Once you've combined item meshes in NifSkope such as books in a bookcase or weapons in a rack, what can be done to minimize the effect the new mesh will have on frame rate in-game? For instance, say you add 100 book meshes to a large bookcase to give the effect of a filled bookshelf. Then you place 12 of these filled bookcases in a room. When you enter the room in-game, the game loads and renders 12 bookcases and 1200 books! Obviously, this can kill the frame rate on many systems.

What can be done in NifSkope to make the game see the filled bookcase as a single item instead of 101? I'm guessing it's a certain branch in NifSkope that can be deleted for each book, but I don't know which one.

Also, what can you remove when changing a weapon mesh to a static item?

Any help is appreciated - I want to learn to optimize my meshes as much as possible before releasing them. Thanks!

Basically, you'd want to remove any faces/parts of the mesh that won't be visible in the world.

Nifskope has some basic scripts to optimize meshes (called Spells), but to really do it right you'll need to load it in Blender or a similar program and actually merge the books into a single mesh.

For the weapon, you can't remove too much, and it won't optimize it really. The weapons are already pretty optimized.

The Nifscript thread has a post from me yesterday that shows the major differences between a playable weapon and the static version of the same. I intend to experiment a bit in the next couple of days to see if simply removing havok data from the weapon has the same/similar effect as making these alterations.

What showler said. Remove as much hidden geometry as possible.

if possible combine any books that use the same texture into a single tristrip. < the less geometry blocks you have the better, even if the total vert count is the same - 1 block with 1000tris, will probably be smaller than 10 blocks with 100tris.

be aware that importing meshes back into a 3d app after having being exported. will probably introduce some annoying things.

make sure weld verts is ticked on import. It is also advised to weld any split verts you find in the UV< if stuff gets split, it'll bloats the vertex count massively, which is more important than face/tri count. Re-setup your face smoothing, and basically the geometry is ready for reexport. though there will be other things you will probably need to take care of before reexport.