Cal3d & predefined LOD?!

[Vaquero]

In a post dating back to 2007, someone states that LOD (Level of Detail) is "currently" not supported for Cal3d avatars. It is now 2015 and my question is simple: Are levels of detail supported for avatars in Vizard 5?
If yes: how do I set it up? I want to use the handmade meshes for the levels, not some poly-reduction algorithm at runtime that messes with the mesh.

If not: This is so essential for performance. If I want to populate a scene with some high quality avatars for realism's sake, I need a way to swap the highpoly meshes against lowpoly meshes for obvious performance reasons (the same goes for the shaders in use on each resolution). I can't make a set of low poly and a highpoly avatars and confine them to inner & outer bounds, if a person should be able to move freely through the crowd.

[Jeff]

There is no support for LODs with Cal3D avatars. If you're having performance issues with multiple avatars, try loading your avatars with the vizfx library and hardware skinning. There's a section that covers hardware skinning in the avatar basics page of the docs.

[Vaquero]

Again, thank you very much for your quick replay, Jeff. I'm planning on loading the characters via hardware skinning, but further, every optimization counts. I'm baffled, that there is no support for avatar LODs. I have a professional background as an artist in the games industry, where we used that all the time. The avatars that come with Vizard look like they've been around for more than 10 years, so I'd like to use some, that add more realism to increase immersion and still be able to fill a virtual classroom without too much of a performance hit.

I've read in the documentation, that the avatar can be setup to exchange bodyparts. So I should be able to exchange the whole mesh against one with fewer or more polygons. Is there a way I can do that with a dependency on the distance to the camera? Or would that create too much overhead?

[Jeff]

I don't know of a way to swap the mesh at runtime. How may avatars are you planning to use and how large is the room?