging the material so get out of edit mode just so we see this so let's alt H to bring back all of our aircraft so right now if I go up to this and I hide the empties these are all meshes here okay now this particular scene has like almost a thousand separate meshes so if this were going into a game engine for instance that's a thousand draw calls and some game engines most game engines probably sketchfab unreal unity different engines like that have ways of automatically merging meshes that share the same material but they're still probably going to be a performance hit because some of them happen like I know for instance in sketchfab it happens at runtime so you're still going to have some sort of performance hit so it's it's sort of a good practice that if you have 20 materials that you have 20 meshes and that's a longer discussion we can talk about that more in another time I'm just going to show you real quick how to do it and then you could decide how you want to do it but so if you go up to edit preferences add-ons and then search for material this comes shipped if blender it's just material utilities it's unchecked by default check it and then you do so so select all edit a to select all and then Shift q go down to specials oh you don't need to be in edit mode you need to be an object mode so in object mode a to select all shift Q to go to material utilities specials joined by material and then do Auto join and then watch what happens push okay now instead of a thousand meshes we have like 20 meshes and so that's again that's 20 draw calls instead of a thousand draw calls so this is a this is a huge huge huge a huge improvement over where it was and and in some cases this would be helpful because now if I wanted to apply modifiers for instance to all these aircraft to have a more non-destructive way of decimating now I can instead of having to add a thousand modifiers I can just deal with 20 so I could have a decimate modifier that has let's say 0.5 and it would make these aircraft look like like terrible but I but then I don't have to worry about I could export this have it apply this modifier on the export but if I ever if I want to come back to this and export it at one I could do that it's a non-destructive workflow so anyway two very quick very helpful things I would have known from day one using blender that can hopefully help you optimize your game there's a there's a million different ways you could use them you'd probably want to use them in in different areas you might not want to do it all up front or all at the end you'd probably want to do a little bit here a little bit there but I think you get the idea of of what I'm trying to show you and I hopeful hopefully it was helpful all right take care

Channel: Alex Pearce

Views: 27,452

Keywords: blender, optimization, optimize, low-poly, low, poly

Id: zFtg-NnMIgU

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020