Microsoft acquires Simplygon 3D optimization technology

Designed to slim down AAA game models, the tech may find its way into the new drivers for 3D printing.

Microsoft has acquired Swedish-based Donya Labs, developers of Simplygon, software widely used in the game industry to optimize models — which generally means to make them use less processing and storage. The process is also known as decimation.

**A before-and-after look at the process of decimation (model optimization) as accomplished by Simplygon. Final surfacing will be added later. (Source: Microsoft)**

Simplygon technology is in use at many of the leading game publishers including Bethesda, Bungie, Activision, Sony, Tencent, and more. It is part of the Unreal 4 engine for use as a plugin and is also available in Unity, 3ds Max, and Maya. Donya Labs experimented for a time with cloud tools to let companies upload models for processing in the cloud, but stopped work on it last year. .

Simplygon includes both manual and automatic tools to reduce the size of models and make them small enough for real-time performance. The technology has been made available for the Microsoft Hololens developer network since last November.