object downres over distance..

[ton]

Does this happen already?

My guess is, that is doesn't .. so I quickly looked to see if I could set some sort of conditions for the objects..  e.g. just before the object maker, have 2 tgo's one hires, one lowres, then it'd be nice if a node could be created that would choose either one based on it's distance to the camera.
But this might not be possible yet, right?

thanks, Ton.

[Tangled-Universe]

Maybe you can create 2 populations, place one in front of the camera and the other in the background.
Then set render quality to very high for the on in the front and medium or low for the one in the background.
Maybe this will save some time too...

[SuperNova]

As the user above said... Try that out and see how much difference you get in picture quality and render times.

[FrankB]

Does this happen already?

Yes it does. Far away vegetation renders faster than a bushfire. There's no need to use multiple populations for that. What does help in certain circumstances is to use another, more sparse population for the mid and background if your viewpoint is rather low anyway. This is to save RAM if you have to.

Regards,
Frank

[Oshyan]

While I don't believe actual object polygon decimation/reduction occurs, the render engine itself inherently applies a from of LoD to the whole render. Far away elements of the scene get proportionally less detail (per absolute size/area - same detail relative to screenspace though). You should see distant populations rendering fairly quickly as a result. However an actual multi-model or polygon reduction LoD system might be an additional improvement. Use of billboards likewise, although realism can suffer. We'll certainly be working on optimization of population rendering, but I think it's actually one of the areas that is least render-time intensive as compared to others like volumetric clouds.

- Oshyan