Merge skinned and non-skinned meshes.
Create atlases.
Remove hidden triangles.
Decimate meshes.
Create LOD levels with 1 or 2 mouse clicks.
Recognize this problem?
You downloaded a model. It looks great, but is way too heavy for it's purpose.
SimpleLOD fixes this problem in a very easy way: By merging skinned and non-skinned meshes, by baking atlases and by generating the LOD meshes for you. Your GameObject is operational with just a few mouse clicks.
The name "SimpleLOD" only refers to how easy it is to use it. There is nothing "Simple" about it's functionality or it's performance.
SimpleLOD does a pretty good job at reducing the triangles in your meshes and it combines meshes and sub meshes to reduce draw calls. Depending on the complexity and shape of the original mesh, the end result may have less than half the triangles with no visible changes. When you ramp up the compression for higher LOD levels, the reduction goes much further than that. Up close you may notice differences, but when viewed from the distance that goes with the LOD level, the model will still look great. It is recommended to play with the compression levels for optimal results.
Baking a texture atlas for your merged gameobject has suddenly become a very easy process as well. Simply drag & drop materials or textures and the atlas gets baked on the spot. In the background it creates identical atlases for normal maps, specular maps, etc.
There are many mesh combine packages, many mesh decimators and many atlas baking packages, but SimpleLOD combines this all in 1 product and....."
- it produces very good compression results,
- bakes atlases for normal maps,
- supports skinned meshes,
- support models bigger than 64K vertices,
- runs entirely inside Unity (no external services),
- has all C# source code included (no dll)
- and can be used at runtime (also in background thread) as well as in the editor.
With SimpleLOD you can have an avatar model, apply several clothes meshes to it, add non-skinned meshes to the bones (like weapons or a helmet), combine it all into 1 skinned mesh, bake atlases and generate decimated meshes for LOD levels.
Of course the end result would still be better when you model everything by hand. But not everyone is a master 3D modeler and sometimes models are procedurally created at runtime. This package is for those people that want an easy solution for a complex problem.