Levels Of Detail

HOOPS Luminate can be used to render Levels Of Details (LODs), thanks to the culling callbacks mechanisms (see in the doc Culling Methods the section Using Culling Callbacks or the doc Using Culling Callbacks for Visibility Control for instance). However, HOOPS Luminate - as of HOOPS Luminate v4.0 - does not provide automatic LOD generation methods, as generic LODs are generally good for no one, as they’re not specific enough to be competitive.

Are LODs Really Needed?

The first question prior to using LODs to ask is: are LODs really needed? Using HOOPS Luminate, many GPUs are able to render more than 1.500.000.000 triangles per second, including shading and texturing. So for instance, most CAD applications will not require any LOD system, as they don’t display more than a few millions triangles each frame.

Furthermore, the time consumed by the application to select its LODs is to balance with the polygon savings. LODs selection may break the rendering pipeline and lower the benefits of the internal batch architecture in HOOPS Luminate. This because, HOOPS Luminate can’t know beforehand which sequence of meshes will have to be rendered.

For Some Applications, LODs Are a Must Have

Then, yes, for some applications, LODs are a must have: all kind of simulation engines for which the amount of data does not fit in the system memory anyway will require LOD selection systems. In this case, HOOPS Luminate’s culling callbacks are tools of choice to implement your own LOD selection criteria.