Blender Scene Optimization Tools
"Optimize the scene" is a task nobody can start, because nothing tells you which object is costing you. So the scene repaints itself and the expensive things are the red ones.
The read-outs
Face count, modifier evaluation time, texture memory and shader complexity, each on its own axis, plus a combined overview that averages them by percentile — the only unit faces, milliseconds and megabytes share.
They all write to viewport display colour, so the render is untouched and one click puts the scene back. Log scale is the default, because a scene whose median object has 34 faces and whose worst has 368,102 is unreadable on a linear ramp.
Measuring, not guessing
Blender exposes modifier.execution_time, but it reports the last evaluation — a chair read 0.0 ms lazily and 20–25 ms under forced re-evaluation. Taking the median of three forced runs dropped the scene total from 5.9 s of archaeology to 1.2 s of measurement, and the real ranking appeared: 302 ms, 139 ms, 97 ms.
The Cycles probe came back flat red until I ran four fixed samples with adaptive off: the Debug Sample Count pass is normalized, not a raw count. A flat map means the sample budget is too small, not that the threshold is loose.
Saying "I don't know"
The EEVEE measured mode swaps each material for a zero-cost emission and times the delta. With render.render per material, pipeline setup and shader recompilation swallow the signal: three of four materials landed below the noise floor.
The panel computes that floor, reports how many materials fell under it, and prints "result not conclusive" instead of painting a map. A colourful map generated from noise is worse than no map, because someone acts on it.
Next steps
- Optimizer side, working: Channel Pack (merges greyscale maps into RGB, lossless, reversible — the report found 53 maps wasting three channels each) and Texture Downscale (reversible, per-map-type caps, VRAM budget).
- Optimizer side, not started: Decimate top N from the face ranking, procedural texture baking, F-Curve decimation.
- Diagnostics: fix the live EEVEE cost view, rewrite the measured EEVEE mode around draw_view3d, merge the five addons into one.