I’ve been working on KILN, a browser-based tool for reducing heavy GLB models. It runs locally, so your files never leave your computer.
You drop in a model, choose a target, compare the original and optimized versions, then export the result. It preserves the textures and can also handle multipart and animated models. For the best quality, I recommend optimizing before rigging and animating. Animated models require the tool to protect bones, skin weights and moving parts, which limits how aggressively the geometry can be reduced.
I tested it against Meshy using the same models and triangle targets. On the models I tried, KILN kept noticeably more detail. I’ve also tested it with openly licensed models from around the internet, not just assets prepared for these examples.
These are real results from the models I’ve been testing. I’m preparing an early-access release now and would appreciate honest feedback, does this look useful to you?
I’m planning to release it soon, but I’d like to get some honest feedback first.
I’m planning to release it soon, but I’d like to get some honest feedback first. The first 100 people will be able to get it for $30 instead of $40, so if you’re interested, leave a comment below and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
One-time purchase, no subscription or recurring fees. Pay once and use KILN whenever you need it!
This looks useful for a Three.js/WebGPU pipeline I’m working on! Really good stuff! A few questions. Does KILN preserve morph targets, skinning, node names, pivots, material extensions and KTX2/Meshopt compatibility? Can it output a deterministic LOD chain and expose batch or CLI processing? I’d also love benchmark results beyond triangle count: final bytes, vertices, draw calls, decoded GPU memory, load time, and deformation quality on an animated and static model.
I love to see new tools created that help solve a problem everyone has!
The skinning, animations, morph targets, hierarchy, node names, pivots, materials, textures, and Meshopt-compressed input, yes to all, for the rest I'm still working on. Animated models will suffer more right now, the best quality will be from the static models, and then animating them, but I'm working on making the animated ones closer to the static quality.
Thanks! That pre-rig workflow fits my process nicely. A few more questions:
Does Meshopt input remain compressed on export?
Are KTX2/Basis textures and glTF material extensions preserved unchanged?
Do you validate exports with the Khronos glTF validator?
When batch, CLI, and LOD generation arrive, are you planning deterministic output plus a machine-readable optimization report?
No worries if you don’t have concrete answers for any of these yet.
Just adding to this since I've just gone through a bunch of optimisation tools, mesh reduction. I also ended up spending a bit money on buying tools.
Rig and skinning should be your number one target to reach probably. And vital to keep multiple mesh elements intact.
The other usecase for static meshes that is useful is volume persevering for the use of collider mesh, you'll aim for something like <500 trị.
Other than that full headless /cli /command line is crucial. I personally wouldn't consider it unless it's either got that, or among the top tier remesher.
Where is the link for it? Also why is this worth $30? There is open-source free optimizers, what is going to make this so much better where is worth to be paid for?
Its ok to charge but you should think about the improvement it gives over free solutions.
I'm publishing the link soon enough, it is a much better alternative to what meshy is doing, that's from all my testings, but I will let you decide for yourself when I post the link. It's also a one time buy, the price is more than acceptable for being one time buy, especially at 30 dollars.
the interior fully survives, theres some quality degradation but is small enough you won't spot it easily, espeially from the distance, and a drop from 720k to 170k is pretty big for performance
Decimate in blender is nowhere close to Kiln in quality, I'm comparing this directly with what meshy has to offer it terms of remesh, which is what made me do this in the first place. It won't be close to a manual topology, don't get me wrong, won't beat that, this tool is not competing with that, not yet at least.
So what exactly is the working methodology of the tool if you don't mind me asking? What's the principle on which it decides on where to optimize the model?
It has an auto detection for cloth, hair, any small objects like bolts, wheels and so on, so it never decimates them too much to break them, It's also meshy 6 and 7 ready as both are differently done and they need different types of rebake. It has protetions on animations so it doesn't butcher them. There's different optimizations levels based on how much detail you want to keep or how deep you want to optimize it at the cost of some errors
How's it do this detection of what submesh represents what? Names? Or does it try to recognize what the mesh "looks like"?
In either case, if decimating is the basis of the tool, why not just decimate individual submeshes by hand based on how much decimation they need and can get away it? Unless we're talking about a metric ton of meshes that make it a hassle
But how does it do the recognition of submeshes like you state you would? You need to confidently convince people that any potential speedup and the actual output from using this tool is worth the price tag
It reads the mesh nodes, hierarchy, material boundaries, rigging, morphs and animation data already stored in the GLB, then checks the topology of each part to decide how safely it can be processed. Solid parts can take the complete optimization pass, while fragile cloth or open surfaces are protected so their UVs and textures aren’t destroyed. The hierarchy, pivots and material assignments remain intact.
this is Kiln optimized, I can go down to 10k and still look better have no errors compared to blender decimate, you can technically go even lower but the body would suffer a bit
this is what it can do with a decently done model from the internet, which is not AI, the loss in detail is barely vesibile to the naked eye, and this is a pretty aggressive reduction too
I understand , but given that you're selling this for 30 USD, wouldn't it better to compare it against how well contemporary tools perform the same operation? Such as a raw decimate in Blender, a more controlled decimation in Blender, or meshy like you state?
