How many LODs do you use on an asset?
TL;DRAssets generally get up to five LODs, switching automatically when small triangles reach a certain on-screen pixel size, so it scales regardless of asset size without manually set distances.
The answer is generally up to five. The way our LODs are calculated... so for anyone who doesn't know, LOD stands for level of detail. It's essentially another version of the mesh, the geometry, that is cheaper, has fewer vertices or fewer triangles. We basically take the average size of the small triangles, and we say when that is a certain amount of pixels on screen, switch to the next one. So it doesn't matter if your asset is the size of a space station or the size of a coffee cup. Once those small triangles are a certain amount of pixels on the screen, it will say, OK, use the next LOD. So it's a really lovely scalable system. In a lot of game engines, what you'll have is you dictate the distance at which you transition to an LOD manually, which obviously, when you've got many, many assets, is a bit of a pain. And it's just a really elegant system.
And you can kind of see what's happening here. Usually what I tend to do is, you've seen it before, you basically have the parts of the weapon with the hard edges. And usually I leave those parts with the hard edges. Yeah, it's a really low polygon area. And if you go to a distance of like 20 meters, you can't tell the difference between them. So if you're zooming out, the one without LODs is disappearing on the right, but with the LODs, you can't see a difference.