Scene Optimiser (formerly PW Toolbox)

Accelerate your game just with a couple of clicks!

Do you wish your game would perform better? Faster frame rates mean that you can hit a wider audience and deliver a richer and more satisfying experience. However, scene optimization is a time-consuming process, often akin to dark magic.  Scene optimizer was born out of professional VR and Mobile optimization work for our customers, and we have automated a range of different techniques to make it easier for you deliver better framerates with just a couple of clicks.

What types of scenes will benefit from Scene Optimizer?

• Scene Optimizer is not a magic bullet that will insta-fix poor level design, and the performance boost you will get will be dependent on your scene.  That said we have frame rate improvements of up to 900% in some scenarios and gotten a nice boost in most of the scenes we have tested with. The best benefit will be gained on scenes that have large numbers of game objects as is typically the case where you are using low poly or modular assets.
• Not all assets make sense for Scene Optimizer. Static / non-moving assets are best suited to Scene Optimizer, but this is also dependent on the shaders being used. Some vegetation shaders move vertices to simulate wind, and these will often break when merged. You can still use Scene Optimizer in your scene, but need to ensure these specific objects are excluded.

How does Scene Optimizer Work?

• Scene Optimizer takes a hybrid approach to optimization as one approach rarely fits all scenarios. You simply drop your object tree onto Scene Optimizer and tell it what combination of techniques you want it to do.
• Scene Optimizer will execute your configuration and automate the optimization of your scene. It turns weeks of work into minutes and encourages experimentation to see which approach works best for you, as we provide a frame comparison system to show its impact.

Intelligent Mesh Combining:

• Scene Optimizer understands that the way you should treat rocks and grass is entirely different to the way that you would treat buildings and even mountains.
• Scene Optimizer uses a combination of size, spatial partitioning and mesh combining to create intelligent objects that significantly reduce draw calls, shadow generation, and also aids the process of culling.
• This can result in massively increased performance as most modern mobile and desktop GPU's will render one larger mesh much faster than lot of smaller ones.

Layer Based Distance Culling:

• Scene Optimizer can also automate the generation of meshes on different layers and provides a system to easily control shadow and draw distances based on the size of the original objects.  This enables you to cull smaller objects quicker as they are less likely to be seen in the distance and to keep larger objects rendering further out. This can easily be tweaked and can have a profound impact on render performance.

Occlusion Culling:

• Unity has an inbuilt occlusion culling system, which is awesome when used properly, but if used incorrectly, especially in open world situations, it can actually be much slower than no occlusion culling at all. Scene Optimizer can help with Occlusion Culling, especially with large numbers of smaller objects such as grass and ground cover by turning potentially millions of culling decisions down into a relatively small number of larger culling decisions. This reduces CPU load and can have a profound impact on your games performance.

Bonus - object placement tools:

• We added a tool to quickly align objects with the ground / slope of an underlying terrain - convenient when moving a selection of objects around on the terrain to a different spot.