Course Introduction

The Optimization Process

Profiling Tools

Welcome to 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications! In this introductory project, we will review the course's main learning objectives, discuss the practice of optimization, and identify the optimization tools available at your disposal.

Introduction/Optimization and Profiling

Geometry - Introduction 

Triangle and Polygon Usage

Level of Detail

Additional Geometry Best Practices

Demo: Level of Detail

Textures - Introduction

Texture Size, Color Space, and Compression

Texture Atlases

Texture Filtering

Mipmapping

UV Unwrap, Visual Impact, and Texture Channel Packing

Alpha Channels and Normal Map Best Practices

Editing Texture Settings

Demo: Texture Atlases

Shaders and Materials - Overview

Optimizing Shaders for Mobile Platforms

Transparencies

Additional Material and Shader Best Practices

Demo: Draw Calls and SRP Batcher

Lighting - Overview

Light Modes and Types

Lighting for Static Objects

Light Probes

Shadows

Demo: Baked Lighting

Conclusion/Next Steps

This project will highlight optimizations for 3D models that can make a game more efficient while maintaining aesthetic intent, improving the performance and experience on mobile devices. 

Geometry

This project will highlight the different implementation considerations and optimizations that take advantage of a Texture’s flexibility. When given the correct settings and applied correctly over their many use cases, Textures play a major role in achieving your desired visual effects. 

Textures

Shaders and Materials play a crucial role in determining how target hardware will process and render your 3D objects. In this project, you will explore best practices that will keep the shaders lightweight and fast when running on phones with limited resources.

Shaders and Materials

Lighting is one of the most important aspects of real-time 3D visuals. It can set the mood, guide interactions, and identify goals and objectives. In this project, you will learn about and compare the differences between the available lights and light modes that you can use in your 3D mobile application.

Lighting

ARMUnityMobileOptimization.zip

In this intermediate course, participants will learn how to produce performance-optimized 3D assets and scenes for mobile applications. Topics will cover tips on optimizing Geometry, Textures, Materials, Shaders, and Lighting. This course was created with technical artists and content creators in mind.

Arm & Unity Presents: 3D Art Optimization for Mobile Applications

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What is the Optimization Process?

Conclusion

The process of taking a piece of software and improving its performance is called optimization. In this tutorial, we review the steps we take when optimizing our 3D mobile applications.

AI, ML Curricular Framework Resources 

Optimization is the process of taking a piece of software and modifying it to improve performance. For mobile applications, this typically means modifying the application to make it run faster on mobile devices with limited resources.

In this course, we will be focusing on optimizing 3D art assets: our models, textures, materials, shaders, and lights.

For example, a mobile game you’re working on could be exhibiting low frame rates, might appear jumpy, make your phone warm, and use up considerable battery life. These issues could be caused by a complex model or an unoptimized shader. This can give a bad impression and make the game difficult to play. Profiling and optimizing games to improve performance can often lead to a better, smoother experience.

When optimizing 3D art assets, we will use an iterative process that guides you through finding and removing performance problems.

The optimization process consists of the following steps:

Profile, or take measurements, of your application with a profiler.

Analyze the data to locate the bottleneck.

Determine the relevant optimization to apply.

If the performance is not acceptable, return to Step 1 and repeat the process.

The following is an example of the optimization process applied to the mobile game above:

You're testing your game and notice graphical hitches or subpar performance. While your game is running on your test device, you can use the Unity profiler to take measurements to find the problem.

Analyzing the measurements from the profiler can help you isolate and identify the source of the performance problem. You might, for example, notice large spikes in vertices being rendered in the Rendering profiler module after your main character comes into view.

After noticing the large spikes and testing for other situations, you determine that the game could be rendering too many vertices when certain models come into view.

You update your team and advise that some of your 3D models could use LODs to reduce the number of vertices in your meshes when viewed from far away.

After applying the LODs on the models, you test the game again to verify that the optimization worked!

If you do this and your application still doesn’t perform as expected, you can restart the process by profiling the application again to find out what else is causing problems.

At a certain point in your game's development, you can expect to repeat the optimization process a number of times. Optimization is an iterative process that can help you find performance problems in a number of different areas. In the next Tutorial, we will explore the different tools available to you when profiling your mobile application. 

The Optimization Process

1. What is the Optimization Process?

2. Conclusion

Complete this tutorial