Material LOD

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,

I just came across a (perhaps) missing feature or more of a question if that is working out of the box in Unity (since every other thing can be coded easily).

Is Material LOD used in Unity? I mean a mechanism which changes the material according to the distance or other heuristics, since we don’t need high quality materials in the far.
So it is mainly the same as Geometry LOD which changes the mesh with distance, but with materials.
It would be a good addition, since we could decrease just render quality like we do for weaker computer systems like “in the near I render with high quality, at mid distance I render like DX8 class GPUs and in the far we render like DX7 class GPUs”.
Any other ideas on that or some critics?

Regards,
Martin

2

Right now you can do that manually - based on distance, switch between several materials. Just like you’d do geometry LOD.

I think as an out-of-the-box feature, it would make sense to drop “how many pixel lights shine on an object” count with distance.