The Scene Audit Checklist

7.1The Priority Order

When optimizing a whole level (not chasing one bottleneck), review in this order - earlier categories have higher impact:

1. Measure first - baseline stat unit / stat gpu / memreport. No numbers, no changes.
2. High-value audit rules - mobility, shadows, culling (below).
3. Actor & draw call counts - instancing, merging, HLOD.
4. Materials - complexity sweep, translucency, samplers.
5. Textures - sizes, compression, streaming health.
6. LODs / Nanite - distant geometry gets cheaper.
7. Lighting & shadows - counts, mobility, radii.
8. Post-processing, particles, animation, Blueprints, physics, audio - in that order.

7.2The Ten Highest-Value Rules

1. Nothing is Movable unless it truly moves - Static is cheapest.
2. Disable shadow casting on tiny, distant, or insignificant objects.
3. Cull aggressively - sane draw distances on props, clutter, decals, VFX.
4. Instance repeated meshes (ISM/HISM/Foliage) instead of thousands of actors.
5. Keep materials simple - translucency, two-sided, WPO, and sampler stacks add up.
6. Use lower texture sizes than artists want - most assets don't need 4K.
7. Keep light counts low, especially shadowed movable lights.
8. Use LODs / Nanite / HLOD intentionally - distance should mean cheap.
9. Budget post-process features - AO, GI, reflections, DOF, bloom can dominate.
10. Skeletal meshes and Niagara get significance/budget/culling rules - idle off-screen systems must not burn CPU/GPU.

7.3Red Flags You Can Spot In One Pass

• High-poly meshes with no LODs (and Nanite off).
• Textures at 4K+ on ordinary props, non-power-of-two sizes, missing mips.
• Normal maps with sRGB on or wrong compression.
• Meshes with 5+ material slots.
• Movable mobility on decorative objects; shadowed movable lights everywhere.
• White-hot areas in Shader Complexity; heavy overlap in Quad Overdraw.
• Hundreds of ticking Blueprints (run dumpticks).
• Assets referencing far more than they need (Size Map surprises).

7.4Automate The Asset Half

Rules 4-8 and every red flag above are asset properties - which means they're scriptable. The Unreal Asset Health Dashboard runs exactly this checklist against your project: one Python script exports the data, the browser scores every mesh, texture, material, and Blueprint, and you get a ranked worklist instead of a hunch. Run it weekly; watch the grade trend.