Whitelist LOD Group component
a
alareis
There is no reason not to. And no, impostors are not a valid substitute for actual authored LODs, though they could be a decent pre-cull step; neither is distance culling. Relying on occlusion is also not an option, as layouts vary greatly, often not bringing camera close enough to targets.
We're currently stuck between two extremes: either you run on eleven-and-a-half vertices, or you rock LOD0 and effectively output microtriangles for anyone two or more meters away; more often than not it's the latter, and given commonly used fragment shader complexities (and their "quality") the performance impact grows exponentially. I guess this needs to be said: it's not 1996, and we can have more than 512 verts per scene. Especially in VR, where detail is paramount.
Previously stated excuses for not whitelisting the component were laughable at best. Just because few people will make use of it doesn't mean no-one should be able to use it. Safety system accommodates for LOD meshes under the mesh visibility umbrella.
Existing solutions rely on safety system allowing animator evals, as well as relying on contact receivers. It is janky, unreliable, and takes too much time to set up.
There is no need for implementing some magical automatic LOD generator either. Most automatic generators tend to mangle topology and related attributes beyond reasonable level even for flatscreen. If an author doesn't want to properly author LOD meshes, they can choose to use existing automatic generators themselves.
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Allow users to create their own custom LOD models for avatars
O
Ophaque
I would love to have the ability to optimize my avatars even further by using hand-made Level of Detail models at a distance. This sounds like it could be easily exploited, but with enough restrictions, avatar creators who want to go the extra mile could optimize their avatars to a ludicrous degree.
Perhaps the polygon count on LOD models could be rigidly locked to a percentage value of the avatar's original polycount. For example, LOD1 could be 75%, LOD2 could be 50%, and so on. If I have an avatar that's 70k triangles, then LOD1 would have to be 52,500 triangles or less, and LOD2 would have to be 35,000 triangles or less.
Perhaps LOD models past LOD1 could be forced to only have 1 skinned mesh.
LOD models could require that you use the same textures and materials as the main model, to prevent the exploitation of swapping to unoptimized materials. Perhaps the number of custom materials could be reduced to 2, maximum.
Maybe the Quest fallback version of a model could just be the lowest custom LOD model instead, if the LOD model in question is optimized enough.
If there was a separate Performance Ranking System for LOD models that restricted the ability to upload them if they went over the limit, I don't see this feature being exploited. At worst, most users would ignore it, and automatically generated LODs could be used instead. At best, an avatar could be optimized massively, which could lead to improved performance across the board, especially on Quest or Android.
The only downside would be an increased download size, but if the LOD models are forced to use the same textures and materials as the main model, the impact would be negligible.