Animation Mesh Reduction

Overview

This document describes the Animation Mesh Remeshing & Reduction Export feature of Creature. This is a Pro only feature.

Art by Emily Willoughby (http://emilywilloughby.com)

Why do Mesh Reduction?

The region meshes you generate in Creature can contain thousands of triangles. This complexity is required during animation authoring to achieve specific motions. This can become a problem when the animation is exported out into various Game Engines to be run on low end hardware like mobile devices.

Creature Pro has the Animation Mesh Remeshing & Reduction Export feature designed to specifically tackle this problem.

What does Mesh Reduction do?

Mesh reduction reduces the number of triangles of your animated mesh. This reduces computation time spent in posing the animated meshes at runtime during Game Engine playback.

Creature employs sophisticated algorithms that allow you to reduce the complexity of your animation meshes with minimal degradation in terms of playback quality. Extremely high mesh reduction ratios can be achieved ( in some cases, meshes with only 9% of the original size play almost identical to the original ).

What formats does Mesh Reduction export to?

Mesh reduction exports to the standard Creature JSON file format. It also supports export to FBX but only for Bone Motors.

How to run Mesh Reduction

1. In Animate Mode, click on Export

2. Select Game Engines

3. Click on Save as... and select Advanced Export

The following screen below will show up:

The options available:

• Resolution: Drag this slider to determine the resolution Creature will try to reduce your animation mesh to

• MinTriangles: This is a hint, not an absolute value. It suggests to Creature the minimum number of triangles per region that it will try to retain

• Export: Exports the mesh out into either JSON or FBX