Balancer 0.73.112.Beta

Balancer 0.73.112.Beta is a useful utility which puts your 3D polygonal models in balance.

With Balancer you can quickly and easily find your perfect balance between visual appearance and the number of polygons. Balancer utilizes a high quality polygon reduction (aka mesh simplification) to preserve the visual appearance of your model. The model features, normals, texture coordinates, layer boundaries are all honored. Optimize your models even further to dramatically speed up rendering of your models.

Balancer features a fast and efficient triangle reordering that can be tuned for various rendering methods like triangle strips and array/buffer based rendering.

Major Features:

1. High quality, high performance mesh simplification
2. Construction of the entire LOD hierarchy in one shot
3. An advanced user interface to instantly select an optimized model with the desired number of triangles
4. Texture coordinates preservation
5. Normals can be either preserved or recomputed
6. Preservation and simplification of the model boundaries
7. Boundaries defined by discontinuities of materials, layers, texture coordinates are supported
8. Visualization of boundaries
9. Joining of vertices given a user-specified threshold
   
10. Joining of normals and texture coordinates to eliminate corresponding false boundaries
11. Fast and intelligent triangle reordering for best visualization performance depending on your rendering method
12. Target rendering methods are triangle strips, general rendering, array based rendering
13. Supported 3D formats: Wavefront (.obj)
14. Supported image formats: JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, PPM, PBM
15. Supported operating systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

Enhancements:

• New mesh tool: Joining normals and texture coordinates were added for elimination of corresponding false boundaries.
• Joining vertices, normals and texture coordinates are now with threshold parameter.
• New mesh tool: Discarding normals and texture coordinates were added.
• New option page: Apply joining of vertices, normals, texture coordinates and construction of simplification hierarchy automatically on model loading.
• A dozen of fixes and minor improvements.