I do not work with either SolidWorks or Simlab's plugin myself but some of our customers do and send us fbx files of their models. Since I am not in contact with any of these pieces of software I would be very grateful if someone who is could help me understand better. There are some things I would like to know. Many models come with a very high polycount, their meshes are too dense, they also have many different materials, thousands usually.
The final idea is to put the model in a game engine, millions of polygons and thousands of materials slow down and even kill the performance of the game engine. I would like to know if it is reasonable to ask limits. For instance, would it be ok if I ask designers to keep their total mesh polycount under 1 million of polygons and the amount of materials under, let's say, 100 hundred materials?
Here are some questions I would love to know the answers of:
- What process exactly the designer follows when exporting a model to fbx?
- How is the mesh generated?
- Has he/she any control on the polycount that will be generated? (I just want to know if she can limit the polygons to a certain number)
- Has he/she the option to choose between fbx formats with SimLab plugin? (binary,ASCII)
- Is there an easy way to remap materials in order to make the final fbx have less materials?
Thanks a lot and I hope my questions are not very annoying
