More detailed info on the LOD system in Unity

I find the docs fairly limited in info on the benefits/cost about using LOD.

so I was wondering some things:
Is it a good idea to use LODs without actually using lower detail meshes, thus only having an LOD0 and a culling state ?
and would it still be beneficial if you have a lot (100's) of very small objects all having this LOD component just too cull it when it's far away ?
well that's basically it, so I'm wondering if I should use LOD on every object in my scenes (1000's of objects), or just the biggest meshes ?

btw, the scenes in the project I'm working on are really big, and very open, with lots of small objects, these scenes cost a lot of memory and are quite expensive.

 

I am surprised this question hasn't been answered...?

One more related question: Does the new LOD system handle colliders for the LOD group or is it just a rendering toggle? We're still on 3.4.2 so I would really appreciate some info.

TIA!

 

I'd like to know too. The lod system is very undocumented and has little info.

 

Hi really sorry this is such a late reply but I was personally searching for a draw or pass call cost with LOD Group components and stumbled across your two posts. I can tell you that using LOD's is pretty much always a good idea. What you are describing using a single mesh and using the LODGroup component to cull it at a custom distance will absolutely help with runtime performance. The only other simple option you have is to cull everything using the camera at a certain distance, which as you've described the scenes as open and large may not be the best. Again, super sorry to reply to a 10 year old question but, if anyone stumbles across this, yes, use LOD's, especially if you're creating large scenes in Unity.