SimplyFive Light — One-click LOD Generator for Blender

A Blender add-on that generates a set of LOD meshes (Levels of Detail) from the active object. For each mesh you can create up to 5 simplified versions, each with its own triangle percentage and quality mode — in one click.

Light is the free version. It is fully self-contained and useful on its own; a separate Pro version adds fine-grained per-LOD control and extra transfer options (see Pro version below).

Author: zloy_pingvin Requires Blender: 4.2.0+ (verified on 4.2, 4.5.11 LTS, 5.0 and 5.2 LTS)

Features (Light)

• Up to 5 LOD levels per object. Each level's target is set either as a percentage of the source or as an absolute triangle count, the way platform budgets are written.
• 5 one-click quality modes per level: Careful, Standard, Aggressive, Very Aggressive and Very Aggressive Alternative — the farther the level, the more aggressive the mode. The two Very Aggressive modes differ in one thing: the Alternative finishes with a Decimate pass to reach the exact percentage, which suits some models and not others.
• Recalculate + Smooth on the Very Aggressive modes: rebuilds normals from the simplified geometry, since the source ones stop matching it at very low triangle counts.
• Attribute-aware simplification: keeps UVs and normals so seams and hard edges survive.
• Vertex colors carried onto the LODs, and optionally used as a per-vertex importance map — paint the areas you want to keep detailed, from either a color attribute or a vertex group. One global switch applied to every level.
• Source checks (Preferences) that catch the two things which silently stop simplification dead: a UV map that was never unwrapped, and a surface duplicated to carry a second material. Both are reported before generating, and both can be worked around automatically.
• Optimize for GPU: reorders triangles and vertices the way the GPU reads them, without changing the geometry.
• Multiple UV channels: carry every UV channel onto the LODs, not just the active one.
• Multi-material support, including materials on linked duplicates/instances or produced by Geometry Nodes.
• Merge by Distance on the result to weld seams cleanly.
• Configurable LOD name suffix (Preferences), default _lod_.
• In-viewport LOD preview slider, plus a Line Up LODs review mode that lays all levels out in a row for side-by-side comparison.
• Keep the original object: generate from a copy instead of renaming — your object keeps its name and is hidden, the copy becomes lod_0.
• Parented assemblies keep their shape: every generated level is placed under the same level of its parent, so a single level of an assembly can be selected, hidden or exported on its own. A parent with no LODs of its own gets an empty standing in for it, and the panel names those parents.
• A result block under each level after generating: requested → produced triangles, why the level missed, and one hint naming a lever this mesh actually responds to. It also reports what was lost quietly — materials with no triangles left in the LOD, an importance mask that found no vertex group, extra UV maps dropped — and flags the case where the triangle count was hit but a part that would not collapse ate the budget of the rest.
• A notice before generating on a skinned mesh or one with shape keys: only geometry is carried, so the LOD is baked in the current pose and key mix.
• Optional once-a-day update check against the product site, off with one switch — with it off the add-on never touches the network.
• Russian UI translation.

Pro version

https://zloy-pingvin.github.io/SimplyFive-Light/

The Pro version keeps everything in Light and adds:

• Full per-level fine-tuning of every simplification parameter. Light shows the same block greyed out, so you can see what each level is generated with.
• Chained LODs — build each level from the previous one for cleaner far LODs.
• Vertex color hard-lock: guarantee important areas are never simplified.
• Per-level importance mask, so a near level can anchor a little of it and a distant one all of it.
• Recalculate normals + Auto Smooth by angle, and a Sharp Loops mode that closes broken feature loops, for very low-poly levels.
• Accurate Vertex Colors: blend colors along the collapse so a painted gradient does not come out in steps.
• Protect Material Borders as a switch of its own, separate from UV seams.
• Limit Prune: stop pruning from deleting whole parts.
• An extra topology-ignoring ultra-aggressive mode, a voxel remesh, and a "regularize" pass for more uniform triangles.
• Batch queue: every selected mesh becomes a task with its own settings, its own level count and its own modes; Apply Settings to Selected sets up symmetrical parts in one press, a preview slider switches the whole queue between levels, and one button runs it.
• Transfer Vertex Groups: the LOD arrives bound to the skeleton — the armature binding is copied and each surviving vertex inherits the weights the source really had.
• Transfer Shape Keys onto the near levels, with a limit on how far they go.
• Two extra presets: Clear Simplify (geometry only, for very far levels) and Scan (photogrammetry).
• Save and load full configurations as named presets, plus editable mode presets.

Installation

1. Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons.
2. Open the drop-down at the top right → "Install from Disk…" → select the SimplyFive Light archive.
3. Enable the checkbox next to "SimplyFive Light".

The simplification library is already bundled — no extra build step is required.

Quick Start

1. Select a mesh object in the viewport.
2. Open the sidebar (N) → "LODS" tab.
3. Set "Number of LODs" (3–4 is usually enough).
4. For each level, choose a mode (Careful / Standard / Aggressive / Very Aggressive) — the farther the level is from "0", the more aggressive the mode should be.
5. Set the size of each level — the toggle in the level header picks the unit: % of the source, or Tris for an absolute triangle count.
6. Click "Generate LODs".

The source object is renamed to "name_lod_0", and "name_lod_1", "name_lod_2", etc. appear next to it — one per level (the _lod_ suffix is configurable in Preferences; with "Keep the original object" on it is copied instead of renamed). The "LOD Preview (distance)" slider inspects each level individually, and the icon button next to it ("Line Up LODs") lays every generated level out in a row for side-by-side comparison.

Full documentation: https://zloy-pingvin.github.io/SimplyFive-Light/docs.html

License

SimplyFive Light is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. Full text — see the LICENSE file next to the add-on.

The add-on uses the meshoptimizer library (by Arseny Kapoulkine, MIT License): https://github.com/zeux/meshoptimizer. The full meshoptimizer license text and usage notice — see the THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt file next to the add-on.