Very Vexing LOD Issue - Help Please?

[Republic DC9 234]

I'm trying to get some buildings in my Balboa Park, San Diego scenery to show up - or rather, have them show up from a reasonable distance away.

As I approach the park, several of the buildings go from black textures/nothing into full buildings but only when I'm directly on top of them - like crashing into them in some cases!

I know it's not a missing texture issue as the textures DO appear at some point, I suspect a bad LOD issue - in this shot, the side textures of the bridge are just beginning to show, and the buildings straight ahead are entirely black (but will color in with textures when right on top of them).

"Easy fix!", thought I, having fixed disappearing runway marks before.

But no matter what entry I put in the .obj files involved - same problem - and just HERE, in Balboa Park, rest of conversion went just fine.

Any help is appreciated...here is what the ends of the .obj files look like now - they started with just ATTR no blend (which the rest of the working objects have), I tried adding variations of ATTR_LOD with various distances in the first and second positions, no good.

Very confused....but would be glad to get this beautiful conversion running correctly.

Thanks,

Steve

End of the .obj in the text editor....

IDX 1474
IDX 1475
IDX 1474
IDX 1473

ATTR_LOD 0 20000

ATTR_no_blend

TRIS 0 3126

[vesalius 153]

Hello,

I'm in no way a scenery developper or texture guru... But since you see the texture popup when you're very close to the object, do your dds have mipmaps? They must have mipmaps.

Just my first thought when I read your topic.

All the best.

[Republic DC9 234]

4 hours ago, vesalius said:

Hello,

I'm in no way a scenery developper or texture guru... But since you see the texture popup when you're very close to the object, do your dds have mipmaps? They must have mipmaps.

Just my first thought when I read your topic.

All the best.

Me neither, Vesalius....but I think you've just given me a very important clue!

Mipmaps!

I don't totally understand them, but believe they are involved from switching from low res to high res textures as you get closer to an onject.

A good lead, perhaps now I can find out how to solve the issue...thank you!

Steve

[vesalius 153]

Indeed, that's why they are used. So that objects at 10km distance do not load large resolution texture but rather a very small on. It loads, seemlesly, a larger resolution as you get closer to the object.

Wiki... :)
"They are intended to increase rendering speed and reduce aliasing artifacts. A high-resolution mipmap image is used for high-density samples, such as for objects close to the camera. Lower-resolution images are used as the object appears farther away."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap

[Slai 10]

Thanks for the mipmap clue.  I converted the DDS to PNG which stripped off the mipmap and then used Xgrinder to get back to DDS.

I published a fix along with performance enhancements on the org- http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/37478-san-diego-buildings-integration-pack/