InstaLOD provides a comprehensive toolset to help you maximize efficiency and cost-savings. Our real-world examples offer a step-by-step guide to help you translate practical issues into successful solutions. We are continually expanding our list of articles on how to leverage these powerful tools. The following page provides access to some commonly-used workflows.
- Fixing Surface Normals: Polygons have various attributes that impact how they are rendered on screen. In InstaLOD Studio, users have the option to edit the way polygons are rendered by adjusting the surface normals and winding order.
- How to Close Holes: There are various ways to close holes using InstaLOD. Depending on the scenario, however, specific workarounds might be needed to achieve the best results.
- Vertex Welding: Vertex welding is a crucial feature to fix broken or messy geometry such as overlapping vertices and superfluous UV splits. It can be an important preprocessing step that improves the topology of a mesh prior to optimization, enabling InstaLOD's optimizer to produce even better results.
- Quick LOD Generation Workflow Using Automatic Quality: A quick and scalable LOD generation workflow can be built using only the Automatic Quality mode. This can be done by creating multiple "Optimize" mesh operations distinguished by the chosen level of quality.
- How to Create Complex Mesh Operation Chains: InstaLOD Studio allows the creation of advanced mesh operations by chaining multiple operations together. This allows for the creation of unique and highly customized operations that can be used in the same way other profiles are used.
- How to Create LOD Chains: Creating LODs manually is a tedious task that can be sped up by creating multiple LODs simultaneously and fully automated thanks to InstaLOD’s asynchronous processes.
- Preparing Models for AR/Web: This article overviews the necessary requirements to prepare models for AR and Web experiences using InstaLOD.
- Processing Data for 3D Printing: This article overviews the requirements and preparation for models to be 3D printed and how InstaLOD's tools can be utilized for a 3D printing workflow.
- Optimizing Small Objects Without Breaking: InstaLOD’s Optimizer is scale-sensitive by default and therefore optimizes larger surfaces differently to smaller details.
- Dealing with Massive Data Sets: Processing files with millions of polygons is a trivial task for InstaLOD, even on low-end hardware machines. Loading large data sets with hundreds of millions of polygons onto a GPU, however, can become a struggle in any real-time application.
- How to Preserve Topology During Polygon Optimization: InstaLOD allows users to paint vertex colors on geometry to have point-precision over where to optimize, and where not to optimize. Vertex painting can also be used in the ‘CAD Live Link’, to fix shading issues on CAD data.
- Optimizing Skeletal Meshes: Optimizing skeletal meshes often results in exploding meshes, broken rigs, or other issues which makes this process tedious work to complete. InstaLOD makes this a quick and painless task.
- How to Process Scan Data: Processing scan data is a difficult task. While other optimizers and remeshers can crash at just 3-4mio polygons, InstaLOD is able to batch-process hundreds of millions of polygons through InstaLOD Pipeline without needing high-end hardware.
- Kitbash: Remesh Workflow: Kitbashing allows artists to be flexible when creating new assets with existing models. With InstaLOD, this workflow can be pushed to the next level.
- Preserving Mesh Details with Isotropic Remesh: The Isotropic Remesh mesh operation restructures the topology of the input mesh so that all edges have the same size.
- Preserving Separate Meshes During Remesh: Remeshing typically combines multiple meshes into a single one. To preserve each individual mesh after the reconstruction process, ‘Distinct Construction’ can be used.
- Remeshing Non-Watertight Meshes: Remeshing non-watertight meshes can quickly become a problem due to backface creation. With InstaLOD’s feature ‘Ignore Backfaces’, this problem can be fixed easily.
- Remesh: Optimize Mode: The 'Optimize Mode' for the Remesh Mesh Operation is useful when a complete reconstruction is not necessary but a very low polygonal count is targeted where modeled-out detail would typically be lost.
- Best-Practices for Optimizing CAD Data: InstaLOD’s ability to optimize densely tessellated polygon meshes while maintaining the shading quality makes it the only optimizer suitable for the optimization of polygon meshes created from CAD solid body data.
- How to Selectively Tessellate CAD Data: The tessellation of CAD data is typically processed on a global scale, meaning that entire assemblies are tessellated using the same settings. With InstaLOD, CAD files can be tessellated on a per-part level with a wide range of control.
- Utilizing the Baker as a Texturing Tool: InstaLOD’s sophisticated baker allows for advanced workflows beyond the typical high-to low-poly bake such as baking at up to 32K resolution. In this article, learn how to utilize the baker as a texturing tool.
- Decal Baking: Transferring decals onto a mesh texture reduces draw calls and makes costly blending operations obsolete. InstaLOD allows the automated blending of textures in an easy-to-use and intuitive manner for a variety of operations.
- Transfer Map Baking: Transfer textures make it possible to use original textures on models even after the UVs have been changed on a model.
- Normal Map Baking: Normal maps are used to render how light interacts with a polygon surface and commonly used to project high-frequency detail onto a low polygon mesh. Baking normal maps in InstaLOD is a quick process which achieves perfect artifact-free results.
- How to Utilize Cage Meshes: Baking cages can be utilized to modify the direction that baking rays are cast to fix e.g. texture skewing. InstaLOD supports the use of custom texture cages for quick and easy setup of bakes.
- Bake Multiple Diffuse Textures when Remeshing: Baking models with multiple ultra-high detail diffuse textures (e.g. 10 x 8k textures) would typically require a 32k texture bake. Whilst InstaLOD is capable of baking these massive textures, many render engines only support textures of up to 8k.