Scene Optimizer

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Accelerate your game just with a couple of clicks!

Do you wish your game would perform better?

Faster frame rates mean that you can hit a wider audience and deliver a richer and more satisfying experience. However, scene optimization is a time-consuming process, often akin to dark magic.

Scene Optimizer was born out of professional VR and Mobile optimization work for our customers, and we have automated a range of techniques to make it easier for you to deliver better framerates with just a couple of clicks.

Which scenes work best with Scene Optimizer?

Scene Optimizer should only be purchased if you have large numbers of game objects in your scene, typically on mobile or VR where it can be extremely effective for low poly scenes like the one in our video. Unity terrain-based scenes handle asset rendering differently, and you will not get much of a benefit.

If your scene does not get a frame rate boost, then this can be for a range of different reasons, but not because Scene Optimizer did not do the tasks it promised to do. Before purchasing please read the following section on how Scene Optimizer works. If you do not understand it, then Scene Optimizer is not for you.

You are welcome to reach out to us and ask if you are unsure.

How Does Scene Optimizer Work?

Scene optimization is hard. When optimizing for mobile and VR, we often spend as long optimizing a scene as we do creating it.

You need to pay attention to project settings, lighting, post-processing, camera setup, shadow settings, asset optimization (a lot of the art on the asset store is poorly optimized), and level design. Each of these elements needs to be worked on to get the best result.

Scene Optimizer is not a magic bullet, but instead, it should be considered as another tool in your arsenal. It is particularly effective for large scenes with lots of meshes, as we demonstrate in the video, and its biggest benefit is that it takes an intelligent approach to merging game objects to reduce the rendering, culling, and shadowing overhead.

Scene Optimizer takes a hybrid approach to optimization as one approach rarely fits all scenarios. You drop your object tree onto Scene Optimizer and tell it what combination of techniques you want it to do.

Scene Optimizer will execute your configuration and automate the optimization of your scene. It can turn weeks of work into minutes and encourages experimentation to see which approach works best for you, as we provide a frame comparison system to show its impact.

Technique: Intelligent Mesh Cutting & Combining

Scene Optimizer understands that the way you should treat rocks and grass is entirely different from the way that you would treat buildings and even mountains.

Scene Optimizer uses a combination of size, spatial partitioning, and mesh combining to create merged objects that significantly reduce draw calls and aid the process of culling.

Scene Optimizer can also cut large meshes into smaller meshes, and change indexing to 32-bit if requested to make them perform better on mobile and VR devices.

This can result in massively increased performance as most modern mobile and desktop GPUs will render one larger mesh much faster than a lot of smaller ones.

Technique: Layer Based Distance Culling

Scene Optimizer can also automate the generation of meshes on different layers, and provides a system to easily control shadow and draw distances based on the size of the original objects.

This enables you to cull smaller objects quicker as they are less likely to be seen in the distance and to keep larger objects rendering further out. This can easily be tweaked and can have a profound impact on render performance.

Technique: Occlusion Culling

Unity has an inbuilt occlusion culling system, which is awesome when used properly, but if used incorrectly, especially in open-world situations, it can be much slower than no occlusion culling at all.

Scene Optimizer can help with Occlusion Culling, especially with large numbers of smaller objects such as grass and ground cover by turning potentially millions of culling decisions down into a relatively small number of larger culling decisions. This reduces CPU load and can have a profound impact on your game's performance.

Scene Optimizer Tips

Scene Optimizer should be considered as a handy helper to save time on some of your more common optimization processes.

Large scenes should enable layer-based culling in the settings, and then tweak the results. You will typically get the best benefit by reducing draw calls and shadows on small grass/rocks/bushes. Select your camera and experiment with the culling distances to tweak it. By reducing draw distances on small and medium-sized objects you can improve your render significantly.

Occlusion culling is not recommended on open-world scenes where there is nothing to occlude. It adds CPU overhead for no benefit. To get the best benefit, design your scene with natural or artificial obstacles. Stand behind them to see it in action.

Some vegetation shaders move vertices to simulate wind, and these will often break when merged. You can still use Scene Optimizer in your scene, but make sure that these objects are excluded.

Bonus - Object Placement Tools

We added a tool to quickly align objects with the ground/slope of an underlying terrain - convenient when moving a selection of objects around on the terrain to a different spot.

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Release Notes

v1.1.6

Features:

• Added support for Unity 2023.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed some issues with lighting and UV conversions.
• Fixed bug with missing mesh references after optimizing in Unity 2023.

v1.1.5

Features:

• Upgraded mesh combination algorithms.
• Identified limitation with perfect preservation of UV2 channel during mesh combination.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed miscellaneous bugs and third-party script conflicts.
• Fixed some performance issues.

v1.1.4

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug with overwriting meshes in EditorSaveMesh Utility.

v1.1.3

Features:

• Added feature for detecting broken LOD Groups warnings before optimizing.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed issue with LODGroups not being included in the Original / Optimized performance test.
• Fixed compatibility and other issues with using Gaia Multi Terrains.
• Fixed the ignoring of lightmap objects for those who want to rebake lighting.
• Fixed issue with multiple Optimized gameobjects for multiple Root GameObjects.
• Fixed bug with multiple root objects.

v1.1.2

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug with accidentally skipping objects with lightmaps.
• Fixed bug with handling multiple Root GameObjects.
• Fixed bug with Gaia Multi Terrain scene loading.
• Fixed bug with cleanup of old optimizations.

v1.1.1

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug with 'Original' and 'Optimized' compiler errors when importing over old version.
• Fixed some warnings with 'OnEnable' in Editor.

v1.1.0

Features:

• Moved save folder to 'SO_UserData' under Assets.
• Scene Optimizer now generates a 'Data' GameObject in the Scene to record all original and optimized entities.
• Deprecated 'Original' and 'Optimized' Components.
• Defaulted 'Merge Colliders' to false.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug with FPS Tester mis-calculating frames in certain contexts.
• Fixed bug with naming of objects causing conflicts upon saving.
• Fixed bug with AssetDatabase Save + Refresh order.

v1.0.9

Features:

• Ability to filter objects by type (i.e. All/Static Only/Dynamic Only).
• Ability to source meshes by multiple layers.
• Unoptimized objects are now copied to a separate object instead of ignored.
• Improved internal + external documentation.

Improvements:

• Improved UX of Scene Optimizer Editor.
• Improved handling of optimize command visualization.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed compilation issues with certain newer versions of Unity.
• Fixed bug with back slashes on MacOS.
• Fixed bug with Start + Stop Asset Editing.
• Fixed bug with Material list causing editor to crash.
• Fixed bug with Material filter causing some objects to be missed.
• Fixed bug with Min Max Object Size editor Slider.

v1.0.8

• Fixed bug with collider scaling not matching the optimized objects in certain cases

v1.0.7

• Fixed crash issue when an objects lod group counts are mismatched.
• Fixed bug with Culling System sometimes not being added to Main Camera automatically.
• Fixed issues with Optimize Command selection in Editor Window.
• Fixed bug with child terrains having original components added to them.

v1.0.6

• Better handling for Terrain objects in the scene
• Added support for Gaia Terrain Loading (apply the optimizations to all loaded Terrains automatically)
• Improved UX and handling of events.
• Improved stability during the optimization process
• 'Optimize Scene' now reverts the previous optimization operation before re-applying.
• Fixed positioning issues when merging GameObjects while using the 'Child Under Roots' setting.
• Fixed warnings being created for some Mesh names