In a mod I'm working on I've added a building and other large structures to Dragon Bridge, and I want them to be visible at a larger distance than they currently are, as having them appear/disappear only a short walk away from the village ruins the whole idea. I tried ticking the "is Full LOD" box, but now the majority of them aren't appearing in the game at all. Is there a way to do this?

You can set ugrids to 7 in your skyrim.ini but all manner of strangness can occur. Mods like Warzones with crash with this change. However, you do gain a bit of a distance viewing bonus.

After much testing I don't recommend it myself, but you can always try...

Also, if the is Full LOD thing makes your objects invisible, uncheck it. Won't do you any good. Also, that option causes performances issues for some on objects that do accept it.

Pretty sure this is an issue Bethesda says they are working on.

you can use smoke and mirrors for now.

creating your own super-low-res LOD mesh and carefully placing it inside your high res mesh will "switcheroo" the LOD for long distance visibility.


you are more than welcome to dissect my mod to check out the LOD effect. (you can even see the tower visible from dragonsreach inside whiterun's worldspace). It's also visible from the mountain peak above drela's cottage (the tower itself is located near riverwood, so that distance of visibility is almost half the entire length of skyrim)

at one point i had the tower also visible in the 3d world map but i had to take it off because of CTDs when accessing the map in certain interior spaces. the LOD by itself works totally fine with no issues or performance hits though.


http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5696

Since this thread was dead I'm now gonna hijack it a bit.

Amethyst Deceiver (and anyone who understands the probem) I have a similar (the same) problem. My floating fortress at a distance only shows a small part of the involved statics. The most large ones (and thus most important ones at a distance) don't show. After giving full LOD they don't show up either.
Only a few spread out rocks show floating in the air. How can I get something solid appearing when looking at my fortress from a distance?

You mention the lowres LOD meshes. I couldn't make one I must admit but what makes them so special that they would show up while the regular one I'm using now doesn't?

the advantage of custom low res LODs, is that they can remain visible with the "is full LOD" checked without causing performance issues. the low res LOD does nt need a detailed texture, does not need collision, and should be extremely low poly.

the downside is, since it does not work like a real LOD (becoming invisible at close range to let the high res model take over), you will have to find a clever way to "hide" them inside the high res model so that they are not visible up close.

Curious, is the respawn flag on objects what makes the objects change from LOD levels 0-3 and is it for CPU optimization?

Amethyst Deceiver (or anyone else who knows) if needed I'd only need like the 10 or even 5 biggest parts of the floating fortress to show in a distance and I'd be willing to it try that with the high detail texture. But how do I get it to show in the first place.

I do not understand why some of the statics do show (even though not given the full LOD flag) and why the most important ones which DO have the full LOD flag don't show at all.

I don't pretend to understand hwo this all works... but I would like to know the best solution to get SOMETHING showing so there at least appears to be some sort of solid mass floating in the distance instead of the few disconnected rocks we see now.

i'm guessing it has to do with memory. the larger statics are likely very dense and high-poly, hence the first to go at further distances to cut back on rendering strain.


the way worldspaces work in skyrim, it appears having LOD data in the statics is not enough. it must be generated as part of the worldspace in order for the low res LOD to properly remain at long distances. this is a whole different topic altogether and apparently is a very problematic issue right now and would require 3rd party software (read more info in the worldspaces and LOD topics).

i think the main problem is that most house/dungeon mods exist in Tamriel worldspace, so adding LOD data to the main tamriel worldspace is probably not the easiest or best solution (since multiple mods will just overwrite each other). that's why i suggest making your own "fake" LOD's for just the main large pieces that need to be visible from long distances.

you can check out my mod and poke around to see how i did the custom LOD for my tower (which remains visible from more than half the length of skyrim): http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=5696

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/559813634632589911/211F149492E29AE545CD86BF109649073448DDC5/

this is how it looks from a distance

and this si what is actually there:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=9029


I have to make a correction though: after double checking it seems that all things that DID show DID have the full LOD flag tagged
I'd still like to have it visible from a distance and would like to know how I could get the larger objects cliffslopes, dwemer5x4 towers and the bardscollege visible (since just flaggin full LOD doesn't work)

Thanks for the reply Amethyst.. so nothing I can do in the CK can probably solve this problem. Good to know so I don't need to try anymore. I can understand the explanation that they are to dense and highpoly so cut first.. but it's odd since Full LOD flag should prevent that.. so that must not be working completely then.

I understand what you say you do with the low res mesh. create it a bit smaller and very low poly etc so that will always show and when closer the original pieces will appear around it.
I don't think I could make this though so that remains a problem. In my last post I had a link with a pic of what it looks like and for someone without mesh experience it might be a little hard to recreate that in one mesh

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352634-exterior-static-display-nightmare/page__p__20387244__hl__full%20lod%20not%20showing__fromsearch__1#entry20387244

In there they say this




and I can confirm that duplicating the objects, deflagging distant LOD and then replace the original with this and flag it Full LOD does show them in game over long distances.