Automatic LOD is a powerful Unity extension that allows you to quickly generate and manage multiple levels of detail for your 3D models.
LOD levels are simplified meshes that are generated procedurally by the extension and help optimize your game especially on lower end platforms.
The Automatic LOD component takes care at runtime of enabling the correct mesh for each object depending on its distance to the camera or its screen area covered. This way you can use meshes with lower polycount when the object is far away or covers small screen space and higher polycounts for up-close views.
Features:
Generate LOD level meshes fully procedurally with just one click
Supports both static and skinned meshes
LODs are automatically handled by the component. No scripting needed
Build on top of our Mesh Simplify extension which is also included
Includes full source code
Includes high quality 3D models and sample scenes seen on the screenshots
Clean, easy to use and powerful UI
Valid for all platforms! Especially useful on mobile
Supports complex object hierarchies with sub-objects and multiple materials
Live preview both in edit mode and play mode
Supports both screen coverage and distance to camera algorithms
Allows finetuning assigning priorities to vertices using volumes
Classic mesh decimation / polygon count reduction using the included Mesh Simplify tool
For version 1.0 we centered our effort on geometry and reducing both processing time and bandwith use.
Usually for textures the video card itself takes some good care about them using Mipmapping. Using mipmaps you don’t need that much bandwith/memory and you have many more cache hits which really speeds rendering up.
That being said, we are working on that for our next release. This has just begun
Features we are looking for are:
Texture LODs. Be able to generate different texture sizes for each LOD.
Material LODs. Be able to generate materials with less texture slots and complexity.
Shader LODs. Be able to use simpler shaders on simpler LODs.
Why should we use your LOD asset as opposed to the standard unity LODGroup component? The mesh simplification looks amazing, but what makes your LOD component better than Unitys?
The company I work for bought this asset, and I do like it, and I see the use of it, it is definitely worth it! But, I find it is slow in the scene view, like very slow when I have 150 duplicated objects in the scenes. Why is this?
I will probably make a Unity LODGroup compatibility option in the near future. I wanted to have my own component because of flexibility and control, but as you can see the UI is almost the same so you don’t have to get used to it. Right now it has a couple of options I was missing on the LODGroup but I definitely plan to give support to both as some people may be more used to the LODGroup.
Just in the scene view it is super slow, but also at runtime it adds an extra drawcall per mesh which is not usable for me. A compatibility option with Unitys LODGroup would be amazing, because this tool is great for doing all my lods in one place, just the LOD switcher component itself is not useful for me, I’d like to just use Unitys LOD component.
Hello!
I will check first the slowdown and the extra drawcall, maybe they have an easy fix. Then how long it would take to support LODGroups, because I’m not sure if they work the same way in complex hierarchies.
I want to be able to pass in a Mesh object at runtime and then return a generated simplified mesh with a lower LOD based on some “factor” of detail. Is this possible with Automatic LOD?
$90 is a lot to risk on 1 function from this asset.
Yes you can, but if you just want to simplify a mesh at runtime and not use any LOD functionality at all you can use our Mesh Simplify asset which is 30$ cheaper
Your Automatic LOD asset looks very awesome.
Is Automatic LOD a super set of Mesh Simplify?
Is there any function that Mesh Simplify provides, but Automatic LOD does not provide?
Yes, Automatic LOD is a super set of Mesh Simplify. Automatic LOD includes the full Mesh Simplify folder and uses its core to do the LOD simplification as well. There is nothing in Mesh Simplify that is not included in Automatic LOD.
I’m still preparing the API documentation, but there is an API that can be called at runtime yes. In fact, if you download the demo you will see that the mesh simplification is done at runtime in the background (you can still move the camera while the progress is updating). This demo is included in the package so you can check the sourcecode and see how it is done
Is it a skinned mesh? I’ve noticed this behaviour sometimes but it is quite erratic and can not be reproduced. I’m thinking it may be a bug related to switching a GameObject’s mesh at runtime instead of enabling/disabling gameobject LODs.
I will release a version enabling/disabling child objects so that this won’t happen. Stay tuned
