In January, Microsoft acquired 3D optimization service Simplygon for an undisclosed sum. Today, we’re seeing the fruits of that buy with the launch of Simplygon Cloud, which the company hopes will help game developers integrate the optimization tool into their workflows to make content more friendly to resource-intensive AR and VR platforms.
The tool, launching on the Azure Marketplace, works in reducing polygon complexity for 3D objects so that they’re easier to render when compute resources are in high demand.
Simplygon takes the couch on the left (584K polygons) and makes the one on the right with just 5K polygons
This past week, Google announced their Poly API, which makes it easier for game developers to import 3D assets into what they’re working on. Google has largely been focusing on stylized low-poly objects for the most part as they look to make objects more friendly to the GPU restrictions of their Daydream VR platform.
Simplygon Cloud is operating in a similar vein for Microsoft; the company launched its Mixed Reality platform this fall with a bunch of VR headset makers, and resource constraints are now a much more real thing to Windows game developers in VR (and AR with HoloLens). As the name implies, what Microsoft is now doing is sending this capability to the cloud, so assets can be delivered across differently specced platforms with unique cloud-based 3D pipelines for object libraries.
What makes Simplygon a more attractive option compared to competitors is that it’s obviously easier to reduce complexity than increase it, so by allowing game devs to focus on building high-detail 3D objects and allowing Simplygon Cloud to minimize them for the appropriate platform, developers won’t have to rebuild objects as compute capabilities increase over time.
Simplygon Cloud is available in the Azure Marketplace now.