How it works

Lodscape LOD Tools provides a tab in the Tool Shelf in Blender with 2 separate panels. The Slice Panel In the Slice panel you will be able to create the number of cells you want for your landscape, you also have an option to rename the cells in a grid way. (A1, A2... Z1, Z2.) The Levels of Detail Panel Once you're happy with the number of cells created for you landscape, in this panel you can then set safe margins for the LOD creation. This will set margins groups for the LOD generator to work with and perfectly match each cell Level of Detail with the neighbor cells. After that, select all cells and set the number of LODs you want to generate, it will show you the distances automatically set for you based on the size of the cells, also the ratios (percentage of vertices to be reduced from the original cell) are set automatically has a base for you, if you're felling lucky, just press the button to generate the LODs, you can always undo to fine tune the ratios and redo it again quick and easy. The newly created LODs will be hidden and packed individually to each original cell. To see the results, change the render to Game Engine and move around, if the LODs were created with proper ratio setting you will have a hard time seeing the results (pat yourself on the back, good job) so you may want to change to wireframe mode to check if the LODs are really working. TIP: After the LODs are created if you need to fix just a few of them, instead of redoing all the LODs with different ratios, you may want to fine tune only those that are not perfectly matching. The renaming option becomes useful here has you can search the outliner for the name of the cells, unhide the correspondent lods, delete them, select the cells that need fixing, set new ratios in the LOD Tools Panel and generate new LODs only on those cells selected.

Limitations Version 0.2.0 , First Release

Slice Tool

• Only works with square terrains
• Landscape size limit: 8192 blender units
• Number or rows/columns: 26
• Number of rows/columns are conditioned to a modulus 0, so the renaming will work properly and to prevent crashes. This means Landscape 1000x1000 work well with 2,4,5,8,10,20,... rows/columns but not with 3,6,7,9,11,... rows/columns. In any case the slice tool will be grayed out and show a info tip in case this condition is not meet.

LOD Tool

• Margin limited to 5 steps, usually 1 is enough.
• Max number of Lods per object: 5

Known Issues

The landscape must be perfectly square and preferable in round Blender Units or the slice tool will be grayed out, even when the size shows a integer number sometimes that is not true for Blender internally. Usually after some scaling. Example: The dimensions panel of Blender shows x:1000, y:1000, but the slice tool is grayed out with a info saying that the terrain is not square. The probable cause is that internally the sizes may be something like x:1000.0213, y:999.109. To solve this, go to the dimensions panel and type 1000 on the X and Y axis.