Objects and LODs

Objects and LODs

A plain mesh

Set Frame Type: Visual and Visual Type: Object. That is the whole of it — a mesh with materials, sitting where you put it.

Levels of detail

A LOD is a child of the mesh, named after it with _lod1, _lod2 and so on:

prop
 ├── prop_lod1
 └── prop_lod2

The suffix is the whole rule — nothing else marks them. Each LOD carries the distance it takes over at, in meters, in its own object panel; the first one is the mesh itself, at zero.

Note

A LOD chain is one frame in the file carrying several meshes. Blender shows them as parent and children because that is the only way to hold several meshes in one place.

Instances

Two objects sharing one Blender mesh are written as an instance: the first carries the geometry, the second names it and carries nothing but its own transform. The object panel says which it is, and which object it is an instance of.

Some frames cannot be instanced, and a mesh with LOD levels of its own is written in full instead. The panel says so when that happens, rather than doing it silently.

Faces whose corners meet

A face naming the same vertex twice covers no area, and Blender cannot hold one. The import gives the repeated corner a copy of the vertex, and the export writes the copy as the vertex it repeats — so the 1,203 such faces in the game's files survive a round trip instead of being dropped.