Optimize your 3D models: Balancer 1.0 released

[atangeo]

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/

[micmanos]

The price is nice but to be honest, 13.300.000 polys to 400.000 polys doesn't say much in this forum and it's not really as attractive as saying ... "1.000 polys down to 500 polys".

This is primarily a 3D-Application oriented forum and not a 3D-SMax forum to be dealing with that high of polycount.

PS: Interested to see how it will handle a 1.000 poly model or maybe do some successive passes on that horse model and see how that algorithm handles his own creation.

It has tremendous value if an algorithm can be applied multiple times and still keep going.

[atangeo]

Thanks for the feedback.
You are right. 13.300.000 polys to 400.000 polys was to show only how Balancer can easily
handle huge models.
Please, see details of this horse example, or click on the image at atangeo.com.
You will see 13.300.000 polys all the way down to 400 polys.
All the resolutions were computed in one shot, so you can quickly
pick the one you need. But if you run Balancer on a saved, say, 4.000 polys
it is supposed to give you the same 400 polys model.

[micmanos]

I'm so sorry for speaking up so soon. I should have checked the details better. I have downloaded the Lite will give it a try in a couple of convex/concave models i have. I'm curious to see how they will turn out.

It would increase your site effectiveness if you would replace the 400.000 poly model with the one at 400 poly or maybe create a nice vertical ribbon that shows the downcount like in the details page.

Cheers.

[Lenn]

Looks useful, I hope it is. Soon I will need a tool like this, so I will try it out. Thanks.

[atangeo]

@micmanos
I've added a low-poly image to make a ribbon.
It looks more effective now. Thanks for the advice.

[sybixsus]

Just a little tip. Triangle strips are now considered pointless when it comes to game development. For that reason, it would probably be best, at least from a marketing standpoint, to focus on optimization for index buffers, which your software also seems to handle.

[atangeo]

@sybixsus
Thank you for the tip. We will try to make it more clear
what our optimization is good for.
What we basically do is triangle reordering for optimal
utilization of GPU vertex cache.
Index buffers based rendering is the best method to draw,
and our optimization is very effective for this method.
Right marketing terms is not an easy task 

[atangeo]

Balancer was updated to version 1.0.2.

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

[atangeo]

Balancer has been updated to 1.1.3.
The latest update 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/

[arnienet]

Very impressive, seems to work very well on a couple of models I tried, and is the best app I've used for this purpose.

I don't know if this suggestion is outside your plans, but if it were possible to preserve skeletal bone to vertex mappings (especially for shared vertices) to allow mesh reductions for models which have already been rigged, I think it could make this app really stand out in the marketplace.

anyway, excellent work

[atangeo]

Thanks for the kind words about Balancer. 

We plan to add Collada and FBX formats in the near future. So when we will have all the bone info handy, we will add support for vertex remapping of skeletal animation. Thanks for your suggestion.