The Challenge
To ensure a smooth experience in VR, it’s important to optimize your scene. A typical LCD monitor has a refresh rate of 60 Hz, while most VR headsets run at 90 Hz. To have a comfortable experience in-headset, VR content needs to run at 90 frames per second (FPS). If your scene is heavy and runs at lower than 90 FPS, you risk a subpar experience that causes discomfort.
Optimizing your 3D scene for VR is tricky, but here are a list of things you can consider:
Opportunities for optimization
Turn off Shadows
Common issues
- Shadows are known to cause significant performance issues for VR
Ideal solutions
- Turn off global shadows for the scene. You can toggle this off in the right sidebar. Learn more about environment lighting here: Environment Lighting (HDRI)
Reduce the polygon count for 3D models
Common issues
- When you download models from elsewhere that were created to be rendered for photorealistic images, they likely high poly counts ranging anywhere from 50K to 1000K or even millions of polygons. This does not translate well to real-time VR rendering.
Ideal solutions
- Use models that are low-poly or created for VR. If you’re using platforms like Sketchfab or Turbosquid, check the polygon count before you download it.
- Be careful with using too much subdivision, since this also increases poly count.
- Reduce the polygon count to the absolute minimum that it can have without affecting the shape. Here are some tools you can use to do this: