Scene Optimizer vs Decimater
Wonderland
Posts: 7,134
in The Commons
So I get that Scene Optimizer primarily deals with textures but it also handles subdivision. Is Decimator still necessary if you have Scene Optimizer? And do characters still look OK after they've been Decimized? And is there a way to pick exactly how many polygons are in the final output? Sorry, I'm way more of an artist than geek and still don't really know what's going on behind the hood... Thanks.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Decimator is designed to reduce the mesh and textures of the model for use in a game engine. It can also be useful for on background items. Though if you have persons in the back ground blurred by DOF, its best just to use solid color shaders instead of maps.
In Iray, the mesh does not take up that much Vram. 4 million polygons weighs about 500MB of vram.
Textures are the biggest hog. If you need to manually trim a scene, I recommend reducing the number of maps in the eyes and mouth and turn fingernails and toenails to solid colours shader. If you have characters you use often, it would be best to optimize their maps, including hair, and then save them as a scene subset so you can load them in the same everytime.
Actually decimator doesn't do anything with textures, it is all about the mesh and you can dial it down by percentage or number of polygons. I have used it in lots of different situations.and it works fairly well. For textures, the texture atlas can combine all your maps on to one sheet of a size of your choosing. It works well also, but as pointed out, the most benefit is with models used in games and backgroud figures.
I agree with the comments already posted. Decimator is useful to lower the poly count of a mesh, which is particularly useful if it will be used in a game.
However for Daz Studio users looking to get a scene to fit in the VRAM of the graphics card, Scene Optimiser is far much useful, since as stated, it is the texture maps that normally consume the majority of the memory resources.
Ah yes, you are correct. I got the two confused. Its been so long since I used either that I was thinking of them as the same plugin.
I use Decimator all the time for creating animation. I use it for Decimating mesh to reduce poly mesh thread count to reduce resource to speed up animation rendering. its a great asset for reducing high ploy character mesh, in fact i found i Decimate a lot of my heavier props as well . Its only good for reducing the mesh to lighten resources which is what make Decimator desirable for animation use..
To reduce textures I regularly use texture atlas , But have been using scene Optimizer more lately. because it allows me to pick and choose which textures I want to opitimize.
The one thing about scene Optimizer that drives me buggy is sometimes your saved scene you been working on loose or fail to retain the optimized textures settings you assigned them.and you have to re-due them when reloading a scene.
That is my use for Decimator & scene Optimizer. I use them both for creating daz animations
Indeed.
I find the Decimator an invaluable tool for creating super low face count
background crowds for My animations as well.
I dont have the scene optimizer however there is a free script for DS that reduces texture sizes by half on any selected scene item every time you invoke it.
Here are some screen shots of a scene from my Feature length film project.
The animated blue suited "backgrounders" are decimated down to about
6000 faces each with 512 x512 texture maps!!!
as they are covered head to toe there is no need to have a figure insude those suits thus they are MDD animated empty shells.
Thankfully C4D has nondestructive subdivision at render time, to smooth out the Blocky edges on the figures with such Low poly counts.