Level of Detail and Shaders

[shivanangel]

I guess what I am trying to get at is that I didn't want to create an LOD object in max that references the same model twice when all I want to do is swap the shader applied to the model.

If I understand correctly, the fix you are recommending requires the LOD object in Max be created and exported. I'd need a naming convention saying the object is an LOD object, and upon loading I'd then need to get the node names and identify the LOD order ( by some naming convention again ) and apply my shader to the lowest LOD object, leave all subsequent objects to default to the regular vertex shading.

[farshizzo]

Ok, I see two ways to go about this:

1) Use a LOD node with with a different group node for each range, but the same base model is added to each group node. So you still retain only one instance of the model. Then you can apply the different shaders to each group node.

2) Compute the distance of the viewpoint to the object within the vertex shader and use that as a way to dynamically switch between simpler and complex computations.

I would consider method 1 more ideal, but it might be more difficult to setup. Also, if you have different shaders applied to various sub-parts of the model, then method 1 won't work.