The mesh dial was never just about polygon count. Game and Light now run a shorter generation cascade, ship faster, and cost less. Hero still pays for the full high-detail path. The price on the button matches the compute.
If you generate 3D on NIUA, you already know the Tier control: Hero, Game, and Light. Until now the list price was the same either way — only the export bake changed. Under the hood the expensive cascade still ran at full strength, then we crushed the mesh for games. That was wasteful.
As of today, Game and Light early-exit the cascade before the high-res shape stage. You still get a textured, core-spec GLB you can drop into Unity, Unreal, or Godot. You just stop paying for detail you were going to throw away.
What you pay
- Light — $0.39 — early-exit cascade, 50K faces / 1K textures. Background props.
- Game (default) — $0.49 — early-exit cascade, 300K faces / 2K textures. Import-and-use.
- Hero — $0.79 at standard resolution, $1.49 at 1536 — full cascade, max faces / 4K textures.
- Fast track — $0.29 — separate cheaper model for drafts (no tier dial).
- Re-export — $0.09 — new LOD from the saved recipe, no full regenerate.
Live numbers always live at /pricing and GET /api/billing/prices. The playground price badge tracks the same catalog.
What re-export can and cannot do
Every standard-track mesh still saves a generation recipe. Re-export builds LODs from that recipe without re-running the full model. The ceiling is the cascade you bought: a Game or Light job cannot invent true Hero density later. If you need Hero fidelity, generate with Tier = Hero up front.
Where to try it
Playground → New mesh → Tier dial. Same params on the REST mesh endpoint and the generate_mesh MCP tool. Agents reading llms-full.txt get the updated copy.