Optimize your 3D models: Atangeo 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/

[wildrj]

This app seems to be a very useful piece of software . I just downloaded and tried the "lite" version. I was very impressed how well it keeps the original model form while reducing the poly size. I haven't thoroughly tried it out yet i just opened the sample model and tried it out.

[atangeo]

Upon your fair requests,
we've put some nice examples and screenshots of some pretty complex models.
Please take a look.

[Nvisiongameco]

Hey, man this product ROCKS!! I needed something like this for my blender models...Which everyone tends to think are WAY too high poly for my game! Lol!

[bitplane]

Looks good, and fast! Does it use the edge collapse method?
Also, more importantly for games, does it create normal maps and remap the UVs?

[atangeo]

We use a vertex removal method, so uv remap is not needed.
No normal maps creation yet, but we hope to start working on this soon.

[bitplane]

I've been thinking about writing a mesh reduction tool for a long time, but I never solved the problems of remapping the UVs and dealing with boundaries. Your solution looks really cool, nice work

[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