hey blender people,
I was wondering if there’s a LOD script out there for terrain… for eg: have a mesh for terrain and the script automatically reduces my mesh while keeping my UV’s in tact as best it can… or a script that blends together 3 separate meshes ranging from high to low… anything like that out there… anyone willing to write one up…??? anyone know a simple solution…
here a basic concept for the mesh which would work with a simple LOD script but the problem is doing this on a large scale would be very finicky and time consuming…
what do you think???
No, there is no such script as far as I know. Realtime modification of meshes is limited to move vertex coordinates around (x,y,z,u,v) or change color.
What you can do is split up the mesh into separate objects. Then replace the objects mesh with other resolution. The downside is you need all meshes in memory. An issue is the border to the next object. You need to keep this at the same level as the connected mesh or you get gaps. The good thing is you can remove the objects that are out of sight.
thanks for the response, yeah looks like im going to have to make the entire map then cut it up and hit it with the decimate modifier the same way I did in the picture of my original post, but it’s going to be a pain in the ass lol… oh well… im very much in the planning stage of my project at the moment so maybe i’ll find something better along the way… really dont want to sacrifice quality in this project. 
Blender 2.49 and above has an automatic culling system intergrated in the engine,also there is always the camera clipping feature…so doing lod for a big map terrain is not making much of a sence.
You need to focus on doing lod system for the objects on the terrain…because its possible and more likely to see lots of objects in a small distance.
well the short test road above would take about 20-30 secs to walk along and it’s about 12000 verts and with the lower rez meshes it’s at 4000verts so there’s a massive difference there culling system or not it will lag without LOD, and I will do LOD for my objects but I trying to be very tactful in the way im doing this project after seeing so many crash and burn on the forums lol, im not even starting on modeling assets until the ground is done… and I haven’t even designed a map yet im just trying to figure out how i’ll tackle it when the time comes im really still figuring out a story at the moment but I’ve got an outline of what im going to do though.
Well, if you really need that kind of details for the terrain,which is a little odd(in fact you can use normal and bump maps on a low res terrain and achieve alot more detailed terrain).
However, what I suggest then, is to use dynamic loading feature in blender 2.5x - make your high res terrain and then cut it into peaces and make every chunk to load and unload on a certain distance from the character.