How do you go about LOD???

8bitboy

Hi, I am working on a weird open world game which has alot of rocks (like a ton). I decimate the big rocks, but I want to do add LOD's for them. Do you decimate them again in a lower poly-count and do the UV + texture again, or do you retopologize inside a 3D program(Max) and remove edge loops. Any advice and tips is much appreciated and will help out anyone else who is wondering about the same thing. I am using Unity with detail maps so the textures are not that time consuming to produce again and use Zed bush for the decimation. I've also been wondering about image based LOD's and fading LOD's like in No Man's Sky. Thanks a bunch :-)  

oglu

if you have a good decimation tool you dont have to recreate the uvs... at least ot fot the first two lods...
maya has a new reduce tool since 2015 i think... its the one from softimage...
also the polycruncher in max got an update...
for rocks i would  use a decimation tool and if needed clean some artefacts by hand...

if you have to do character or hardsurface i would reduce everything by hand... or do some retopo... depends on the shape...

StormyBA

Finish your LOD0 including UV's.

Duplicate LOD0, rename LOD1, delete stuff

Duplicate LOD2, rename LOD2, delete stuff

You can be rather "dirty" with lod's, in particular LOD2. By there very nature you should not be getting close enough to them to see any small "errors" 

Synaesthesia

I would personally do the first couple of LODs by hand to ensure that there's minimal "popping", which can be visually jarring.  After that, decimation is fine - as Stormy mentioned, the nature of LODs is that you shouldn't see them transitioning in the distance, so you can usually reduce heavily.  

8bitboy

Cool, so retopo is the way to go.