Demystifying "chunked level of detail"
- by Caius Eugene
Just recently trying to make sense of implementing a chunked level of detail system in Unity. I'm going to be generating four mesh planes, each with a height map but I guess that isn't too important at the moment. I have a lot of questions after reading up about this technique, I hope this isn't too much to ask all in one go, but I would be extremely grateful for someone to help me make sense of this technique.
1 : I can't understand at which point down the Chunked LOD pipeline that the mesh gets split into chunks. Is this during the initial mesh generation, or is there a separate algorithm which does this.
2 : I understand that a Quadtree data structure is used to store the Chunked LOD data, I think i'm missing the point a bit, but Is the quadtree storing vertex and triangles data for each subdivision level?
3a : How is the camera distance usually calculated. When reading up about quadtree's, Axis-aligned bounding box's are mentioned a lot. In this case would each chunk have a collision bounding box to detect the camera or player is nearby? or is there a better way of doing this? (raycast maybe?)
3b : Do the chunks calculate the camera distance themselves?
4 : Does each chunk have the same "resolution". for example at top level the mesh will be 32x32, will each subdivided node also be 32x32. Example below:
