API

Art Tools

Good performance is critical to the success of many games. The graphical parts of your game can primarily impact on two systems of the computer: the GPU and the CPU.

Common Bottlenecks:

  • The GPU has too many vertices to process. The number of vertices that is acceptable to ensure good performance depends on the GPU and the complexity of vertex shaders. Generally speaking, aim for no more than 100,000 vertices on mobile. A PC manages well even with several million vertices, but it is still good practice to keep this number as low as possible through optimization.

  • The CPU has too many vertices to process. This could be in skinned meshes, cloth simulation, particles, or other game objects and meshes. As above, it is generally good practice to keep this number as low as possible without compromising game quality. See the section on CPU optimization below for guidance on how to do this. If rendering is not a problem on the GPU or the CPU, there may be an issue elsewhere - for example, in your script or physics. Use the Unity Profiler to locate the problem.

The art tools provided by the toolkit allow you to optimize your game assets for maximum performance using the WebGL platform.

Maya Scripts plattform folder locations:

  • Windows - C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\maya*VERSION*\scripts

  • Macintosh - ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/VERSION/scripts

Check out the Maya Arts Tools Tutorial to get started optimizing your geometry for web based game development.

Reskin and combine selected meshes with new max influencers. Download and install the Babylon Reskin Tool file in your Maya Scripts folder.

Open the Script Editor and go to the Mel tab, copy and paste command below:

babylonReskinTool();

Highlight it and click on "Save Script to Shelf...", specify a name ('Reskin') and click "OK".

Removes unwanted namespace text from selected object. Download and install the Babylon Namespace Tool file in your Maya Scripts folder.

Open the Script Editor and go to the Mel tab, copy and paste command below:

babylonNameTool();

Highlight it and click on "Save Script to Shelf...", specify a name ('Names') and click "OK".

The geometry tools help improve overall scene performance by optimizing game art for WebGL rendering. The toolkit supports combining meshes, seperating meshes, generating blocking volumes for collision and baking a texture atlas for Static Mesh Filter game objects.

Geometry Tools

The height mapping tool enables 16-Bit RAW Greyscale image manipulations. This is very useful to convert to and from RAW and PNG image formats and to scale height maps to the desired mesh detail resolution.

Height Mapping

The cubemap baking tool can pre bake environment Skybox and Radiance texture images. The toolkit supports Low Dynamic Range, High Dynamic Range, and Direct Draw Surface image file formats. An internal Cubemap Filtering Tool plugin is used to process cubemap textures. It reaches very fast processing speeds by utilizing both multi-core CPU and OpenCL GPU at the same time.

Cubemap Baking

The texture atlas skin tool allows you to bake a texture atlas for Skinned Mesh Renderer game objects. It will parse all the sub meshes (materials) and combine all the textures into a group of texture atlas images. The toolkit will encode new uv sets and bake new geometry assets using the combined texture atlas material assets.

Texture Atlas Skin