SimplyFive Light 1.3.5

🆕 Added
Blender 4.2 is now fully supported — one archive for 4.2–5.0. Verified on 4.2, 4.5.11 LTS and 5.0.1.
Recalculate + Smooth — a checkbox added to the Light version, on the Very Aggressive modes, with an adjustable Crease Angle. Builds normals from the simplified geometry instead of carrying the source ones, which no longer match it at very low triangle counts (meshoptimizer, experimental).

🐞 Fixed
Shading of imported models. Their normals were sometimes read as flat shading with custom normals, which caused serious trouble when simplifying the model.
An empty LOD could be added silently. At a high Target Error, Prune can delete every disconnected part of a mesh. Such a level is no longer created, and the report says which ones were skipped.
The importance mask on a Very Aggressive Alternative level lost that level entirely. The mask reaches the Decimate pass through a temporary vertex group, and cleaning that group up afterwards raised an error which took the finished mesh with it.

⚡ Faster
~15% faster generation — Merge by Distance runs on the buffers, so the mesh is born welded.

💾 Install
Download SimplyFiveLight-1.3.2.zip
Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk… → select the zip.
Enable SimplyFive Light, then open the LODS tab in the N-panel (View3D sidebar).
Requires Blender 4.2+

SimplyFive Light 1.3.2

🐞 Fixed
Blender crash caused by assertions in the library (a modal box on Windows, a silent crash on Linux/macOS).
Simplification of flat-shaded meshes. Most noticeable on scans. Smooth-shaded meshes are unaffected.
Edit Mode leak: removing an object that was in Edit Mode left its edit mesh behind.

⚡ Performance
4–6× faster, and more than that on flat-shaded meshes. (505k-tri scan: 7.5s → 2.0s. 22M-tri scan: 20 min → 77s.)

✨ Interface
Return to Edit Mode (Preferences, on by default) — returns you to the object you were editing, including after a failed generation.

💎 Pro only, 1.3.2
Voxel remesh (experimental in meshoptimizer)
Recalculate + Smooth normals mode (experimental in meshoptimizer)
Build from Previous LOD chaining fix.
→ [Get SimplyFive Pro]

💾 Install
Download SimplyFiveLight-1.3.2.zip
Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk… → select the zip.
(Blender 5.0+: you can also just drag the zip into the Blender window.)
Enable SimplyFive Light, then open the LODS tab in the N-panel (View3D sidebar).

Restart Blender after installing this version — it rebuilds the meshoptimizer library, and Blender keeps the previous one loaded until a restart.

SimplyFive Light 1.2.9

🐞 Fixed
Preferences panel crash on Extensions Platform installs. When installed as an extension, opening the add-on's Preferences threw a NameError on every redraw — Blender 4.2+ drops bl_info from the module in favor of blender_manifest.toml, and the panel still read bl_info['version']. It now reads a module-level VERSION constant. If your Preferences page was crashing, 1.2.9 fixes it.

💎 The ‘Sharp Loops normals’ mode has been updated and now realigns panels whose smoothing was disrupted following chamfer simplification. The ‘Flatten Panels’ function (Pro version only) → Get SimplyFive Pro

💾 Install
Download SimplyFiveLight-1.2.9.zip
Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk… → select the zip.
(Blender 4.2+: you can also just drag the zip into the Blender window.)
Enable SimplyFive Light, then open the LODS tab in the N-panel (View3D sidebar).

SimplyFive Light 1.2.7

🎯 Finish with Decimate — meshoptimizer alone stalls well above your target when UV / material / normal seams block it (ask for 1%, get 8%). The new finishing pass takes those aggressive LODs down to the exact target percentage — interpolating UVs along collapsed edges instead of smearing textures across seams.

🎚️ "Very Aggressive Alternative" mode — plain Very Aggressive is now pure meshoptimizer; Very Aggressive Alternative adds the Decimate finish. Which one looks better genuinely depends on the model, so now you can pick per mesh.

🖌️ Importance mask from a Vertex Group — bias simplification with a named vertex group (paint it in Weight Paint, safe on rigged/skinned meshes), in addition to vertex color. New Importance Source selector.

🔧Sparse is now automatic — applied from the mesh data only when it actually helps; no manual option to get wrong.
🧹Fix UI and removed dead code

💾 Install
Download SimplyFiveLight-1.2.7.zip
Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk… → select the zip.
(Blender 4.2+: you can also just drag the zip into the Blender window.)
Enable SimplyFive Light, then open the LODS tab in the N-panel (View3D sidebar).

SimplyFive Light 1.1.3

SimplyFive Light 1.1.3

Changed

• lod_0 row: buttons rearranged — Only This LOD on the left (open-eye icon), Show All LODs on the right (layers icon).
• Get SimplyFive Pro button added under the "available in Pro" list (self-hosted build; the Extensions Platform build stays clean).

Install

Download SimplyFiveLight-1.1.3.zip below (not the auto-generated Source code archive), then in Blender:
Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk… — or just drag the zip into the Blender window (4.2+).

SimplyFive Light 1.1.2

SimplyFive Light 1.1.2

One-click LOD generator for Blender, powered by meshoptimizer — not the Decimate modifier.

💾 Install

1. Download SimplyFiveLight-1.1.2.zip
2. Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install from Disk… → select the zip.
   (Blender 4.2+: you can also just drag the zip into the Blender window.)
3. Enable SimplyFive Light, then open the LODS tab in the N-panel (View3D sidebar).