Mesh Merge and Simplification Guide

Merge small static pieces that always move, load, and render together: bolts on a crate, decorative panels on a wall kit, or rubble pieces baked into one background prop. Do not merge parts that need separate animation, damage states, materials swaps, sockets, culling, or gameplay interaction.

Protect silhouette, deformation boundaries, UV seams, contact surfaces, and recognizable design marks. Reduce flat internal detail first. For LODs, remove small bolts before changing the main outline. For scan cleanup, decimate broad noisy surfaces more than edges or facial details.

Merging can increase material slots or break lightmap density if each source used different UV assumptions. Simplification can stretch UVs, destroy baked normals, or move vertices away from the high-poly bake. Recheck texture seams and lightmap channels after the operation.

Compare draw calls, triangle count, runtime vertex count, bounds, culling behavior, collision, and LOD transitions before and after. A merged mesh with one fewer object can still perform worse if it creates a huge bounding box that renders when mostly offscreen.

A modular market stall has twenty small static planks. Merge planks that share material and never animate, but keep the cloth awning separate if it swaps color or simulates wind. Simplify plank backside faces that the camera never sees, keep front silhouette chips, and regenerate LODs from the merged result.

Related multilingual terms on this page are technical anchors, not one-to-one translations: Mesh Merge / Mesh Simplification / Automatic LOD / Triangle Budget / Vertex Budget / 网格合并 / 网格简化. Keep local-language notes beside the English production term when writing DCC tasks.