LOD groups behaving differently between editor and game

Hi, I just set up a character (consisting of a single skinned mesh renderer) with three LOD levels, plus a culling level. In the editor scene view, everything behaves as expected with the LODs, but in the game, the character is culled until it gets very close to the camera, and you basically have to be on top of it to get the highest quality level. I thought this was an issue with the LOD bias, but every single quality level has an LOD bias of 1 or greater, and I'm testing at the highest level. Any ideas what else might be causing this behavior? I'm running the latest 5.5.1 release, and this is a VR game for the Vive.

 

Hi CleverNickname,

Most of the time this can be fixed by clicking the 'Recalculate Bounds' button within your LODGroup component.

A good way to debug this issue is to play your scene and select the character, in the editor the LODGroup should be exposed and you should be able to play around with the LOD's. At this point take a note of all the property values while in play mode and examine then next to the editor values.

If this does not yield a result then i do know of another behaviour that occurs with LODGroups to do with scaling. If you are scaling your character in play mode this could be the source of your issues.

These are just tricks that i learned over the years from experience, if they don't help, let me know and ill research some more and attempt to fix the issue.

Good luck and i wish you all the best.

 

Hi CleverNickname
I encounter the same problem as you described 18 months ago: my LODGroups are behaving differently between Playmode (Editor) and Build. Actually in Playmode it's correct. In Build they are popping on and off.
Have you found a solution to that?

 

Hi,

I know this is an old thread, but I ran into kinda the same issue. I would get different LOD results depending on if I was in the editor or what computer my build was running on. After a bit of time debugging, I found that my issue was the LODBias in the Quality Settings. If someone is having the same issue, I would suggest looking into this as a possible solution.

Cheers!

 

thank you, i had a feeling this was the culprit!

 

I have the same issue. Everything works fine in Editor and play mode. But build give me strange low LOD!

What did you do in LODBias?

 

In case anyone need some guidance. I found that quality level was set to "very low" as default on Quality settings and the game was published using those settings. That give me differences between the editor and game published.

 

I spent an hour to understand - unity3d LOD is not based on distance but size of object on screen. That is, if you have a different FOV in the Editor Camera that is different from the Game Camera, then the LOD will work differently. Hope it helps someone who comes across this thread.

 

This is may because of the Quality Level you are using. LOD Bias basically tells you "Do not use those LOD Level's but use those instead".
For example, LOD Level 2(Lowest) may not get triggered when the Quality Level set to High(Users wants to destroy his PC)
Since LOD Level 0 is the Highest, it prefers highest. Also the Highest LOD Level selection also configurable.