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What is SceneBoost?

SceneBoost is the most advanced and automated proxy system for Blender that can optimize complete scenes and bring a studio-level workflow to your Blender projects. Together with other optimizations and features like preview renders, it can significantly improve your workflow and allows you to realize projects that weren’t possible before due to hardware limitations.

How Does It Work?

With just the press of a button, it analyzes your scene and can create different detail levels for your textures, videos, and meshes. And switches them automatically, depending on the current circumstances. This can significantly reduce your RAM and VRAM usage, so that you no longer encounter any errors.

You Have Full Control

You can decide whether you want to create proxies only for the textures, meshes, or both. Each section has different parameters that can be adjusted, if needed. You can also exclude collections from the overall process or use the same proxies across different blend files without having to regenerate them because already generated proxies are automatically detected for each object.

The General Process

The addon creates two lower quality levels for each object, which it can later swap with the original object as needed. Besides normal textures, it also supports UDIMs, image sequences, and even videos, which can significantly increase your performance.

Real Proxies

When we talk about mesh proxies, we mean real proxies. Unlike other available solutions, SceneBoost doesn’t just add a decimate modifier to the objects - it actually creates separate meshes, stores them in the specified proxy path, and swaps them in and out automatically. All modifiers etc. remain intact, and you can continue working as usual since only the mesh data is swapped in the background.

Why It Matters

When opening a scene or switching LODs, objects don’t have to be recalculated each time - only once during creation. This results in faster loading times and many other benefits. A decimate modifier, for example, can’t be added to rigged objects, because the deformation would need to be recalculated on every frame.

SceneBoost, on the other hand, transfers all vertex groups and shape keys from the original objects to the simplified ones, allowing you to animate your characters in real time using the low-detail versions - and then transfer the animation data to the original objects. Everything happens automatically, you don’t have to do anything.

Preview Renders

Beside that the addon also gives you the ability to create preview renders of your scene. This means that besides regular rendering, you now also have the option to create faster preview renders with lower LOD levels, fewer samples, and a few other settings that you can define once.

A Studio-Level Workflow

The addon can distinguish whether you’re working in the viewport, creating a preview render, or doing a final render. This means you can always work in the viewport with low-detail objects to save RAM and processing power, and the detail levels are automatically swapped for the preview or final render, according to your preferences. This also allows you to continue working on your scene while on the go with a laptop at lower detail levels and then render it in full quality at home - without needing to manually adjust anything.

You can also switch back to the original version of any object at any time if needed, make changes to the mesh itself, and then regenerate the proxies for that object with a single click.

Dynamic Detail Levels

In addition to fixed detail levels, the object LODs can also be adjusted dynamically depending on the camera - based on how far an object is from it or whether it’s in the field of view. This way, even in final renders, you can save a lot of RAM without sacrificing quality.

More Than Proxies

SceneBoost also offers additional optimization options to improve your workflow and take advantage of the distinction between Viewport, Preview, and Render. For example, you can use different Volume Steps for the Viewport, limit the Subdivisions globally, or deactivate Motion Blur only for the Viewport to achieve faster feedback.

What Formats are Supported?

SceneBoost supports all common image (.jpg, .jpeg, .jpe, .jif, .jfif, .png, .tga, .tiff, .exr) and video (.avi, .mp4, .mkv, .mpeg, .mov) formats. So, unlike other available solutions, it also supports EXR files and can even create proxies from MOV files with alpha channels, making it possible to use green screen characters or similar content.

Does It Work with Scattered Objects?

Yes and no. It can create different LOD levels for every object in the scene, regardless of whether it’s scattered or not. However, you can’t use camera-based LOD switching for scattered objects, as the add-on can only measure the distance to the original object then. But for scattered objects, this isn’t important anyway, because instances of an object don’t consume additional memory.

Before You Buy

Keep in mind that especially on larger scenes, the LOD switches can take a while. We tried our best to get the best performance for the proxy creation and switching, but we can’t change how fast Blender can process different kinds of textures and meshes. Ideally, you should work in the viewport mostly at the lowest quality level without changing the levels all the time, and only change the quality for individual objects when needed. The dynamic function should mainly be used for final renders and primarily be used to set the right parameters in the viewport. It’s best to simply watch the tutorial to directly see what you need to pay attention to and how to get the best performance out of the addon.

The Development

This add-on was developed with the help of Spencer Magnusson. So also check out his own add-ons and social media channels to improve your workflow and learn more about optimizations in Blender!

https://spencermagnusson.com

Tutorial

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