What are the best techniques for optimizing art on mobile VR platforms?

1 Reduce polygon count

One of the most important factors that affect the performance of mobile VR games is the polygon count, or the number of triangles that make up the 3D models in your scene. The more polygons you have, the more processing power and memory your game requires, which can lead to lag, stuttering, and overheating. To optimize your art for mobile VR, you should aim to reduce the polygon count of your models as much as possible, without sacrificing too much detail. You can do this by using tools like ProBuilder, MeshLab, or Blender to simplify your meshes, or by using LOD (level of detail) groups to switch between different versions of your models depending on the distance from the camera.

2 Use texture atlases

Another way to optimize your art for mobile VR is to use texture atlases, which are large images that contain multiple smaller textures for different parts of your models. By using texture atlases, you can reduce the number of draw calls, which are the commands that tell the GPU (graphics processing unit) to render your objects on the screen. The fewer draw calls you have, the faster your game can run on mobile VR devices. You can create texture atlases by using tools like TexturePacker, SpriteSheetMaker, or Photoshop, or by using built-in features in your game engine, such as Unity's Sprite Atlas or Unreal's Texture Streaming.

3 Bake lighting

Lighting is one of the most demanding aspects of game art, especially on mobile VR platforms, where dynamic lighting can consume a lot of resources and cause performance issues. To optimize your art for mobile VR, you should consider baking your lighting, which means pre-computing and storing the lighting information in your textures, instead of calculating it in real time. By baking your lighting, you can create realistic and consistent lighting effects, such as shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion, while saving CPU (central processing unit) and GPU cycles. You can bake your lighting by using tools like Unity's Lightmapping or Unreal's Lightmass.

4 Simplify shaders

Shaders are the programs that control how your objects look and behave on the screen, such as their color, texture, transparency, and animation. Shaders can add a lot of visual appeal and interactivity to your game art, but they can also be very complex and expensive to render on mobile VR devices. To optimize your art for mobile VR, you should simplify your shaders as much as possible, by using low-resolution textures, low-frequency normal maps, minimal transparency, and simple effects. You can simplify your shaders by using tools like Shader Graph, Amplify Shader Editor, or Shader Forge, or by using built-in shaders in your game engine, such as Unity's Standard Shader or Unreal's Material Editor.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?