Automatic mesh LOD management system

by Peter Szücs for WorldForge

Ember uses high quality graphical models, but doesn’t provide low quality versions of them. When a model is far away from the camera it is not required to render high quality models, since the user sees it on screen for just few pixels. This makes Ember to require high-end graphics cards. The automatic LOD (Level of detail) management system is about to solve this problem. It will create from high quality models multiple low quality models, by reducing vertex count with an algorithm. This allows for far away rendering to use low quality models, which will increase graphical performance. Next to the automatic LOD management, I want to provide possibility to manually configuring the LOD for a given model, which will allow fine-tuning for performance critical models. I will also design and create a GUI for the manual LOD configurations in the model editor to make fine-tuning an easy task.