[gameprogrammer] Level of detail rendering

Hey everyone,

 I find alot of ideas you come up with tend to already be done or have tried
and failed for some reason :P

but, I had an idea for LOD i thought i'd kick around see what you guys
thought.

W/ LOD, distant objects don't need much detail, but what i was thinking is
that they are also pretty static when you get really far away.

So static for instance, that a really distant mountain is often just a
skybox :P

so, my idea was this, what if when an object got really far away, It
rendered the object to a surface and just displayed it as a quad until it
either needed ot start rendering it as a 3d model again, or until it needed
to update the quad due to the player viewing it from a different angle.

I know with changing lighting and other things it would make this technique
not work so well, but if we're talking about an outdoors scene where the
global lighting changes slowly, maybe it would work out good.

What do you guys think?  Has this been tried before?

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