Donya Releases Simplygon 4

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Press release from Donya L abs: 

Linköping, Sweden - Donya Labs [1] announced the release of Simplygon 4.0. This latest version includes new features and a multitude of improvements, tweaks and optimizations to both core features and usability. Simplygon 4 was previewed at Game Developers Conference in March earlier this year and a few studios have had access to the beta version since then. Simplygon 4 is now available for evaluation or licensing by visiting www.simplygon.com [2].

As the leading tool-chain middleware for automatically optimizing 3D content and creating LODs, Simplygon is made with games and game development in mind. Powerful, internally developed, algorithms and optimization methods provide the high-quality results unique to Simplygon and its automated processes guarantees a pixel-perfect LOD-chain generation. Simplygon's four major components, MeshLOD; ProxyLOD; MaterialLOD and BoneLOD; can be used separately or in combination to optimize content for use within a video game to boost performance, but also to adjust content between game platforms or trans-media, e.g. taking movie assets and optimizing them for games.

In its fourth edition Simplygon has received several new features and overall improvements focusing on usability, productivity and quality. Some of the main features in Simplygon 4 are: 

BoneLOD
A brand new component to Simplygon, BoneLOD, means that in addition to full skinning support, users can now optionally reduce the skinning complexity of a rigged mesh. Optionally, it can be run as a fully automated process removing bones that has little impact on the end result.

Alpha Texture Sampling
MaterialLOD in ProxyLOD now supports up to 32 layers of transparent geometry when baking, further increasing quality in material baking, while still keeping the extreme triangle and draw call reductions of ProxyLODs.

Full Unreal Engine integration
In 3.5, Simplygon introduced support for Autodesk's 3ds Max and Maya, and now the same great results can be achieved automatically from within Epic Games' Unreal Engine. The pre-built integration means that developers using Unreal Engine or UDK can access Simplygon directly from within the UnrealEd with little or no internal development.

Improved User Control using Per Vertex Weights
One of Simplygon's strengths is its ability to achieve great optimization results completely automatic. This can now be combined The user can choose vertices that are more important to keep for a more heavy or conservative reduction in certain areas giving the user a whole new level of control and even better results than before.