A Different LOD Problem

Thanks kindly, Wayne. Actually, I was using the stock Near/Far LOD setting in the wizard. I had structured these models with an eye to four LODs at some point, but hadn’t yet crossed that bridge because I’d heard it was quite tricky…

To add some irony to this, I’d seen some discussion of the Swap Texture plugin later yesterday evening, and used it to reassign one of the textures to the carbody shape. This may be what solved the problem … that is, I got the grill cars in the game with an N/F LOD this morning, so the problem appears to have been solved … but I’d feel a whole lot more comfortable if I knew what I did right (and/or wrong) before I try to get more sophisticated about this.

At any rate, Happy New Year all… -Phil

I’ve encountered a different LOD problem which doesn’t appear to have been discussed here. The short version of the long story is that I’m building a fleet of passenger cars, the first eight types of which export with Near/Far LODs and run well in MSTS. The ninth car type, which is derived from the same basic shapes as the others, is crashing the sim and giving me fits.

The problem involves the two basic shapes of the model, the car shell and the interior deck and bulkheads, displaying textures not mapped to them in the far LOD, or that’s what SView is telling me at any rate. The shell, in this case, is not more than a reskin of one of the other car types. The Update Material plugin hasn’t helped this time. I have even gone so far as to develop the interior shape from scratch, and a new shell from an early, untextured master shape, and still encounter this problem.

I’ve run out of options at this point. Can any of you offer some guidance here? Thanks kindly for you time and thoughts… -Phil

Hi Phil,

Are you generating custom LOD’s? If so, you will have found this can be tricky and often results in misapplied textures on the the secondary LOD’s.

To be successful, your second LOD model must have the same groups, in the same order as the original. Also, be aware that not all group boundaries are visible. For example, if you change textures or material characteristics within a group, 3DC will treat that change the same as a group change.

Hopefully Richard will be able to take a look at this one day. The custom LOD generator is not setting the prim_state_idx parameters properly in secondary LOD’s. I’ve taken to manually fixing them up on some occasions but it would be nice if this were done automatically.

Wayne