How-to · Cleanup
Cleanup Time per Asset: How to Estimate and Log Yours
No one has published reliable cleanup times for AI 3D models. Here is a log template and formula to measure your own, and decide whether AI generation saves you time.
We cannot give you a cleanup time per AI asset, because we have not measured any and found no published figure we trust. The honest answer is that cleanup time varies by asset type, by the generator, and by your target engine, and the only number that matters is your own. This page gives you a log and a formula so you can find out in a week of normal work whether AI generation saves you time.
Why a single number would mislead
Cleanup is a chain of steps (the full pipeline), and several steps depend on things you cannot know in advance: how fragmented the shell is, whether automatic remeshing accepts the mesh, whether the texture has baked-in lighting. Any single-asset anecdote describes one model, one engine target and one person’s skill. Averages across different asset types hide the real decision: a distant static prop may need almost nothing (a Nanite scene may skip reduction entirely), while a deforming character may need hand retopology.
What to log
One row per asset, per attempt. Use a spreadsheet. Columns:
| Field | What to write |
|---|---|
| Asset id and type | e.g. prop, character, environment piece |
| Generator, plan, date | Which tool, model version, plan |
| Destination | Engine, platform, and its limits you are holding the asset to |
| Generation attempts | How many tries before one was worth cleaning (retries cost credits and your time) |
| Minutes, each step | Import and scale; shell repair; reduction/retopology; UVs; bake; LODs; collision; engine import and fix |
| Waiting minutes | Time you were idle while Blender or the generator ran (log separately) |
| Result | Shipped, shipped with defects, abandoned (with the step where you gave up) |
| Notes | What broke |
Use a stopwatch or a timer app that you start and stop per step. Write minutes of active attention, not elapsed wall-clock. Decide in advance what counts as “done”: the destination’s documented limits met, and the asset looks right in the engine at gameplay distance.
Formulas
Define these yourself from your log; nothing here is a measured value.
- Cleanup minutes per shipped asset = (sum of all step minutes for all assets) ÷ (number of assets shipped). Include the abandoned ones in the numerator. Dropping them overstates savings.
- Cleanup cost per shipped asset = cleanup minutes ÷ 60 × H, where H is the hourly value you put on your time. State your H.
- Total cost per shipped asset = (credits or subscription cost allocated per asset) + cleanup cost. Allocation depends on plan terms; see the credit cost calculator and cost per usable asset.
- Compare with your alternative: time to model it yourself, buy it, or hire it (AI vs asset store, hire an artist or use AI). Use the same “done” definition for both sides.
Label any assumption you make in a worked example (hourly value, abandoned-asset rate, how many retries you budget) and keep assumptions out of the measured columns.
“Done” for each step, using documented thresholds
A log is only comparable if “done” is fixed before you start. Where a platform publishes a figure, use it as the exit test; where none exists, write your own and record it in the Destination column.
| Step | Exit test | Source for the number |
|---|---|---|
| Import and scale | Dimensions match a real reference; scale 1,1,1; origin where the engine needs it | No figure; see scale and pivot fixes |
| Reduction | Triangles at or under the platform limit | Roblox: individual meshes cannot exceed 20,000 triangles. We found no per-asset budget for Godot, Unity or Unreal in the pages we read; Epic publishes no Nanite triangle limit |
| Rig (if any) | Rig accepted without error | Meshy rigging API: textured humanoid only, at most 380,000 triangles, face toward +Z, GLB input; Tripo rigging costs 25 credits. Roblox: a vertex cannot have more than four bone influences |
| LODs | Switch is not visible at gameplay distance; frame time acceptable | Godot default Threshold Pixels is 1; no engine publishes per-level ratios |
| Collision | Convex proxy accepted | Unity Convex Mesh Collider: 255 triangles |
| Engine import | No warnings; materials and scale correct in the engine | Engine-specific |
Rig and generation credits are money, not minutes, but a failed rig (Meshy returns 422 when pose estimation fails) costs a retry and your time, so log them in the same row.
A worked layout with invented inputs
Every number in this example is an assumption chosen for arithmetic, not a measurement and not a typical value. Suppose a log of four props: three shipped, one abandoned. Assumed minutes of active attention per asset: 20, 35, 15 and 45 (the abandoned one). The total is 115 minutes; divided by three shipped assets that is 38.3 minutes per shipped asset. Dropping the abandoned asset would give 70 / 3 = 23.3, which is why it stays in. At an assumed hourly value H of 30, cleanup cost per shipped asset is 38.3 / 60 x 30 = 19.2, in the same currency as H. Add the credits allocated per asset from the credit cost calculator to get total cost, then compare with your alternative using the same definition of done.
How to read your first ten rows
- If most minutes are in one step, that step is your bottleneck; read its page and consider whether a different method or generator setting would help.
- If many assets are abandoned at the same step, look at the generator, the prompt and your method before blaming skill.
- If the total cost beats your alternative on only some asset types, use AI for those types and nothing else.
- Re-measure after you learn a new method; early rows may be slower.
What we plan to add
We have not run a stopwatch log, so no averages appear here. If you keep one, treat it as one person’s data on specific tools, versions and engine targets, not a universal figure.
Pitfalls in logging
- Forgetting regeneration time, which belongs in the log.
- Counting only the successes.
- Mixing active and waiting time.
- Stopping when it looks fine in Blender instead of in the engine.
- Comparing your first AI asset to your hundredth hand-built one.
This page is part of the Cleaning Up AI 3D Models section.