Lodscape - LOD Tools

Lodscape is an Add-On for Blender that provides tools to slice and generate Levels of Detail (LOD) for landscapes or several objects in a short time, conveniently packed and ready for Game Engine. It will speedup  you real-time visualizations for Games, Architecture, Archaeology or Topography.

Features

Slice a landscape in smaller cells (aka:chunks). Rename automatically the newly created cells for a cleaner outline and convenience of use. Set vertices groups with safe margins for seamless LODs. Create several LODs with automatic distances and ratios of detail to any number of cells in one go. Not happy with the automatic settings? Easily fine tune to your liking all at once or in smaller groups.  

Why I did the Lodscape LOD TOOLS

I had a nice landscape of 1024 square meters with a resolution of 512 (approximately 256000 vertices), sculpted and textured, try it in Blender Game Engine and my framerate drops to 40 fps with only the landscape and a camera moving around. What can I do? I know, slice and lod it :) After a couple of hours slicing my 1st row of 8 cells just to test it and having to redo it again, rename, vertices groups, decimate, ratios, distances one by one, you start calculating the time you will take to finish the 64 cells and wonder if you will have to redo it again, this may take days. You just think, there should be a faster way to do this. That's when I decided to make Lodscape LOD Tools Add-On and reduced the time from possible 3 days to under 5 min.

Test case:

Slice a landscape to 8 column/rows results in 64 cells named A1 to H8: about 50 seconds. Setting vertices groups for safe margin and cells matching: 3 seconds Generating 3 LODs to each cell with default settings ready to use in Blender game engine: about 1 minute and 40 seconds. Now in 3 easy steps I have the same result in under 3 min, and I can undo and redo it how many times I need. Great. Results of the test made with a 5 years old Laptop: Using Blender regular tools: 3h minimum. Using Lanscape LOD Tools: under 3 minutes.  

My Commitment

This tool was made out of necessity to speed up my work and will be updated as needed. If you have any request for it  to work under a specific setting or need a new feature please let me know how it can be improved. Also, any current user will get free updates for life.