For this week I made a bunch of meshes. I am not a VFX artist of any sort so I'm sure they aren't the best but I tried. Going into making all the meshes I knew I had to keep a low polygon count. This is because the more triangles are on screen the more the GPU will have to work and the more the game will stutter. 
To handle this I leaned onto materials. I knew that I would have to make some corners sharper than I would like and some other similar compromises but by utilizing materials. For example for this Ice Sickle I made is made out of only octagons and the ring on the bottom is a hexagon. This seems like it would make it feel low poly but it doesn't. As you can see from the pictures below  despite the relativly small amount of polygons it apears much smoother. 

And this is closer than the player would ever see, if I wanted to reduce the polygons even more I could use planar decimation to reduce it way down. However I still want the models to look decent up close should the player ever  move their camera in such a way to get a good look. 
 


That was the first optimization, the 2nd was an issue I didn't even realize was one at first which is the resolution of the textures that the materials use. I started noticing this one bug that warns me that it is exceeding the texture streaming by 800 (or so) MB. I did some digging and found out that, as mentioned before, I was using to high resolution images for the textures.  After a bit more research I discovered the solution. I could lower the maximum quality of the textures so they wouldn't take up as much space in memory. Here's how to do it. As you can see below the textures were taking up over 160MB of memory alone. This was a huge portion of memory on its own. Then after changing it from 2k resolution to 256 it went down by an insane amount with no visible differences in gameplay though it can be noticed when zooming in in the editor. Another HUGE impact was the face model for our character which you practically never see. It was using INSAINE 8k textures taking up 358 MB of memory JUST for his face. This was reduced to 22 MB but I didn't want to take it too low that way if you face Clancy towards the camera its not just a blur.