Streamlining your project

Streamlining your project - Exercise

Here, we want to talk about streamlining a project. As mentioned earlier, VR is a kind of a video game and it relies on a hardware it runs on. For example, if you open a video game on a modern computer, you will find better performance versus an old computer where it might lag.

From the early stage of development, you will need to keep this in mind, and one of the metrics that affects the performance is the number of polygons in the scene.

Continuing from the previous tutorial, here we have the Front loader opened in 3ds Max, or you can download P4Optimizing.max from the project folder.

Hover your mouse on the perspective window and hit 7 on the keyboard. This is going to bring up the statistic of the scene.

Note the number of Polys. It is too much or just nice – does the number of polygons give you the acceptable amount of fidelity for its computational expense. For example, more complex objects will require more calculation and that will slow down the performance. The best way to understand is to run a test on the hardware.

In this section, we check out the number of polygons on each individual object. When you select any object in the scene, you will notice that the statistic doesn't change as it only shows the Total. We would like to know the number of polygons per object that I am selecting.

Click the + sign and Configure Viewports in the perspective window.

This will open the Viewport Configuration dialog. Select the Statistic tab and check Total + Selection and click OK.

Now when you select any object you not only see the Total polygon count of the scene, you will also see polygon count of the selected object. This will give you an idea how dense or lite that object is. Example: if you select one of the tires, it will show you that it is made up of 5000 polys.

You can now make the decision: what object to keep, further optimize, or delete.

File > Save or press CTRL + S to save the file.