Proposal for Texture based LODS

It would be really beneficial for a Texture Asset to have the concept of LODs or quality levels. This would allow artists to author high-quality textures assets used in the editor, whilst also providing developers the ability to globally set a specific LOD ahead of the scene load. Although determining a specific LOD could be done in-engine, it would be hard to capture all use cases, therefore a more transparent approach that allowed developers to manually set a global LOD depending ahead of time would be much more beneficial. This would provide a better way of scaling desktop content to VR/mobile.

From the editor perspective, when the Texture compression pipeline is triggered there is an option to create half/quarter res textures. The editor by default uses the LOD 0 textures

Although this would be statically set for a given scene, A LOD api would open the door for developers to create dynamic view based LOD systems.

6 Likes

Yes, please :slight_smile:

1 Like

That will be quite useful! When retina screens were introduced it was common to use filename prefixes in various mobile dev frameworks to provide variations in image resolution.

It’s definitely doable to build a third party system in PlayCanvas but having this integrated with the editor and engine will help a lot!

1 Like