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Optimizing mannequin

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Peter Strahle

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Description

Optimizing mannequin is a December 2025 post on the peterstrahle.dev blog about performance work for the Quest VR title Mannequin, with lessons carried from Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice.

It covers volumetric lightmap memory bloat and Lightmass importance volumes, then Unreal culling options after Software Occlusion Queries disappeared in UE5, including precomputed visibility limits, the custom Snow Occlusion plugin with occluder meshes and tuning cvars, distance culling, detail-mode props, manual instancing, Custom Primitive Data and color atlases, and per-platform LOD bias for HMD versus editor mismatch.

It is for intermediate Unreal and Quest VR engineers who ship modular scenes and are GPU-bound on mobile VR headsets.

The article is a free HTML post with debug screenshots, tool notes, and concrete console variables from production.

It is useful as a practical checklist of CPU-side occlusion, draw-call, and LOD tactics that kept a modular Quest thriller playable.