LOD for Scene Efficiency pt.1

Many times we encounter projects with a great scale of scene, assets within contains are numerous and numerous means giga polycount like city blocks, community area or most common are game contents. How do we tradeoff performance and quality? The answer is LOD.

Level of Detail (LOD) is important to maintain interactivity and still getting 70-80% quality over high number of poly. With high poly contents in the scene it is the best way we impress ourselves in terms of details and realism but too complex to render and the interactive rates are evidently long to process. One solution is to simplify the geometry of those objects that are small and within distance but mostly even large objects can benefit on LOD’s as long as the texture resolution is large enough to support the pixels needed to get better rendering output. It is also called mesh reduction or mesh decimation.

A little sample below explains the benefit of LOD.

Images above show that LOD works well specially when viewed in a distance, it may look impressive in OGL view but it is best when rendered. The image below are the rendered, lights applied and remember the model below is our 500 poly version!

Close up with wireframe visible

By now I guess everyone whos reading this would like to try on their tight deadline projects and rendering time is a big issue. In the next part ill show you how to make LOD object that will help you speed up loading scene time up to 3x quicker and better scene utilization