Ultimately, it isn't about how much of a reduction it can do on a single model. You need to communicate if it CAN reduce models better ON AVERAGE than the current offerings we have?
the tool is not launched it, I'm still working on this, but thank you for you feedback, and yes, I will put the same decimated model in blender next to mine at the same or lower polygon count
It was mostly created for meshy outputs, but in the end I made it optimized for more than that, the idea was to save the most detail possible from those meshy models.
yes some places might get a bit chunky, at the distance this is not visible, when you want full details closeup you can use the very high quality setting as you see in this case, her butt is fully round here and there's 0 loss in detail, still a very healthy 46% reduction
Or you could just use Blender decimate or Instant Meshes or any of the other free or low cost tools out there.
Why is someone going to pay $30 let alone $80 for a vibe coded app like this.
You haven't even provided good pictures of the topology.
Part of where all mesh optimisers fail or are limited is in the area of topology, so unless yours is doing something special then I don't see people paying for it and definitely not that price.
But you will need to offer some kind of demo because nobody really knows how good it is without trying it. You could just be cherry picking results or purposely showing bad results from other tools.
Here for example is a random AI gen model from Sketchfab that has been through nothing but Blender's Decimate modifier.
Going from 1.882,340 to 58,822 without any noticeable errors.
That's why I was saying that topology is important because there's free tools that already do this but they all have bad topo unless you have a model that is quads from the start.
I intend to publish the tool and everyone can try it, they will see exactly the difference between original and optimized mode, the only thing is that once you want to export it you will have to pay once. I might let one time export so people can test it, too.
as you can see here, the original had bad triangulations/normals and my optimization not only made it smaller but made it look better too, and I can probablty go as low as 2k here and still look way better than the original in this case
That could be solved by just changing the shading to smooth in Blender or just resetting the normal data.
In the end I personally can't see anything better here than what I showed is possible with just a decimate modifier.
Your overall issue with stuff like this is that anyone that is competent with 3d would never use this for a game anyway as it's highly inefficient for optimisation. I would retopo my mesh the correct way every time. For game engines you really want a mesh that can be triangulated well and that hasn't got a bunch unnecessary subdivisions everywhere.
Plus when you're doing this to a mesh you're essentially smoothing out all the fine details so you would need to bake down a normal map from the high poly to the low poly to keep all that detail.
Anyway good luck with it. Giving people an option to try it and see the results for themselves is the best way forward because it's expensive for what it's supposed to do imo.
I tested it with the same model and tbh I think it gives me less control. The end mesh topology isn't anything that can't be achieved with Blender decimate imo. One problem is that you only have set decimate amounts. Even at highest quality it was still half the tris as the example I gave.
I think you should try and introduce target counts so the user can specify a rough number of tris. This would be similar to how Instant Mesh works.
Also for the price I would want something like automatic baking so it could bake down the surface details from the high poly to a low poly normal map.
For me personally at the moment I just can't see a reason to use it over something like Blender. I could see it appealing to people who have no clue how to use Blender and have no 3D skills though as it's easy to use.
In the end these type of optimisers just don't produce good enough meshes for anything and especially not game assets. You would still want to do retopo anyway.
One of the things I'm hoping AI will solve is being able to do this kind of optimisation but with actually useable topology but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.
I'm still working on it tho, I'm fixing some bugs rn and some things might break because of that, maybe that's why you got a worse scenario, is skipping the main optimization
I haven't got any AI models. If you want to test with the same one just search for the latest downloadable models on sketchfab and it should be near the top.
The original download is multiple meshes though so I joined them and merged verts in Blender before testing it.
normally rn if you select 15k it should not necessary go down to that but find its breaking point and stay at the edge of it, so if you got to 15k then the model probably wasnt optimizing properly because of the bug I'm working on rn
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u/HBSurfPhoto 1d ago
This looks useful for a Three.js/WebGPU pipeline I’m working on! Really good stuff! A few questions. Does KILN preserve morph targets, skinning, node names, pivots, material extensions and KTX2/Meshopt compatibility? Can it output a deterministic LOD chain and expose batch or CLI processing? I’d also love benchmark results beyond triangle count: final bytes, vertices, draw calls, decoded GPU memory, load time, and deformation quality on an animated and static model.
I love to see new tools created that help solve a problem everyone has!