 Alright guys, this week I'm going to talk about Level of Detail and what this means for 3D art. The term Level of Detail refers to the method of reducing the number of polygons or triangles used in 3D models based on their distance from the player or camera. This technique increases the efficiency of rendering by reducing the workload on the graphics card or GPU. This is usually achieved through the use of Level of Detail groups. The way these work is for each asset or piece of scenery in a game a number of models are actually created. Each of these models has a different polygon count ranging from the most detailed version which may be tens of thousands of triangles down to a version featuring very little detail and a vastly reduced polygon count. This is demonstrated in this example featuring a bunny that we'll call Nigel. As you can see, each model represents exactly the same bunny. All of these are clearly Nigel. These four models would represent the different levels of detail in the LOD group. The clever thing about the way LOD works is that the closer the object is to the camera the higher the level of detail that is shown to the player. So if in a game we're standing right next to Nigel, we'll be shown the version with 69,451 polygons, but if Nigel's right at the other end of the level, we'll only see the 76 poly version. The next example demonstrates the way that this works. As you can see, when we're close to Nigel, we need to see the highest quality version in order to see all of the detail. But as he moves further away, the polygon count can be reduced without us really being able to tell. This avoids wasting processing power and rendering detail that we can't see because the object is too far away and ensures that the game can maintain an acceptable frame rate. Here's a video which shows level of detail being handled by an algorithm rather than an LOD group. The closer we are to the terrain, the higher the number of polygons that is shown to create all of the detail we can see. But as we move further away, you can see the polygon count being dynamically reduced to lower the amount of processing needed on Jones that doesn't need to show a high level of detail. So there you have it, level of detail. I hope I've given a clear explanation of what this is and if you think that I have, then please show your support by hitting that thumbs up button below the video. I upload a new video every week, so if you want to see more videos like this one, then please subscribe to my channel. If you have any questions or comments on this video or anything else to do with 3D graphics, game design or media studies in general, then drop a comment below the video or contact me through any of the methods you can see on screen. Thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next one.