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LOD - Model Fades away quickly

S

sydney2006

Messages
101
Country
australia
Hi,

I've just been playing around with LOD's for Apron Flood Lights i'm making. Everything seems to work well; I set up the main model at LOD_400 then one a bit higher at LOD_100 then one at LOD_10 as it was fading quickly, and still is.

The effect looks great and seems to be working but as soon as i'm about 3 gate lengths away the polygon fades away to nothing. Only showing lights right around you?

I thought it would stop at LOD_10 and keep displaying? Anyway to fix this?

Aaron
 
Simple Answer (if you have to use LODs): make the object bigger.

add a single triangle underground to enlarge the bounding box.

Use LOD_100 as the maximum, and perhaps LOD_003 as the minimum ... if you must use LODs.

Does it need LODs ... usually only if it is VERY poly intensive (ie several thousand), or you need to shed drawcalls at a distance.
 
Thanks for your reply, I'll try both those idea now.

Yah I have to use LOD's for it, they are so that from a distance the polygon goes up a little to stop the "flickering effect"

Cheers

Aaron
 
No luck :( I added a massive square underground and changed the LOD settings to 100 010 and 003, the apron light poly still faded at about the same distance.

Aaron
 
This may sound a little bit foolish but check the view distance when exporting with the SDK.
 
Which begs the question is this for FSX or FS2004.

When you say Fades out ... that sounds like a Mip issue, rather than a LOD (if we're talking FSX at least)
 
This is for FSX sorry, forgot to mention that. I was unaware of view distance option? All I do is export the model in FSDS then run it through FSDSTweak.

It could be a mip issue? how could I check for this? I haven't had an issue like this with any of my other objects and if I didn't use LOD it does not do the fade to nothing.

Some progress though, on your idea of making the object larger, I reduced the "light part of the texture by about 4x" then once I was back in FSX when I placed the object but for the same light size the object is now 4x larger (scaled it up). Seems to fix the fading to at least 10000ft (haven't checked exactly how far) which is good enough for practical purposes.

Thanks for all your help

Aaron
 
In FSX LODs "switch" rather than fade.

The important dimension is the diagonal extent of the object, so on flat approach, or LOW zoom level a lower LOD will be selected sooner.

Extended objects under the ground increases the diagonal extent of the object and forces the use of a higher LOD (because the sim thinks the object is bigger)

MIP switching fades from one MIP to the next ... it will depend what you made the texture with ... DXTBmp adds mips by default. Imagetool has to be asked to make them.

EDIT: And no, ther is no "draw distance" using X2Mdl ... only LODs. That was deprecated after FS2004.
 
hcornea said:
EDIT: And no, ther is no "draw distance" using X2Mdl ... only LODs. That was deprecated after FS2004.
Click to expand...

After FS2002 already even. It takes a bit effort to get used to the LODs, but in the end they are better than a visibility distance.
 
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