While the Level of Detail system that is in place for meshes is great for optimisation we don’t have control over the LODs themselves this brings issues across with how the mesh is decimated and quite often this can make the game look bad, introducing custom LODs would fix this and i’m aware that this has been brought up in the past however I think it should definitely be considered.
In addition this could help in improving performance for our games as we could define how many tris each mesh is as opposed to letting the engine handle it.
Here is an example of what i’m talking about with some game ready trees that were created for a game.
As you can see the tree gets absolutely butchered at LOD1 and that is just at the first stage so imagine going further back. We can also save texture draw calls with custom LODs since LOD1 is a billboard plane of the tree (1 mesh) whereas the original tree would have 2 meshes the leaves and the trunk.
Proposed concept of the custom LOD options that I had in mind
If this feature is addressed, it would improve development as we would be able to create large spanning environments that would be optimised for use in games or even showcases and would still look stunning.