Hi all, we are currently looking into Simplygon for our Lod system. Just wanted to know if anyone has used it and what they thought of it, pros/cons.
Cheers,
~B)
I bump that old topic.
New site, http://www.simplygon.com/ but same question.
If anyone has used it …
Thank you.
We’re putting through a testing right now and it does look pretty solid, but it is costly.
Wow does look interesting, but i think i want to punch their marketing department in the collective throat for the liberal use of the term “automagic”.
Having never used it myself but having been around it quite a bit, I think people’s responses are quite positive about it. I think there were other threads on this forum?
I’ve been evaluating it this last month (again as I did it at Grin 3 years ago and then it had big issues). All of the concerns when it came to normal mesh LOD that we expressed last time had been fixed by now. They have even added a plug-in that gives you script access to batch from Maya or Max, which is nice. Skinning and defoemation preservation has improved a lot and is now really solid, as is remapping (but it would be nice if it could keep the texture reuse from the original mesh, mirroring etc. instead of making everything unique). The only thing that is usually visible is some minor normal face issues, but they are not seen at the distance that the LOD is to be used at anyhow, so it’s ok.
The Proxy LOD is still missing some features, like skinning support would be nice to create backdrop characters out of kit modules and such. And it doesn’t work that well on mesh parts that should not be visible on the given bounding box screen size (which the mesh LOD handles well). But other then that it works ok.
The big thing is still the price. It’s costs a lot, and like for example Havok it’s a cost per project. So if you are running multiple projects at the same time they will need separate licenses. And it’s also even more expensive if you need an MMO license.
I was using it for a UDK project and it definitely speeds work times by loads!! I found that it worked better on meshes that had good topology as opposed to messy geometry… I guess the same sort of theory behind subdivision…
I tested it with static and rigged skeletal meshes in the udk… Great job!
Your point of view is so wonderful, and I feel very interesting. I have a lot of immature idea where you get the answer, I will continue to focus on your posts, I hope you can continue to update, I will put my views and ideas to share with you.
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We took it on but it never became a major part of the pipeline or workflow within World construction, although we did use it in a limited capacity on very heavy objects vehicles etc, manually, it was successful.
However, I guess we are planning a bright future for SimplyGon:
Hi guys! As a Simplygon developer, I just wanted to add that we have received a good review in the latest issue of Game Developer Magazine. There is a reprint PDF available on our website, here: http://www.simplygon.com/pdf/Simplygon_gdmag.pdf
A quote from the review that I think sums up the idea with Simplygon is:
"Simplygon attacks the difficult problem of LOD generation masterfully, and joins the ranks of smart tools that can have a huge impact on time savings in game development. Automatic LOD generation may very well be as significant in time savings as technologies such as motion capture, automatic lipsync, automatic animation rigging, and physics engines, to name a few. More importantly, it frees up the artists’ brains to work on what really matters - and the grab a few beers and kill a few brain cells afterward!”
Also, Simplygon is also available with a site license, for an unlimited number of games at one site, with an annual fee, instead of a per-project license/fee.
Best regards!
Ulrik
It isn’t possible to just buy a single license though is it? We have a couple of guys who might benefit from a good poly reduction tool, but don’t need or want a site/project wide license. We wouldn’t want to integrate it as a dynamic in-engine LOD system, just a stand alone tool. That’s not possible is it?
Site isn’t loading for me? Anyone else having that problem? robinb have you tried emailing them to see if they have a single license?
It wasn’t me that was wanting it. I just happened to look at the site when forwarding the link and found it didn’t have a single license option listed. I’m sure the people wanting decent optimisation will have looked into it.
Single license was not available as an option when we talked to them a few months ago.
They where talking about the site license as their newest version, but at that time they didn’t have a set price range to put on that option. The only license we got clear info on was the project license.
Overall I think it is the best poly reduction tool out there. Sure you can always make better looking LOD manually, but the time it saves on a projects equals from one to several artists for the entire project duration depending on the amount of content. I’m on parental leave right now so I’m not updated on what our discussions are right now as our evaluation ended last week, but I would really like to have Simplygon in our pipeline, especially as we try to keep a small art team on large projects.
EDIT:
Link to license page: http://www.donyalabs.com/eval_sales.asp
[QUOTE=Wolfsong;12516]
Overall I think it is the best poly reduction tool out there. Sure you can always make better looking LOD manually, but the time it saves on a projects equals from one to several artists for the entire project duration depending on the amount of content.[/QUOTE]
For League of Legends we have a bit of a unique situation, that is, we need to generate LODs for different hardware specs rather than camera distance (our camera distance doesn’t change). Is Simplygon’s output geometry good enough that we could use it in that situation with some minimal artist intervention?
Right now I would be careful about using the generated LOD as the first LOD step that the player can get close to, which I guess is the case with generating for different hardware specs for most games. Then again I haven’t played League of Legends so I’m not sure how close to the camera models get as you have a set camera distance. The reason is that Simplygon in many cases does some things that looks strange up close but works well at a distance (of course depending on how hard you crunch the model compare the the input model). So it could be ok if you have a fixed camera distance.
We did use Simplygon at Black Rock Studios to generate all our vehicles from high-res Modo models during most of the production. But I know that we in the end did the first LOD manually to make them look a little better up close. During production we generated all LOD from high-res models for quick turn-around while evolving the looks of the vehicles.
Controlling the generation is not done by camera distance like many systems use for switching LOD. Simplygon uses either vertex count percentage of input model or target screen size based LOD where you control the length of the diagonal of the square 2D bounding box of the mesh on screen from which Simplygon decides which details are needed.
When it comes to artist intervention… the output models aren’t directly artist friendly… They are optimized meshes so the artists find them messy and hard to work with, but then again that is not really the idea behind this product and not a concern for most productions as the artists will only work with the first LOD and never the generated ones. So artist intervention on the output models are probably out the window, but they could be given control to tweak the input for Simplygon to use when generating the LOD.
My best advice would be to do a 30 day trial to see if it works for your camera distance. 
@robinb: Yeah, you are right. Simplygon can be licensed on a per-project or per-site license, but currently not per-seat.
@djTomServo: If you know the pixel resolution, then we can generate meshes with a guaranteed error, such as 1-pixel error (compared to the original). Just as Wolfsong says, the output models (especially ProxyLODs) are hard to do post-processing work on, but the idea is that you should not have to :):
@BlueM00n: Sorry, our hosting ISP had a server breakdown, the site is restored now. http://www.simplygon.com
@Wolfsong: I hope you have a great time on parental leave :):
Best regards
Ulrik
Take a look at Vizup Desktop or Vizup SDK. High quality polygon reduction, advanced LOD generation and flexible licensing:
http://vizup.com/products.html or http://vizup.com/vizup-sdk.html
Drop me a PM if you have any questions.
Regards,
Simon