Optimization

Introduction

In this document, we will go through how you can optimize your scene to be less performance-heavy.

Aximmetry is rendering in real time, therefore you have limited time to render each frame you should always keep this in mind at all times.

Models

When creating or loading a model into your scene it is advised to keep its polygon count reasonable. Try not to use raw scanned or sculpted models as they usually come with way too many polygons. 
Having some higher polygon models is okay, but they quickly add up in requirements.

Here you can see some examples of unnecessary high polygon models:
                           Wireframe                                                                     Shaded

As you can see reducing their polygon count barely made any difference in the shaded view.

Textures

Textures also have an important role in optimizing your scene. Having too many and/or too large textures may result in overloading your Vram.

Here we had 271 different textures for the books, we were able to merge them together to get 1 big texture atlas reducing the number of textures and their Vram requirement.
This is an extreme example we usually can't afford to lose this much detail, but in this case, we got away with it.

Shaders

When selecting a shader it is important to choose one that suits your needs while not going over your requirements, by that we mean that if you will not use a normal map there is no point in adding a shader that requires a normal map.

By default each shader's transparency is set to None(0) we advise only changing this on shaders that you really want to make transparent as transparent shaders cost much more to render.

Light and shadows

As mentioned earlier it is advised not to use too many dynamic lights as they are slower to render.
We also suggest that you do not have too many shadows when rendering. You can turn off the Cast Shadow property for some of the lights.

Effects

Quality and also the number of effects greatly affect the performance requirements of the scene you can try to reduce the number of effects that are used and/or their quality.
Effects that are expensive to render:

• Blurring - try to decrease the quality or the number of Blurrer modules
• Tone Mapping - check if you need all of them in your scene, and turn off unnecessary effects such as streaks or glares
• Billboards - Try to only use as many as you need, for example, you can put two people on the same billboard
• Planar Reflections - Try to use them in reduced resolution and limit the number that you use More on this here:
• Antialiasing - Try to lower their number and quality
• Texture manipulations - In case of static textures, try to minimize the number of operations on the texture. Like resizing, blurring, adjusting the color, generating mipmaps, etc.
  You can do all of these offline (with Aximmetry or other software like PS).