Microsoft recently purchased the company behind Simplygon, a tool for creating quality lower resolution versions of high polygon meshes. One of the nice things about Microsoft acquiring a company is, if they don’t kill it off outright, they often make it available for free. That is exactly what has happened with Simplygon Connect. Here are the details on the two versions available.
Head over to the developer portal, sign in (I used my existing Live account) and the following downloads are available.
In addition to the above downloads, Simplygon is already supported inside Unreal Engine.
Details on the limitations between the Connect version and the offline version are scarce, and the site seems to completely lack an FAQ or additional information. The obvious difference is 1 node vs 10 on the commercial version, however I have no idea what a node actually is. The other obvious differences is the commercial version supports Windows 8 as well as 10, has the ability to supress automatic updates and email support is available. The free version is limited to Windows 10. I am currently downloading the SDK to see if additional information is available, however their servers seem to be absolutely crawling at the moment.