Good Morning All
my last post... said:
Actually, this will do horrible things to the performance if the asset is showing an error.
The error shows when you have A) a single 'block of colour' (uniform colour) texture and B) a large texture.
Since the texture is a single block of colour, it does not need to be big (you only need 1 pixel to show a uniform colour, so why have a 512*512 texture for it, which wastes resources and hence impacts on performance...).
You'll get a warning on most assets, but it will appear as an error on others in specific cases. At no point have we recommended textures like this.
This error checking is already in place on the DLS, so new uploads will not show these errors. We've also run the DLS clean up again, and as such the remaining content should be fixed over the coming months. We also repaired a large number of commonly used assets when SP1 was released.
As above, this explains the situations you will see the uniform texture error. The 'minimum' fix is simply to reduce the size of the texture(s), this will already improve performance if the asset is commonly used or has a lot of uniform textures...
As to using the same mesh twice in the LOD scheme, this is not appropriate. Simple as that. It's a waste of resources, and could very well be causing a negative impact on performance, which in turn makes your LOD completely useless.
You must ALWAYS reduce polys in LOD. ALWAYS. Yes, this is very much a one size fits all situation, because it has to be. LOD isn't just about removing polys per-se, it's about simplifying the model. So, for round objects, you reduce the number of sides. For objects with multiple 'layers' of detail, you reduce this detail back to flat textures with a normals map. This will, of course, require careful texture mapping, and careful modeling. You will probably also need to rebuild parts of the model to make them lower detail/poly.
There is a semi-exception, and that's splines. Where splines are concerned, your poly count can be 'higher', but over a longer distance object, and is effectively lower. For example, if I have a 10poly 5m object, which then goes to a 15 polys 10m object, I've got a higher poly mesh, but it's actually less polys in the scene (15 polys per 10m, rather than 20 polys per 10m).
Regards