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Pixyz 2021.1: More powerful 3D data prep with new products and features

Green automotive 3D image made with Unity Pixyz 2021.1
Green automotive 3D image made with Unity Pixyz 2021.1
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The 2021.1 release from Pixyz, now part of Unity, includes two new products: Pixyz Scenario Processor, which enables the creation of on-premises or cloud-based automated, scalable 3D content optimization pipelines; and Pixyz Loader, which loads prepared assets directly in the Unity Editor or runtime experiences. Plus, improvements to Pixyz Studio, Plugin and Review unlock more data visualization and optimization capabilities.

Pixyz’s products help teams leverage their computer-aided design (CAD), 3D and point cloud assets for real-time 3D, augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) applications, which require significant volume simplification and heavily lightened models. Pixyz’s data-centric preparation solutions can import, export, optimize and render a large number of file formats, sizes and complexity while preserving critical information from the original data sources.

Let’s explore the latest Pixyz innovations:

Pixyz Scenario Processor: Easy 3D data preparation automation

We’ve listened to your feedback and are introducing Pixyz Scenario Processor, a new automation/batching tool that is simpler and more affordable than Pixyz Batch which is being replaced. Pixyz Scenario Processor is for IT professionals, independent software vendors, and creative studios looking to rapidly automate their 3D, CAD and point cloud pipelines.

The goal of automated 3D data preparation is to reduce the time, effort and cost of complex manual processing by reapplying the same optimization scenario on batches of files, automatically. Scenario Processor comes with a set of ready-to-use 3D optimization and conversion scenarios to convert CAD to .pxz or asset bundles for Unity, CAD to a mesh with a specific polygon target, or optimize point clouds. 

Teams can import a 3D file, process it according to a data preparation scenario and export it as an optimized 3D file. Pixyz Scenario Processor automates this process, at scale. Start with one of our ready-to-use scenarios and if you need more you can extend them or build new ones from scratch with Python API in Pixyz Studio. 

Scenario Processor can be deployed on AWS Marketplace, or as stand-alone executable for Windows, Linux and Docker. If you are an existing Pixyz Batch user, you can follow this tutorial or contact our sales team.

Pixyz Loader for Unity diagram: Pre-processed CAD, 3D and point cloud file import inside Unity runtime & Editor

Pixyz Loader for Unity: Pre-processed CAD, 3D and point cloud file import inside Unity runtime & Editor

The ability to import mesh, CAD and point cloud files at runtime in your real-time application is a must have for any industrial developer. Thanks to our new product Pixyz Loader, it is now possible to bring your CAD data into runtime applications!

Here’s how it works:

1 - Use any Pixyz data preparation solution to convert more than 40 file formats to a .pxz file,

2 - Install the Pixyz Loader4Unity Package in the Unity Editor

3 - Add a line of C# in your application to launch the import (sample here

4 - You can now import your CAD file as .pxz inside a Unity runtime or the Editor and retrieve nearly all the original information including metadata, full product structure, lines, points, PBR materials (Albedo, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, Occlusion, Emissive maps) for Unity’s standard shader or custom materials.

 

Now let’s explore the latest updates and improvements for existing Pixyz products.

Pixyz Review: Industrial design review for all

Image of industrial design review
Collaborate on technical reviews in VR with your team

Pixyz Review is a fast and easy-to-use 3D viewer for industrial and technical design reviews. Visualize and interact with the most complex and largest models, on Windows PCs or VR, while preserving all meaningful information: metadata, product manufacturing information (PMI) and scene structure. Pixyz Review’s embedded collaborative capabilities allow you to slice, explode, measure, explore and control nearly any model in a few clicks.

Explore industrial models in more than 40 different file formats, with all their information, interactively

Pixyz Review can be used by more people in your organization and can save you thousands of dollars compared to other design review software and hardware costs. New updates in this latest release include better support for PLMXML, import for larger JT files, and new support for STPX and GDSII files.

Pixyz Plugin for Unity

Beyond, strengthening the stability, all the updates below are focused on improving the overall experience:

The “Decimate to target function” is now more intuitive, able to process millions of polygon models faster and with balanced results for multipart assemblies. This function is designed to streamline your optimization workflow, especially when you want to reduce your polygon count, while preserving visual quality.

Another new key feature is the Impostor generator. Impostor is a technique, frequently used in games, to drastically optimize the meshes in the background of your real-time 3D experiences.

Impostor on the right, rendered on a Quad (2 triangles)

It consists in creating multiple snapshot maps of your mesh from a number of points of view, rendered as quads, a bounding box or a custom mesh to simulate the 3D geometry from different angles.

Impostors can now be either octahedron or semi octahedron, depending on your needs. This greatly improves the illusion, compared to previous impostors which were purely planar.

Impostors are compatible with object intersections, GPU instancing (activated by default), shadow casting and receiving, and LOD crossfade.

Mesh import is now 20% faster and includes new merge functions with a smart merge by region feature and more functions to edit pivots. Additionally, the rule engine now has useful new filters – by bounding box, number of triangles or vertices.

Pixyz filters used on a 3D image of house

Pixyz Studio

Simplicity, efficiency and performance are the three areas of focus for the new version of Pixyz Studio. 

We have completely revamped our import wizard to make the setup for importing CAD files as simple as setting a few explicit parameters. This means you’ll no longer need to try different import settings. With the import wizard, your model will be correctly prepared for optimization.

Pixyz Studio settings interface

Speaking of optimization, we have a new simple and more performant “Decimate to target function,” offered in addition to texture (JPEG or PNG) and file compression options we provide (Draco for glTF).

To accelerate the manual optimization iterative process, we added a “stop” button to let you stop lengthy processes and re-try with different settings or methods, without the need to wait..

Another key change of this release is the new plugin editor. This new module will assist developers who want to create their own plugins to accelerate their workflows and extend Pixyz capabilities in Studio.

But, what is even more powerful: Plugins can be deployed also as tailor-made scenarios for Pixyz Scenario Processor (for use cases needing full automation).

To ease development, we also upgraded the API documentation to make it more complete and easy to browse.

We also improved format support – normal maps in FBX have end-to-end material support with Unity, emissive maps are supported in glTF, JT import and export are now better and faster, vpb materials are supported as custom materials, and PLMXML support is more stable.

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Learn more about Pixyz’s products and how to try or buy them online, or connect with a Unity sales representative to purchase subscriptions for your organization.

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