A customer will not wait long for a product to appear. In web AR the model downloads before anything shows, so its size is part of the experience. Here is what actually makes a file large, using measurements from wearables the studio has published.
Textures are usually the weight
In six of our published game props, the texture maps made up between three quarters and nearly all of each file. Geometry was the smaller part, even for a helmet of 66,000 triangles.
A full material often uses four maps: colour, normal, a combined metal, roughness and shadow map, and glow. At 2048 pixels square and saved as JPEG, those four alone came to about 3.5 to 5.8 MB per prop.
Compress textures before you cut detail
Converting the same textures to WebP, with the resolution unchanged, made three of those files 58 to 75 percent smaller. That is usually a better first move than lowering the resolution or simplifying the mesh, because the shape and the resolution stay exactly as they were.
Compression still needs checking by eye. Look at fine patterns, small text and smooth gradients afterwards, and pay most attention to normal maps, where artefacts show up as bumps in the lighting.
The cautious route is to leave normal maps alone. In our test, compressing only the colour, metal-roughness and glow maps, and keeping the normal maps exactly as they were, still made six props 23 to 33 percent smaller. One thing not to do: re-saving a JPEG normal map in a lossless format made the files bigger, up to 38 percent, because it carefully preserves the JPEG's own blur.
Match resolution to viewing distance
Ask how close the customer will get. A ring or a pair of glasses fills the screen at arm's length; a sofa is seen from across a room. A 2048-pixel map earns its size when a surface fills the screen, and a 1024 map, a quarter of the pixels, often looks the same on an object seen whole.
Keep one material per object where you can. Every extra material brings its own set of maps to download.
Spend triangles on the silhouette
Phones handle more geometry than they used to, but a dense mesh still costs download time and battery. The wearables we measured range from about 3,000 to 66,000 triangles, and every one opens in a mobile browser. Spend triangles where the outline shows: curves, edges and openings. Flat panels and faces nobody will see need very few.
Scale and the base point are part of the file
AR places the model at the size the file says. In a GLB file one unit is one metre, so build in real-world units and measure the result against the real product.
Put the model's origin at the base of the object, so it sits on the floor or the table instead of floating above it or sinking into it.
Compress textures first and check them by eye
Choose texture resolution by how close the customer will look
Use as few materials as the look allows
Check the real-world size and the base point before you publish
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