Optimizing your Scene 3ds Max to Vizard

[dproeder]

I am coming from a video game environmental artists background. My platforms before were Maya to Unity/UDK. Standard Optimization workflows for these engines included:

- Reducing polycount to accurately describe silhouette of the model only.
(ex. eliminating superfluous faces/edges that do not describe and shape/form)

- Making heavy use of repeatable/tileable textures
(ex. having a 256x256 tiled texture for a portion of the wall, and repeating it across the breadth of the whole wall.

- Consolidating multiple objects/models UV's onto one UV texture map so they can share one material. In most game engines, the amount of materials are directly related to how many draw calls need to be made for each object.

- Light Baking.

- Occluding objects (telling the engine not to draw objects) that are NOT in the field of view at any given time during the game loop.



My question is how much attention should I pay to these optimization practices for Vizard? Most importantly, Should I bother with reducing the number of materials exported from Max?

I have taken a new project involving Vizard. So before I develop my workflow, I wanted to get a feel for what kind of performance I could get out of the Vizard Engine. I do know this is a subjective question, and the answer could change project to project. I'm just trying to get a feeler out.