Low Resolution LOD by Snake Man

It doesn't matter how many points/polys your model first LOD has, as long as you have proper low res LOD's which ends with the last LOD being 100 or less points/polys.

People sometimes wonder why to make lower resolution LOD's if your model performs OK. Well, its just something you have to do without exception, if you don't, then you're not modeling properly and are creating ArmA “unfriendly” addons which cause performance loss when playing. Never ever compromise visuals over game play, meaning that your addon would kill all performance from the game.

ArmA engine is funny that it can render a high poly no low res LOD (bad) model in high performance when used in simple scene alone, but when these models are added several time in a complex scene with the usual amount of AI running around in a mission… you start to get heavy performance (FPS) loss.

You need to understand that the lower resolution LOD's are created by taking the first LOD and reducing 50% of the points/polygons on the lower resolution LODs. For example if we have model of 7300 points on the first LOD, it would go down like this:

Notice as the 7.0 last LOD should really be 114 points (by 50% reduction), but its not exact science so you are totally free to have it “just around there” as its that close (only like 15 points).

Also make a note that you can drop even MORE than 50% if you can maintain the shape of the model, so its all about your skill to maintain the model intact, then drop as much as you can, but remember that sometimes the LOD's change even at close distances, so if your model all of the sudden drops all finer details… it doesn't look real nice.

Having high performance model is with low res LOD that ends up being less than 100 points and on top of that, you need to have the section count down to one in this last LOD. Check section fixing for additional details on that.