[gameprogrammer] Re: Level of detail rendering

I think you mean to transition from model/mesh to a billboard. I think that is done in Rome Total War, as you zoom out all the soldiers become billboard objects (allowing hundreds of units). You can make it so that it always faces the camera, then just change the image if the units move left or right etc)
Sometimes this transition between mesh and billboard can be quite noticeable so you could use some blending/fading between the two

-Josh

Alan Wolfe wrote:
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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