LOD (Level Of Detail) is strong feature of Serious Engine. As model is in distance from viewer less detail on it is actually seen so those details dont need to be drawn and have impact on Engine's performance i.e. if model have teeth modeled (with many polygons) and its far away from viewer those teeth looks like few pixels on screen and they can be removed. MIPMODELING tool is used for creating and adjusting LOD. You can access it by clicking on MIP tab in Tools window (Figure 26).
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| Figure 26 |
LOD allows you to have high polygon count models when they are very close to viewer and few polygons in model far in distance. In this tab you can create mipmodels and get informations about number of mipmodels for model, switch factor, number of vertices in every mipmodel etc. Serious Engine supports up to 32 mipmodels per model. LOD techonolgy in Serious Engine allows manually creating mipmodels in 3d application like Lightwave3d, 3DS Max etc. This model have 7 mipmodels created manually in Lightwave3d. By default MIPMODELING tools is in AUTOMIPMODEL mode, meaning when you zoom out model from viewer (SPACE RMB) it will draw less geometry as model is more away from viewer (and mipmodel number changes) i.e you see less details in geometry (Figure 27).
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| Figure 27 |
To view how model's mips look like toggle off AUTOMIPMODEL mode (O shortuct) and use [ and ] to cycle between mipmodels (Figure 27) or use icons in AUTOMIPMODEL toolbar (note: mapping for each mipmodel is either automaticaly generated or read from 3d object so there is no need for adjusting mapping after mipmodels are created or loaded). As you cycle mipmodels distance at wich model changes to less geometry is shown (Figure 28). Last (7th) mip contains no geometry meaning that at certain distance model isnt rendered at all.
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| Figure 28 |