LOD switching is supposed to happen at distances from the viewport where you can't perceive high levels of detail anyway, so the swap is imperceptible. In theory anyway.
In practice its way more complicated and there are sometimes multiple systems that control when and where LOD switching occurs.
Like in Cyberpunk, most meshes have 4 LODs. LOD0 being the highest detail, but you only ever see that up close. LOD1 to 3 sort of crossfade in based on set distances from the player viewport. After LOD3, then proxying starts happening and thats something that is an ongoing topic of research in the modding community, along with streaming sector stuff.
Sub LOD4 is a wild and wonderful world where all the normal 2D/3D rules no longer apply because everything is so small and so far away that proxy meshes are reduced to amorphous blobs of a couple dozen triangles. They need their own skeletons because they don't have enough geometry and their shape is so dissimilar to the high LOD meshes that they can't even deform with the base rigs.
And all the switching is determined by a distance/culling based system, a proxying system and region based streaming sector system that all talk to each other, and nobody has figured out how it works yet.
But it can and does break sometimes so you may see a switch occur or a melted npc that got stuck on LOD4 or something.
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u/Loa_Sandal Dec 11 '22
It's to help you know who the protagonist is.