This operation combines geometrically and materially similar meshes into single, larger static meshes, reducing draw calls and simplifying the scene structure. By intelligently merging groups of meshes based on spatial proximity and material consistency, it significantly improves performance, particularly in complex scenes with many small meshes.

Usage Guidelines

• Dependencies: Run after Hierarchy Merge , Replace Duplicates , and Create Instances to ensure the scene is cleaned and organized before merging.
• Merge Settings: Adjust the MinNeighbors and BoundingBoxExtentFactor to control how aggressively meshes are merged.
• Material Groups: Ensure meshes that should remain separate do not share identical materials, as material similarity is a key merging criterion.
• Project Scale: For large scenes, process merges in smaller batches (by levels or areas) to avoid excessive memory usage.
• Asset Management:
  • Merged actors are tagged as MergedActor.
  • Merged assets are saved under Content/User/Meshes/PalatialMerged/LevelName.

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See how to apply this operation using the Palatial Editor Interface

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Best Practices

• Optimize Merges: Use Smart Merge to optimize scenes where small meshes create performance bottlenecks due to high draw call counts.
• Material Merging: By default, the operation merges materials, which may cause baking errors with complex materials. Adjust settings if material merging is not required.
• Review Results: Verify merged assets to ensure that critical components were merged correctly and no essential data was lost.