3D Model of the Month: Optimizing a Blender Asset for Fast Online Loading

Make Your 3D Assets Fly Fast

During a university project, one of our team members got the assignment to model a realistic 3D representation of a real-world object – in this case, the Extra 300 S airplane. This plane is popular for air races, in reality it looks like shown on the following photo:

The plane was modeled, with the help of engineering documents, in Blender:

After that, materials were created in Adobe Substance. The final asset was then rendered in Blender via Cycles:

Fast Loading Times at Good Visual Quality

Wouldn’t it be great though if everyone could look at this asset right in their browser? Well, luckily, it’s pretty easy to achieve that by optimizing for minimal file size, draw calls, memory footprint and more with the help of RapidPipeline – here is the result:

To optimize the asset for a Web-based showcase, RapidPipeline was used. Since the asset was already low-poly we focused on baking the textures and reducing the file size. Thanks to our presets (we used “Baking & Decimation Mid Res”), this was possible with the click of a button. The file size was reduced from an original 62 MB (GLB format, 52 total textures at 4K resolution, 15935 polygons) to only 2.7 MB (GLB format, 5 textures at 4K resolution, 15935 polygons), without a substantial loss in visual quality.

If you’d like to start optimizing assets for your university or corporate project as well, sign up!