Hey there! I'm about to teach you how to make a LOD (Level of Detail) model in 3DS Max. The only requirement is that you have 3DS Max, a keyboard, and a little bit of patience. In this example, I'm gonna use a hat I created for Scout earlier, the Runner's Receiver:


Which is going to end up looking like this:

Originally posted by "Little Timmy":

But, Mr. Hideous - that looks really bad!

Why yes, Timmy, it does - and that's kind of the point! When your item is rendered in-game, it uses less resources the fewer faces it has. When your item is drawn further away, it will use these Level of Detail models. This is why they're required if you want to import an item in the item importer!

The item importer requires different amount of faces (triangles) on your model, so you want to get your model down to the following levels (depending on your starting triangle count). I'll quote Napy da Wise's fantastic guide for this:

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=148063940

Originally posted by "Napy da Wise":

Max triangle count is 1400, and the items require Lods depending on their tricount.
LOD 0 is max 1400
LOD 1 is max 1000
LOD 2 is max 700
So if you item is 800 tris, you'll need 1 lod. If it's 400, you won't need lods.

So how do you make those LODs? Follow me, and I'll show you!

Now, before we start, I want you to turn on statistics for your viewport - click on the [+] in the top left of your viewport, hit Configure... and go to the Statistics tab. Set it up like this:


This all assumes you're using 3DS Max 2011, by the way, but I'm sure it's not too different in other versions. Also, if you press F4, you can toggle wireframes - very useful when making LOD meshes.

As you can see, my hat has 1258 polygons. That means I have to make 2 LOD meshes!


Start by adding an Edit Poly modifier to your base hat. I usually right click, and then rename it to "LOD1", but that's your choice entirely.

Now, you edit your hat just like normal. Go into Edge Selection mode, and pick something good to start with. Usually, you want to go for things that affect the silhouette of the hat as little as possible, or are small details that you can't see at a distance anyway - like this antenna, for example:


This is also a good reason to use 8-sided cylinders in parts of your model - that way, you can just select every other edge in an edge ring, and you've suddenly made that cylinder half as expensive to draw.

When you've picked some edges you think are good to remove, hit Ctrl+Backspace. This is what my antenna looks like now:



Nice and blocky - which means it has less faces, and that means it's faster for the game to draw on the screen. You also want to watch out for clipping - don't remove the wrong edges, or your hat might go inside the head of your class, and that might look weird!

After removing enough edges, not too many in my case, I'm down to 998 polygons:


Now, I usually remove a little bit more than this, but this is a good LOD1 for this tutorial.

Like I said, try not to remove anything too noticeable from the silhouetted areas, or your hat will look very different. This is what happens if you remove the center line from my hat, for example:



Also, don't remove edges that serve as the limits of your UV islands yet, either, as it could also lead to some funky-looking stuff (unless you've prepared your texture for it):

Now, let's get cracking on your second LOD. You get to be a bit more aggressive on this, because it's going to be drawn at a further distance away. Start by adding another Edit Poly modifier on top, as you did earlier.

Same rules apply as earlier, but you can worry slightly less about the silhouette now, because it's harder to tell at the distance this is going to be drawn at. For example, here are a few edges I'm removing for my LOD2:



And here's what it looks like after removing them:



More importantly, on LOD2 you can (probably) start deleting a few faces, rather than just removing edges. For example, the inside of the hat will pretty much never be visible, especially not at this distance, so I'm deleting these faces:



So now the inside of my hat is missing those faces:

Here's the good news - you don't need to rig your LOD models at all! All the rigging in your LODs is inherited from your first base model. Valve are clever like that.

Here's what my hat looks like now:



It's down to 788 triangles, which is enough to fit it through the importer. All you need to do now is turn off your modifiers one by one, by hitting the lightbulb, and then export the result to whatever file format you use to go through the importer (I use SMD). Don't forget to rig your hat to a bone (usually bip_head) using the Skin modifier! Once you're done with this, take a look at Napy Da Wise's Importer Tutorial to get your hat working in the game engine:

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=148063940


So just remember - Ctrl+Backspace, don't merge vertices (it's bad for UVs and memory), and delete faces, but sparingly!

For more reading, Valve have also created a helpful and more general LOD tutorial: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Level_of_detail