Level of detail
lastmod 2026-03-03created 2026-03-033 edits
In computer graphics, level of detail (LOD) refers to the complexity of a 3D model representation. LOD can be decreased as the model moves away from the viewer, or according to other criteria such as object importance, viewpoint-relative speed, or position. LOD techniques increase rendering efficiency by reducing the workload on graphics pipeline stages, usually vertex transformations. The reduced visual quality of the model is often unnoticed because of the small effect on object appearance when distant or moving fast.
Although most of the time LOD is applied to geometry detail only, the basic concept can be generalized. Recently, LOD techniques have also included shader management to keep control of pixel complexity. A form of level of detail management has been applied to texture maps for years, under the name of mipmapping, also providing higher rendering quality.
It is commonplace to say that "an object has been LOD-ed" when the object is simplified by the underlying LOD algorithm, or when a 3D modeler manually creates LOD models.
Core concept: view-dependent LOD
Regions that are far from the camera or appear small on screen get fewer points (or polygons), while nearby regions keep their original density. It extends what mipmaps do per texel to a per-space basis.
Octree-based LOD (closest to mipmaps)
Space is recursively divided into eight parts to build a tree, and each node stores a representative point (centroid or average color). Deciding how deep to traverse the tree based on camera distance naturally produces step-by-step resolutions, like mipmaps. Potree and 3D Tiles (Cesium) are representative implementations of this approach.
Voxel Downsampling
Space is divided into a voxel grid of fixed size, and the points inside each voxel are replaced with a single representative point. Since the voxel size determines the resolution, prebuilding multiple levels by size gives the same structure as a mipmap chain. Available directly in Open3D via voxel_down_sample().
Mesh-based: Nanite (Unreal Engine 5)
Manages LOD per cluster for polygon meshes and selects the appropriate level of detail at runtime based on on-screen pixel size. Called "virtualized geometry", it is the closest thing to a 3D mesh version of mipmaps.
Poisson Disk Sampling / Farthest Point Sampling
Thins out points uniformly while guaranteeing a minimum spacing between them. Effective for reducing point count while keeping a visually even distribution.
Gaussian Splatting LOD
The recently popular 3D Gaussian Splatting has a similar problem, and there is active research on merging Gaussian primitives or reducing the number of splats in distant regions.
See also
- 3D Rendering
- Point Cloud
- 3D Modeling
- Anisotropic filtering
- Distance fog
- Draw distance
- Korean: 밉맵
- Popping (computer graphics)
- Progressive meshes
- Sparse voxel octree
- Spatial resolution