What is LOD?
TL;DRLOD means level of detail, progressively simplified copies of a model used as it gets farther from the camera; LOD Zero is the highest quality, and changes after it are costly, so it is the last chance for edits.
LOD, level of detail, is basically you take your geometry, so your 3D model for the ship, duplicate it and then smush it down, optimize it more. You do that a few times. Less complexity, right? The further away you get from it in space, it will transition to the next LOD. So it's basically a way of optimizing a mesh as it gets further away from the camera. LOD 0 is the highest quality one, so if you've got your face up against this table, and you step two metres back, these ridges in the table won't be modelled anymore, they'll be flat. And also if, for example, we do LODs on something and then we get feedback about it, it kind of makes those LODs redundant, right? So you really want Ben to be like, we're not doing any changes to it after we've done LOD Zero. That's your last chance to say, change this, because we're going to move on to basically all these destructive processes that mean you can't really go back from that point.
Bear in mind, right, Corey joins the team, and within about two weeks, he's like, right, we need to talk about the pipeline. And I'm like, okay. And he's like, yeah, we need to change this. And yeah, it's much better for team health, much better for scheduling and everything else.
We're trying stuff. This is all stuff we're noodling with. It's not like, this is the way. I'm not coming in and just being like, oi. These are suggestions of things to try.
The situation you could get into is that you make four different versions of the ship geometry. And then myself or Mark come along and are like, that thruster's in the wrong place. And you now need to redo that area of geometry for four different versions.
Some things are easy. Because again, as you go down through the LOD chain, you're making the ship less and less detailed. And so by the time you get to LOD 4 and 5, moving things around a little bit doesn't really matter. Sometimes you play with the scale of them so that you reduce the amount of pop you get as these things change. But the LODs are the icing on the cake in terms of where it is in the production pipeline, but it's also the least fun and the most tedious part of the production pipeline.