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Polygon Cruncher 4.0.1

Reviewed by Steve Shanks

August 1, 2000

Polygon Cruncher is an Editor's Choice Award Winner!

Polygon Cruncher is a powerful polygon optimizer plugin for 3D Studio Max. This is a very useful program for many reasons. For me, the main reason is that I like to model without having to be consistently worried about the polygon count. It disturbs my work flow. Another good use is if you have high poly models you want to use in the background for example, trees or humans. The program is very simple to use. You hit the plugin button which then asks you to select the model to optimize and once this is done a new window opens.

In this window you can view your object at any angle, change to textured or wire frame or a combination of both and most importantly optimize your file. This is done in real-time by moving a slider. Once you have the file reduced to your liking you just click apply to go back to Max. When I received Polygon Cruncher I had a problem with a file. It is a very high poly aircraft seat that I'd created for a simple personal scene but then a client wanted to use it to build an aircraft interior so I needed to reduce the size of the file. Below is the seat in wire frame and rendered before it was optimized.

I then took it into Polygon Cruncher and reduced it to 10%. Below is the result.

I think you'll agree that this is an amazing result and as an added bonus the file was reduced from 4.4mb to 450k. While doing the optimization Polygon Cruncher doesn't disturb any UV textures, vertex colors or modifiers. Polygon Cruncher is a very handy program to have around, and at 499 FF. (70 US dollars at the time of writing) an absolute bargain.