id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	i_links	o_links
345	LoD for important models	scheusso	nobody	"= LoD creation for important models =
== Motivation ==
The reason to do this task is to improve our performance. At the moment there is a huge framedrop when a lot of models are loaded into a level because they're all displayed/rendered at full detail. There is a lot of potential performance gain by using the LoD technique and render only low detail versions of objects that are not to close to the camera.
== Task outline ==
Your task is to create lower LoD (Level of Detail) versions for important models such as assff, HXY-Ship, Spacestations and maybe also Weapons mounted on these Ships.
== LoD ==
Level of Detail is a technique which saves information to create lower detailed versions of a model.[[BR]]

[[Image(http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/equator/papers/Documents2002/Jean-Daniel_Nahmias/Massive%20Model%20Rendering%20htm_files/image020.jpg)]].[[BR]]

See also [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail this]
== Techniques ==
There are several ways to make this:
 * use OgreMeshUpgrade: this way you can (interactively) define:
  * number of leves of detail
  * number of faces removed per level
  * distance at which each lod becomes active
 the script saves the information directly into the mesh and there are no additional steps required to get LoD to work
 * create lower detailed versions of model yourself
  * export them to mesh
  * convert high lod model from mesh to xml using OgreXMLConverter
  * manually insert lower detailed models into xml of high detail version
see also this [http://forum.orxonox.net/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=444 thread] for more information
== Things to figure out ==
The following things have to be figured out (probably by trying different variants)
 * how many LoD's does a sepcific model require?
 * what should be the reduction rate of faces per level?
 * at which distance should the levels become active ?"	task	new	minor		GameContent	0.0.5		PPS